We’re now a month into the Trump Administration, and one prevailing theme we’ve seen take hold is that of workforce reduction, in effort according to officials, to maximize long-term efficiency and align to the new Administration’s priorities. For more on the initially announced fed-wide reductions, see my previous blog. The DoD has recently noted it is aiming to reduce its civilian workforce by 5 to 8 percent, including 5,400 probationary defense employee lay-offs.

The Center for Digital Government’s 2025 Beyond the Beltway Market Briefing event took place in Mclean, VA last week where state and local government leaders shared insights into top technology priorities for 2025.

Some of the key topics of discussion were the 2025 state and local market outlook, the potential impact of the new administration on government technology, emerging technologies such as AI, the foundational role of data, the evolving cybersecurity landscape and modernization and the customer experience.
 

Federal agencies across all areas of government have been contemplating workforce challenges for several years now. Prior to 2025, concerns for federal employees chiefly included maintaining an appropriate number of personnel with many aging out and retiring from the workforce, in addition to obtaining and retaining new talent that fit the ever-increasing technological needs of advanced and emerging IT given the competitive salary requirements for some of the field’s best and brightest.

Numerous cities in the United States struggle with wastewater issues. Many cities’ systems are designed to accommodate smaller populations, and historical rainfall patterns are increasingly prone to causing overflows – where wastewater spills into drinking water sources, streets and homes. And many cities utilize mostly combined wastewater systems where wastewater and rainwater both drain through the same infrastructure, creating increased stress on city systems during storms.

With any new executive administration, change is inevitable for federal agency priorities. It remains true, however, that departments and agencies consistently rely on IT products and services and historic trends confirm stability in public sector IT spending under both Republican and Democratic administrations. For FY25, much of the spending has already been laid out in the budget and priorities for FY26 are well under way, so you can expect to see little change to agency needs in the very near term.

On December 12^th, 2024, The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) released its 2025 annual top 10 priorities list identifying the most pressing technology and policy issues that state CIOs are prioritizing for the upcoming year.

The final CMMC rule went into effect December 16, 2024.

This year’s annual EDUCAUSE Conference took place in San Antonio, Texas, where higher education leaders shared key insights into top edtech trends, priorities and challenges shaping the higher education landscape. 

The 2025 Educause Top 10 priorities list addresses how higher education technology and data leaders can work together to restore trust within the education sector by building competent and caring institutions through collaboration, consistent results and shifting from monolithic systems and processes to more flexible and unified solutions.

Hello from DoDIIS in Omaha, Nebraska! TDSYNNEX Public Sector is once again attending, so if you didn’t make it out to the city that invented the Reuben sandwich, we’ve got you covered. The conference kicked off with a heavy focus on several prevailing themes, notably: cybersecurity, deterrence, interoperability, and data centricity. If you read that list and thought AI was missing – fear not – it was included in discussions, but primarily as a vehicle for aiding in the intelligence community’s (IC) top priorities.

The 2024 National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) Annual Conference took place in New Orleans, Louisiana earlier this month, where state leaders shared key insights into FY25 top technology priorities, challenges and lessons learned. Some of the key focus areas included AI, with emphasis on generative AI (Gen AI) tech, data management, governance, privacy and accessibility, cybersecurity and risk management and digital services and modern government.