Suzette Kent

Official White House Photo

Suzette Kuhlow Kent is an American government official who was appointed as the Federal Chief Information Officer of the United States by President Donald Trump on January 29, 2018. She is the fourth person to formally hold the job of Federal CIO, which was created by the E-Government Act of 2002. The Federal CIO's office is a part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Prior to her appointment, President Trump established the American Technology Council and issued a Presidential Executive Order on Strengthening the Cybersecurity of Federal Networks and Critical Infrastructure (Executive Order 13800) establishing that it is "the policy of the United States to manage cybersecurity risk as an executive branch enterprise." This makes the Federal CIO's role in establishing IT policy supporting enterprise risk management more substantial than the role of her predecessors. On Thursday, June 25, 2020 she announced her retirement and subsequently left the office in July. The office remained vacant as of August 20.

Duties, authority and challenges

In her new position, Kent she will be responsible for setting federal IT policy and leading the Federal CIO Council, which is composed of CIOs from various federal government departments and agencies. Under the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA), federal agency program officials, chief information officers, and inspectors general (IGs) are required to conduct annual reviews of each agency's information security program and report the results to the OMB. The effectiveness of FISMA to date has been flawed by several high-profile security breaches in systems that should have been subject to regular FISMA reviews, for example the 2014 and 2015 Office of Personnel Management data breach.

A key challenge for Kent will be to reform past policies cited in Executive Order 13800 that have permitted agencies to default on their responsibility for protecting private information in their custody under FISMA. In 2017, the Office of Federal CIO released its Report to the President on Federal IT Modernization stressing the need to prioritize modernization of high-risk high-value IT assets; modernize and manage Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) and the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS) to enable cloud migration; and consolidate acquisition, management, and cyber-security service policies. The report calls on the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Federal CIO Council to implement enterprise level risk management that establishes a Security Operations Center to provide centralized visibility into the state of security on each agency's networks in order to manage and mitigate risks to agencies lacking the required expertise to implement FISMA requirements (as established by National Institutes of Standards and Technology.)

Education and career

Kent has an undergraduate degree in journalism from Louisiana State University. Prior to her appointment as Federal CIO, she served as a principal of the banking and capital markets advisory team at EY (formerly Ernst & Young) Financial Services Office in Dallas, Texas.

Media Appearances

The General Services Administration(GSA) published a YouTube video featuring Kent on March 20, 2018 titled the President's Management Agenda, which launches a public-facing web site intended to provide progress and metrics about the federal modernization of government IT services through published action plans and progress updates.