Connolly’s successor, James Walkinshaw, looks to carry on his IT and workforce legacy

Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., was sworn into office earlier this month to take up the seat in Congress previously held by longtime Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly, a strong supporter of governmentwide IT initiatives who died in May. 

Walkinshaw — formerly a member of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors who spent over a decade working as the chief of staff for Conolloy — has quickly moved to carry on his predecessor’s work, including taking over as sponsor of several federal workforce bills championed by Connolly. 

Walkinshaw recently spoke with Nextgov/FCW about the government workforce, the Department of Government Efficiency and his IT priorities. The lawmaker expressed particular concerns about the Trump administration’s continuing efforts to fire federal workers and why Congress needs to continue to support and oversee governmentwide modernization initiatives.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Nextgov/FCW: I have to start off by asking about the likely government shutdown and reports that the Trump administration has asked agencies to prepare plans for mass layoffs if federal funding lapses. 

James Walkinshaw: Federal workers have been under assault for nine months now. We’ve seen firings, we’ve seen mass layoffs — oftentimes illegal, and sometimes reversed by the courts, sometimes not. So the administration has already been doing what the Office of Management and Budget memo threatened they would do in a shutdown. 

But it’s important to note that a shutdown gives the Trump administration no new legal authority to fire federal workers or to conduct reductions in force. So in a shutdown, federal workers have precisely the same legal civil service protections they have today when the government is open. In a shutdown, the administration has to follow precisely the same rigorous process to implement a reduction in force as they do when the government is open. 

And I’ll go a step further. The Anti-Deficiency Act is very clear that, in a shutdown, the federal government can only do essentially two categories of things: functions that are necessary to preserve life and property, or functions required by the Constitution, fulfilling a constitutional duty. All of the work required to do a large-scale layoff, as the memo describes it, does not meet the standards of the Anti-Deficiency Act. So if the Trump administration tried to execute a RIF during a shutdown, they would be in violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. I think if they try to do what the memo threatens to do during a shutdown, they’ll end up in court, and they’ll lose in court. 

Nextgov/FCW: DOGE has taken a leading role in federal reduction in force efforts. What are your concerns about the long-term impact of these layoffs and deferred resignations.

Walkinshaw: DOGE is not and has never been about saving money or making the government more efficient; it’s about creating a federal government and bureaucracy that places its loyalty to Donald Trump rather than to the Constitution and serving the American people. It’s about driving out anybody who is not a bend-the-knee Trump loyalist, and that’s what they want to do. 

We know it’s not about saving money, because they spent, by some measures, $16 billion paying people not to work. You have to have a MAGA worm in your brain to think that paying $16 billion for people not to work is somehow efficient.

To some extent, it has had the desired effect. With respect to the federal government’s ability to deliver services to the American people — which is what my focus is and what my predecessor’s focus was — you have to have two things: good people and good technology. If you have one without the other, it does not work. Unfortunately, what the Trump administration has done is fired or driven out many of the most qualified, technically capable people who understand federal systems, IT systems and others that know how to improve them. That’s going to make any effort to achieve efficiencies or improve delivery of service much, much harder.

Nextgov/FCW: DOGE has come under fire for reportedly collecting sensitive personal data without following oversight procedures. Are you concerned about these reports, and what steps can Congress take to investigate these claims?

Walkinshaw: A lot of it is very troubling, but maybe the most troubling is what we’ve learned about the Social Security Administration. Whistleblowers have come forward — folks who resigned from the highest levels of the SSA — and blown the whistle on the administration’s very careless management of the personally identifiable information that the agency has on every single American. Based on the whistleblower’s report, we know those databases were taken out of their kind of secure digital locations and uploaded to other servers, uploaded to the cloud, putting at risk the security of every American’s social security number. 

It is reckless, dangerous and outrageous, and the unfortunate reality is we don’t know who has all of that data. And you had DOGE personnel who were essentially moonlighting at DOGE and who got access to very sensitive data on Americans, and then they are going back to their private sector company the next day. So it’s very, very troubling.

I think it’s something that is worthy of much, much more scrutiny. In a Democratic Congress, if that comes to pass, there will have to be hearings and to figure out exactly what, if any, laws and policies were violated.

Nextgov/FCW: Are there any steps that lawmakers can take to mitigate some of the potential harms of wide-reaching federal workforce cuts?

Walkinshaw: One thing Congress should do is pass a bill I introduced the day I was sworn into office — the Limit on Sweeping Executive Reorganization Act. It would require any president to come to Congress for an up or down vote before they can significantly downsize, dismantle or restructure a federal agency. There would have to be an independent review of the plan for Congress to consider. 

Obviously, I’m cognizant of the fact that the Republican majority works for Donald Trump. What we can be doing is, whenever possible, shining a light on the most egregious abuses of the Trump administration. Our job now is to communicate all that clearly and lay all of that out and try to shame the Trump administration into backing off of some of the worst and most egregious abuses they’ve engaged in.

Nextgov/FCW: Your predecessor, Rep. Gerry Connolly, was very focused on federal IT issues while in Congress. What are some of your priorities when it comes to governmentwide tech modernization efforts?

Walkinshaw: I spent more than a decade working on federal IT issues as Gerry Connolly’s chief of staff, and he was really the leader in Congress on these issues. 

When it comes to modernizing legacy systems, everyone who is involved and actually knowledgeable knows that it costs upfront money to retire a legacy system and replace it, and that that is the fundamental challenge that agencies face. It’s almost always cheaper to run that legacy IT system for another year than it is to commit to the upfront cost of replacing it. 

That’s one of the reasons we created the Technology Modernization Fund: to incentivize agencies and create funds for agencies to actually make those investments and to retire legacy IT systems. And then, over time, they can pay back the fund with the savings that are generated with a newer, more efficient IT system. 

Unfortunately, Congress has kind of walked away from that funding, which wasn’t included in the most recent appropriations bill. They’re looking at moving money around, kind of rearranging the deck chairs to give it a little bit of money. We need a TMF that’s funded, that has predictable funding long-term, so they can commit to long-term projects and a long-term payback schedule for agencies that retire legacy systems.

That’s something that I’m going to be working on; getting TMF reauthorized, including improving it in terms of the application process and making sure that it’s funded. 

For many years, Connolly was like a dog with a bone and very committed to the FITARA scorecard. I think that drove a lot of modernization efforts. It’s easy to forget now, but the shift to cloud computing and away from standalone physical data servers for federal agencies was a heavy lift. The FITARA scorecard really helped to drive that. Unfortunately, the Republicans have stepped back from that and haven’t held those hearings. We need to hold agencies accountable for their modernization efforts.

One of the things I’m going to be looking at is a modernized modernization scorecard that could build on the FITARA scorecard and incorporate other elements, like AI adoption and cybersecurity. I think there’s just a lot of value in having that annual or semi-annual accountability for modernization efforts to drive change.

Nextgov/FCW: Are there any other issues that you’re continuing to track?

Walkinshaw: FedRAMP is very much on my mind. I worked on the FedRAMP legislation that Connolly passed. The Trump administration has this FedRAMP 20x set of reforms. I think we need to get more data about that, and there needs to be more transparency in terms of whether that’s been effective. We want to have a predictable timeline and process for cloud providers going through the FedRAMP process, but we want to make sure that the right safeguards are in place, and that we’re not missing anything in that process. So far, the kind of data that’s come out from the FedRAMP office has been pretty limited, so I’d like to see more data and transparency on that. 

And then, obviously AI adoption and deployment. Trump and DOGE have been very aggressive, at least rhetorically, about AI, and they have a handful of high profile AI adoption examples. But again, we don’t have a lot of data in terms of where we actually stand with AI adoption in the federal government. So are we making sure that the right guardrails are in place so that we do it responsibly?