Fed Efficiency Drive Includes Code-Sharing Law, Metahumans

A new federal law requiring agencies to share custom source code goes into effect later this month, and federal leaders are already touting its benefits.

“Reusing that code very much has high potential for saving a ton of money because we spend so much time and effort rewriting things that have already been built. There are enough new problems coming down the pipe. We don’t have to keep solving the old ones over and over again,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Open Source Lead Remy DeCausemaker said at last week’s Federal IT Efficiency Summit.

The new law, called the Source code Harmonization And Reuse in Information Technology (SHARE IT) Act, requires federal agencies to share custom-developed software code with each other and publicly list associated metadata to reduce duplicative software development and save billions in IT spending. The bipartisan legislation excludes classified and sensitive code and mandates that agency CIOs establish policies to implement code-sharing practices and promote greater efficiency across the federal government.

“The amount of money you can potentially save … if we could reuse just 1% of the code that we already wrote, that’s $5 million of savings right there. If it goes up to 10%, it’s like $56 million. At 50% reuse, that’s about $250 million, and there are 400 federal agencies in the Federal Register, not all of them have that type of IT spend, but if we could all be able to reuse the code that we’ve written, that could save us, the agencies and the American taxpayers a lot of money and a lot of effort, and bring a ton of efficiency the federal government,” DeCausemaker added.

CMS is updating its acquisition language to align with the law. The agency’s Open Source Program Office has developed inbound checklists using best practices from CISA, NIST, HHS and industry tools like the OpenSSF Scorecard and GitLeaks to guide secure software development and code reuse. These checklists are now referenced in the agency’s technical reference architecture as official policy, emphasizing source code as the ultimate source of truth, especially as greater access to source code is expected in the coming months.

“96% of all commercial software contains open-source software at this point in the software development life cycle … that represents about $8.8 trillion of value if we had to rewrite that from scratch,” DeCausemaker said. “CMS is the first federal agency to have that private-sector style approach to open source.”

Digital Tools Further Efficiency

Agencies are prioritizing efforts to reduce duplication and streamline federal services. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is turning to automation and AI to improve some of its citizen-facing services.

“[When] you start to look at your portfolio of tools and you realize, ‘I’ve got more tools than anyone needs.’ How do I reduce that and find the things that that are efficient; those things that drive productivity?” said Ed Mays, deputy assistant commissioner for infrastructure and support services and chief enterprise infrastructure officer at CBP. “[Driving] that efficiency [is] looking at how we automate. Automation is so key.”

AI is enabling CBP to look across all those signaling tools and report when a database or operating system has a problem. “[AI puts] all that together and says, ‘This is where you need to look.’ So that’s how we’re going to be using AI,” Mays said.

Additionally, Mays said the agency is planning to introduce a “metahuman” later this year to assist with customer interactions.

“A metahuman is like an avatar with an AI base. That is going to think be game changing for us,” he explained.

As agencies adopt more technology, IT leaders are prioritizing sustainability to support scalable infrastructure.

“How do you achieve operational efficiency? How do you achieve energy efficiency? Those things have to be talked about at the foundational level. You have to look at structures that, yes, they support your high performance compute machinery, but how do you cool them? How do you do that without massive power draws? You have to talk about things like liquid cooling. You have to explore sustainability,” said Christine Pacheco, director of federal civilian sales at Equinix.