“Certain members of the Login.gov team did indeed misrepresent intentionally,” GSA official says
A key Democrat in Congress who is black excoriated a group of far-left, highly-paid, largely white technologists in the Biden administration for jeopardizing cybersecurity and potentially enabling fraud in the government while they justified their misconduct by citing racial “equity.”
On Wednesday, Kweisi Mfume (D-MD), the ranking member of a House Oversight Committee subpanel, called the equity-justified lies a “very, very serious issue.”
The criticism of the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Technology Transformation Service (TTS) came following an inspector general report that found that the group tasked with creating Login.gov declined to implement facial recognition despite being required for certain high-security accounts. Officials decided that facial recognition was racist and lied to agencies that the service was compliant anyway. That misrepresentation put one million accounts at risk.
It also came on the heels of a four-part Daily Wire series that found that TTS lost millions of dollars, repeatedly lied, and put the security of sensitive data at risk with wanton noncompliance with basic security rules, while being consumed instead with far-left politics. Employees included a self-proclaimed Marxist organizer and a man who identifies as transgender who raised money from colleagues to “void their gender warranty,” and the group spent its time on projects like creating a social justice robot.
“This is a very damning report against GSA, the one agency we trust to do the sort of oversight of other agencies and the government’s money. It’s very disconcerting. The GSA clearly has tarnished its own name here, and the question is how do they get out of that hole,” Mfume said.
“Login.gov has never met” the security standard that it for years claimed that it did. “It did not then and for many of us it still does not. Yet it continued to mislead until January of last year when the agency released its equity action plan” that it used to retroactively justify its actions, Mfume said.
Sonny Hasmi, the commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service who oversees TTS and appeared before the panel, acknowledged that “certain members of the Login.gov team did indeed misrepresent intentionally.”
“These misrepresentations represent the worst in how government should operate,” he said.