Ask the CIO

Ask the CIO is a Federal News Network interview program about the officials who run government technology, hosted by Jason Miller. The guest list spans the federal map. Army chief information officer Leo Garciga appears alongside security leaders from the Homeland Security Department, a division chief at the Defense Cybercrime Center, and technology officials from the Transportation Department, NOAA and the State Department. State government comes in through Doug Robinson, executive director of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, whom Miller welcomes back to the program. Their conversation goes through the association's survey of state CIO priorities for 2026: declining revenue and deficits, legacy modernization and technical debt, cloud services' long run on the list and the older push to consolidate infrastructure. Miller has a habit worth knowing. He often starts with the basics, asking a guest to explain what their organization does before getting into specifics. Many of those specifics are about cybersecurity. With Kajal Pal of the Defense Cybercrime Center, the talk covers looking at all of the data rather than sampling it, bringing in AI and machine learning to handle the volume, keeping a human in the loop on risk and collecting data from the many tools running in one environment. Exit interviews are their own thread. Hemant, formerly the chief information security officer at the Homeland Security Department, is asked why it was the right time to leave after roughly fifteen years and which accomplishments he is proudest of. Don Yeske, formerly director of the department's National Security Cyber Division, answers one question with an allegory from his time as a civilian deployed to Iraq. Titles in this thread include 'Why DHS no longer has a compliance mindset for cybersecurity' and 'Yeske helped change what complying with zero trust means'. Not every episode is a one-on-one. Some are excerpts from events Miller moderated, including a panel at the ATARC Public Sector CIO Summit and a discussion with Garciga at an Army IT Day. That panel mixes agency officials with an industry voice, as a Pluralsight sales vice president describes what he saw at an AWS conference. Garciga is blunt. He says the Army has added friction by loosening things up, says some companies simply don't know the rules while in other cases the government has made rules up, and invites firms to bring cyber problems straight to his team. The tone is friendly and practical, and the talk is full of agency acronyms. For a broad view, start with the Robinson episode, 'A new top priority for state CIOs in 2026'. For candor, try the Garciga excerpt, 'Army tackling its ‘Achilles heel’ of IT modernization'. What a listener gets is an inside view of how agencies run their technology, in the officials' own words.