HUD’s New CIO Focuses on AI, Zero Trust

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) new CIO Sairah Ijaz told GovCIO Media & Research that deploying responsible AI, driving workforce literacy and boosting zero trust will be key focus areas for her office in 2025.

According to Ijaz, in the coming weeks, HUD will move the role of chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) under the agency’s Office of the CIO (OCIO) to streamline IT efforts. The CAIO previously fell under the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. Over the past year, HUD’s CAIO and Chief Financial Officer Vinay Singh has worked with the OCIO to lay the foundation for AI.

“Vinay and his team have done just an amazing job over the past year of establishing a really strong governance structure, and that’s allowed us to have really good communication lines,” said Ijaz. “And so those governance structures, focus partially on technology, on program management, and then also, on, operationally, how we would manage AI in the department. It allows for us to have those communication lines to folks to allow them to raise ideas that they might have and identify things that we might consider using with AI.”

The agency plans to leverage AI to promote innovation and risk management. Even though the agency’s funding is currently limited to support their AI efforts, Ijaz said HUD is trying to leverage existing processes and governance as much as possible to drive progress.

“Typically someone would say, hey, I have this business need that might need a technology solution. We built the AI piece into that [to support] a business need. What is the issue that you’re encountering? What is it outcome that you’re hoping to achieve or gain?” said Ijaz. “What’s the return on investment if we go the AI route versus another route?”

HUD is taking steps to increase literacy across the agency to drive a deeper understanding of AI as it evolves.

“We’ll always continue to have to provide information. But there’s been a number of sessions we’ve held where people get a good, layman’s term understanding of what AI is, what generative AI is and the distinction between them, so that they can start thinking about how this might help them in their work,” said Ijaz.

Ijaz said budget restraints are not stopping HUD from recruiting and training AI talent. The agency is developing sites across the country where staff can access training.  HUD is also fostering partnerships with universities and industry leaders to identify additional training resources.

“We’re looking at ways to build internal capacity, not just within our technology staff, but in our program offices, because they understand what the true problems are that they’re trying to solve,” said Ijaz. “We’re doing that through a rotational program. We can have folks come through the Chief AI Office for four months at a time, learn up on what’s happening at the enterprise level, take that back into their offices and continue to expand and grow there.”

Cybersecurity will remain a key concern for HUD in the upcoming year.  Ijaz the agency has already started their path to zero trust implementation.

“We’ve established which pillar we’re hitting, first which is identity, and that plays into how we’ve gone towards the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) funding, but we’re continuing down that path of understanding and implementing micro-segmentation, and that includes looking at cloud services, infrastructure, access controls, all the zero trust principles and making sure that we’re continuing to work down the path of building a strong and secure environment,” said Ijaz.

Last October, HUD was awarded $20 million from the TMF to leverage the Enterprise-Identity, Credential and Access Management (E-ICAM) system to secure its digital infrastructure. According to Ijaz, the initial funding HUD received was a subset of E-ICAM, focused on the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the lender community. It became a pilot for the agency to learn and understand how to implement identity management on a larger scale across the enterprise.

“Receiving this award [enabled us] to expand and see our success in how we were able to roll out such a complex project in the lending community, and now expand upon that as we go across the full landscape of HUD and all of the partners that we  interact with as they access HUD systems,” said Ijaz. “This aligns to a lot of our goals of creating secure, agile and cost-effective infrastructure. It will help us look at centralizing the identity matching, management and authentication process.”

Ijaz said E-ICAM allows HUD to reach next step in multi-factor authentication (MFA) like the phishing resistance authentication. It will also allow HUD to set a new standard across the entire department and ensure the agency is secure.

“I think this will support our ability to be able to provide better services throughout the department as well. It’ll allow us to do better collaboration with our partners,” said Ijaz. “It allows us to do improved authentication, faster authentication of individuals and allow us to build on some of those economies of scales of having it more centralized within the department.”

Ijaz expressed her excitement about the FHA catalyst modernization project that the agency is launching as well as the updates to the agency’s Housing Information Portal (HIP) that aims to improve data efficiency.

“It’s going to provide near real time data exchanges with industry systems to ensure that we have enhanced efficiency and usability,” said Ijaz. “We’ve also been working on some large-scale changes that are coming down for HIP that will reduce administrative burdens on housing authorities as we’re collecting tenant data. And it’s going to be really transformational in terms of how we manage our data as a whole and it will be used to support HUD’s other functions as well, and that’s going to be very impactful.”