Pete Sessions: “I thank the distinguished gentleman and friend from Kansas for yielding. I also thank my colleague from the District of…”

“I thank the distinguished gentleman and friend from Kansas for yielding. I also thank my colleague from the District of Columbia, representing the minority or the Democratic Party on the Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, for her leadership. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of this bill. It is a bill that we tried to make bipartisan and to include ideas from a number of people that were on the committee. As the chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, we worked together not only holding hearings, but discussing the need for transparency and better technology for projects from the General Services Administration. As it stands now, the government's internal technology consultancy is mostly opaque in its operation, resulting in the lack of competition and a few instances of serious failures from the GSA's products. Those are products that were developed in-house. Last year, the GSA Inspector General reported that Login.gov, a GSA product that was intended to be a single-sign-on solution for the Federal Government and government agencies, was intentionally misleading Federal agencies about its technical capabilities and ability to actually authenticate the users. In other words, Mr. Speaker, as people came in to do business with the government agency, GSA had a front to it that would assuredly tell that agency wherever they were going and with great likelihood exactly who that person was.…”