Progress Is The Most Important Product

In the last year, OMB, DHS, Justice, the FBI and DNI all agree government has made great strides in Information Sharing.

How important is Information Sharing? So, important that the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 required that an Information Sharing Environment Implementation Plan be created.

Based on the plan, OMB, according to Karen Evans, administrator of e-Gov and Information Technology, “has recently released guidelines out for the Information Sharing environment and the President has recently approved interagency recommendations that have come up to deal with implementation of a framework for sharing information with state, local, tribal, and private sector entities, which includes the Fusion Center guidelines.”

DNI: Establishing Relationships

Dale Meyerrose, CIO, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, talked about how the last year has been “about establishing relationships; making sure that we have the right governance in place not only in the intelligence business, but also with our stake holders and partners across the Federal government whether it’s OMB, DOD, DHS, Department of Justice, or the FBI. We’ve put all those in place.”

Meyerrose was recently named the Information Sharing Executive for the Intelligence Community for DNI. His job is to take Information Sharing within the Intelligence community to another level and to also ensure that the Intelligence community speaks with one voice with other parts of government in terms of Information Sharing.

Justice Moving Ever Forward

At the Justice Department, CIO Vance Hitch feels good about programs that have been going for a number of years now that are actually sharing real information with partners.

“I think last year I talked about the Seattle pilot that we had going. That’s very mature now we’ve learned a lot of things from it. We’ve improved our models,” explains Hitch.  Systems like R-DEx share with partners and Fusion Centers. The soon to be built N-DEx system is a national digital exchange that Hitch says will be available to law enforcement no matter how small or large the city across the whole country.

FBI CIO Zal Azmi mentioned the number of policies that have to be overcome for Information Sharing to be a true reality. “I think through the R-DEx program last year we learned what information our customers need and what information we should share with them. So there are a number of lessons learned from that program,” says Azmi.

“We have been able to actually put a number of pilot programs together to provide greater access to the information that exists in the Federal government. I think those programs will prove to be very successful, they are pilot programs and we are hoping to get those into production within the next year.”

DHS Is Reaching Out

Heading up the Department of Homeland Security’s Information Sharing efforts is Dr. Carter Morris, Director, Information Sharing & Knowledge Management Intelligence and Analysis. On February 1, 2007, DHS Secretary Chertoff issued the “DHS Policy for Internal Information Exchange and Sharing”.

“We have established a governance board to oversee this; we have established a coordinating council at the working level with representatives of more than 20 organizations just to focus on information sharing both internally and with external customers,” says Morris.

From an operational point of view, DHS has spent a lot of effort over the last year really reaching out to the States and Locals and private sectors. “We’ve deployed DHS people to the Fusion Centers to be the focus on that,” says Morris. “We started this year and we will complete that over the next couple of years in getting that deployment.”

Morris also talked about a successful pilot program called the “Homeland Security Information Network for Intelligence” where DHS ties people at HQ directly with analysts at Fusion Centers.

“We’ve rolled out a secret network, a domestic secret network, to state and locals in the field and we have brought state and local people with appropriate clearances on to that network so that they can share in that secret domain,” adds Morris. “So there are an awful lot of activities over the last year that we have been working on.”

The Private Sector Is Also Hard At Work

Also on the panel were leaders of Unisys, BearingPoint and Integration Technologies Group – three organizations who are immersed in Information Sharing efforts.

Unisys is working closely with many sectors of the Federal government, DHS, DOD, and the Intel community as well, says Ed Vaccaro Partner, Homeland Security, Federal Systems at Unisys.

“Through our experiences there in providing services and supporting a lot of the efforts, that are going on there, we’ve taken those experiences and are beginning to work on products that help enable a lot of the activities around Information Sharing and we will be introducing as these opportunities come along.”

“BearingPoint has been working with all the agencies here on either Information Sharing or Enterprise Architecture and performance management, notes Glen Cruickshank, Senior Manager, Information Management Practice at BearingPoint.

“What we are finding is that Information Sharing is really a hard problem to solve. It’s really hard to measure, so we’ve been working on developing an Information Sharing maturity model, an assessment tool, and a series of user metrics that we can take to agencies and help them develop road maps and to assess where they are, where they can go and the types of things to measure, how well they are doing Information Sharing.”

Michael Angelakis, President of Integration Technologies Group says that “we feel that at the end of the day, what we all want is the ability to collect relevant useful data, to advance the data by monitoring it properly, and to have all that cost as little as possible. What we are doing in this area right now is we are looking at a standard that will allow organizations to handle those processes required to collect valid, useful, vetted data and allow it to be monitored appropriately.”

Sharing Information With Those Who Need It

With 80% of the nation’s infrastructure owned by the private sector, communicating with state and local officials is paramount.

It’s been said more than once that “everything is local”. So, what happens if there’s a threat against a shopping mall somewhere and the information comes in, how does the information go two different ways, how does that information get out and back and so forth?

For the FBI the heart of this Information Sharing are the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF)”, says Zal Azmi, FBI CIO. “We have about 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces throughout the country. That’s the central coordination for a lot of the information that we are dealing with.”

Azmi says the FBI operates law enforcement online that is a sensitive, but unclassified network that has been in existence for many years. That’s where the FBI actually collaborates with our law enforcement partners.

“There are about 56 special interest groups that are basically are part of a collaboration environment on issues and activities that are happening,” according to Azmi. “I would also say that the FBI has deployed close to 100 FBI employees to the Fusion Centers and all of these Fusion Centers actually have a live connection to the FBI headquarters network; so actual information is being shared in those Fusion Centers with the FBI agents at headquarters.”

Fusion Centers

According to the Justice Department, a Fusion Center is an effective and efficient mechanism to exchange information and intelligence, maximize resources, streamline operations, and improve the ability to fight crime and terrorism by merging data from a variety of sources. In addition, fusion centers are a conduit for implementing portions of the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan (NCISP).

”I had an opportunity recently to speak to the national Fusion Center conference – the first one that we’ve had -- where we brought people from the state Fusion Centers together with us and the Department of Justice and the DNI’s office,” says Dr. Carter Morris, Director, Information Sharing & Knowledge Management Intelligence and Analysis at DHS.

At the Conference, Morris told attendees that “there is the issue that DHS has language which basically says share relevant and appropriate information to the appropriate state and locals, along with assessments of the credibility of that information.”

For Morris this is the real key to what DHS is trying to do, focusing on the state and local Fusion Centers and making them an integral part of the sharing mechanisms between the Federal government into the states and then down through the localities.

Finding The Bad Guys

Vance Hitch, Justice CIO is seeing on a daily basis how the information being shared turns into real law enforcement action and finding the bad guys.

“This can be terrorism kind of stuff or it can also be regular law enforcement actions,” explains Hitch. “In the first pilot that we did out in the Seattle area, it’s been in place now for over two years, it is wonderful to hear the success stories for just everyday law enforcement. We are cracking drug cases that we have never cracked before.”

Hitch also described an incident last summer at the Seattle Jewish Federation. “There was a shooting at the Jewish Federation with associated bomb threats and so forth. That was resolved in about 15 minutes because of the new features of the Information Sharing that were available between all of the law enforcement components within the Seattle area as well as the Justice Department.”

Service Oriented Architectures

On the subject of information sharing and the intelligence role in getting real time information, OMB’s Karen Evans spoke about a real-life example at DOD.

“It’s one thing to have the Presidential guidelines and think of those as all of the business rules that the agencies and state and local government all agree that they are going to follow; but it’s another thing to actually have demonstrated success or show a system or show the technology that can enable legacy data and share it in real time,” notes Evans.

The DOD strategy is really implementing a service oriented architecture (SOA). “They have built the service. And they have followed the strategy of getting it implemented in 9 months or less, and you have to know the business, but they actually have four of these operating in real time right now.”

One deals with maritime data. There is a service out where DOD, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation are hooked up, live, real time.  They know exactly where ships and boats and all these other things are in real time and everybody’s pulling up the same data, looking at the same data. BTW, this was implemented this in less than 9 months and for less than a million dollars making Evans and OMB very happy.

“It takes things out of the theoretical and puts them into real life and they can show, this is what we have done, here’s the tool kit,” says Evans. “And they’ve documented everything as they went forward so that they can share it with the other agencies and enable legacy data to get it out so that people can share it.”

Barriers To Progress

Trust Is The Key To Keeping The Information Sharing Momentum Going

Trust; the sheer scale of what is trying to be accomplished; moving from the theoretical to the operational; autonomy versus authorities; and getting the legacy data that we already have out as far as classification out to those who need it.

According to Federal Executive Forum government panelists, these are the primary barriers and challenges to Information Sharing.

“I would probably distill this into a very simple concept and that is trust,” says Karen Evans, Administrator of E-Government and Information Technology, OMB.
 

“There has to be a trust relationship across the board. We can say it’s policy and I agree we are very concerned about privacy, civil liberties and security as we go forward with this. But it really is trust that the services are going to be there for when the agency needs to do its mission.”

Evans is asking agencies to put trust in to other agencies to deliver services better than they can do it themselves in their areas of expertise. “That is a change in the model because agencies are used to doing it and providing for themselves,” Evans goes on. “They have to believe that the services are going to be there and that they are going to be reliable so that they can carry out the mission that the American people are expecting them to do.”

A Monumental Effort

For Justice CIO Vance Hitch, the biggest challenge is the sheer scale of the effort.

“Basically there are 20,000 law enforcement organizations across the country, there’s over 200,000 law enforcement officers. My ideal of what we are trying to accomplish is really to share appropriately with all of them,” says Hitch.

In addition, Justice (and for that matter the entire Federal government) is a very complex department internally with 30 components. and so forth. “We are dealing in an environment that is very complex and it takes a lot of cross governmental coordination with state and local as well as Federal.”

Moving From The Theoretical To Operational

Dr. Carter Morris, Director, Information Sharing & Knowledge Management Intelligence and Analysis at DHS, sees the challenge as “moving from the theoretical to real implementation and operations.” For Morris there are still issues about identifying what information needs to be moved to whom, for what purpose and understanding “what it is we are trying to accomplish in this Information Sharing world.”

Morris makes the point that when it comes to implementation, you don’t solve the general problem; you’ve got to start working those real details.

“Sometimes working in the general domain is much more difficult than working in the real one,” says Morris. “Once you understand what the problems are then you can start attacking them. We are trying to put some of our real energy into looking at what the real issues are, what the real problems are and let’s see if we can solve them.”

Autonomy versus Authority

Challenges are nothing new for Dale Meyerrose, CIO at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  

“You are talking about autonomy versus authorities in many cases. How that affects your decision making and culture,” says Meyerrose.
 

“What I mean by that is that there are so many linkages and interdependencies, not only within the Intelligence community but also with our stakeholders and partners,” explains Meyerrose. “So when we make decisions about either systems or process or organization, we have to take into account those partners and stakeholders and users, if you will, because what we produce is not for ourselves, but for them as well.”

Meyerrose added, “So when I say give up autonomy I mean that you take other folks’ view into account before you make a decision. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you give up authority and I think in the old way of thinking authorities and autonomy were so closely linked that organizations had a hard time of making that distinction. But giving up autonomy is key to collectively making us better for sharing information.” 

Legacy Data: Tactical To Practical

“On a tactical base, I will say that the FBI is committed to providing Federal, state, local, tribal and foreign partners with access to terrorism information as required by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004,” says Zal Azmi, FBI CIO.

The basic challenge for Azmi is how to get legacy data out to our partners, because they are dealing with 25 – 30 year old legacy data. “When it comes to implementation, our challenges with getting the legacy data that we already have out as far as classification goes and making that available to our partners,” notes Azmi who says implementation is the most difficult part of this process.

Industry: At The Ready

On the private sector side, Michael Angelakis, President of Integration Technologies Group talked about serious concerns with respect to privacy and security and the need for standards.

“I think that we would be well served to have standards in place to ensure that the data administrators maintain their fiduciary responsibility for the data while at the same time, serve the national interest.” ITG is working in this area.

“We’ve been working in a number of areas with respect to this effort. We just finished our certification in ISO 3000 and ITO and there’s one particular area within these standards, problem management that focuses on what do you do with the data once you have it,” says Angelakis.

For Glenn Cruickshank, BearingPoint Senior Manager, Information Management Practice, the move from “need to know” to “responsibility to share” is something that’s going to take time and a change in mindset.

“One of the things that the community’s done a real good job in the last 50 years building secure systems to prevent access to data,” says Cruickshank. “Now we are expected to do a 180 on that and do that in a very short period of time. And that’s really difficult and that’s taking some time.”

According to Cruickshank, the systems themselves are going to have to change to do that. “Again, there’s a new cultural change we talked about. How we measure that culture has to be changed in terms measuring how much information is going to be produced and how much information is going to be shared. I think that how you look at the culture and how people measure is going to be important in the future.” 

Ed Vaccaro at Unisys says “what we are seeing now is that we need to move the protection of the information closer to the information itself, so that we can get more granularities and more flexibility.”

Vaccaro explains that as we start thinking about how we split the sharing and assign who gets what, “you have more control over it and you are less concerned about who has access to a network or a facility and really you are now focused on the information and the pieces of it.” As a result, Vaccaro says Unisys has spent an “awful lot of time in our R&D figuring out what kind of technologies or products along with our services to help enable all this stuff.” 

Each agency has a specific role in information and intelligence sharing.

For Dr. Carter Morris of DHS, Information Sharing was at the heart of the creation of the Homeland Security Act that created DHS.

“I have a focus that I believe we are doing. We are making sure that the information that DHS has from its operational and regulatory missions flows to the people who can use that information across the community,” explains Morris.

“We have a huge responsibility in the sharing of information with the state and local and private sector. So within our domain, that is really the thing that is driving us.”

Aligning To The Mission

For Karen Evans at OMB it is making sure that everything the agencies are doing, whether they know it today or not, aligns with the potential that they can share the information when they need to do it.

“We have to make sure that all their investments are aligned and that their strategies, their Enterprise Architecture, all those types of activities are aligned,” explains Evans.

“Then also, from Administration’s perspective, (there) is securing the information; that all the agencies are collecting and then insuring the privacy associated with that. So it is really oversight like you said, but when you get down to it, it’s a lot of individual looking at several activities that the agencies are doing and  to make sure they are aligned to meet that goal.”

Mission Expansion

“I think DoJ has long played the leadership role in law enforcement and our Information Sharing strategy would apply to law enforcement whether there was a terrorism element or not”, says CIO Vance Hitch.

“But certainly the new mission of terrorism prevention, which in the Department of Justice is primarily executed through the FBI, it adds to that. So the systems we are building and the approach we have to Information Sharing is built on those two pillars. Obviously we work very closely with our Federal partners in executing that counterterrorism mission.”

Working hand-in-hand with Hitch is FBI CIO, Zal Azmi, who must help execute the FBI dual mission of law enforcement and domestic intelligence. Azmi is implementing the FBI’s national Information Sharing strategy launched in 2004.

“Since then every investment that we have made in new technology has been based on Information Sharing to make sure that we are addressing that,” says Azmi.

“With the creation of the National Security Branch, we have to share information with not only with our intelligence counterparts, all 16 agencies that report to the Intelligence community,” says Azmi, “but also with our law enforcement counterparts. So we are supporting both environments and both systems, including enterprise architecture actually it’s a structure to support both environments.”           

Responsibility To Provide

“Director O’Connell has made it very clear that the watch word that he wants us known by is collaboration,” declares Dale Meyerrose, CIO at DNI.

“And collaboration connotes a more thorough interaction if you will. It’s a more sophisticated element of Information Sharing. In fact he uses the phrase ‘responsibility to provide’ as a means of talking about stewardship and information and the element of Information Sharing.”

According to Meyerrose the thing to bear in mind is that we are in the intelligence business do not deal directly state and local entities but through our partners such as DHS or Justice.

Meyerrose went on to describe three major efforts.

“One is organizational. Within the National Counterterrorism Center, we’ve in fact established a fusion group which is composed of members of the various communities, which specifically look at intelligence information that either the Department of Homeland Security or Justice needs to get out to folks, so that physical fusion group is part of the National Counterterrorism Center is a big player.

Secondly we have looked at our systems and how we interface those systems with folks. For instance last summer, we in the intelligence community provided the construct for the pandemic planning mechanisms for the government portals at unclassified, secret and top secret levels. And what that demonstrates is how we have provided interface of our systems such as Intelink so that the transparency works and we can push information quickly.

And then last area in which we have worked very, very hard is what we call the terror line issues; that is making intelligence packages so that it can be shared with folks. We have the terror line between sources and methods and the information itself so that things can be put out at the lowest classification possible.”

The Private Sector Is Hard At Work

Unisys, BearingPoint and Integration Technologies group are providing government with Information Sharing strategies and tools.
 
Partnership with the private sector is a cornerstone of 21^st century government. Without private sector expertise, government wouldn’t have Information Sharing technologies or tools.

Joining government leaders to discuss Information Sharing on the Federal Executive Forum were leaders from Unisys, BearingPoint and Integration Technologies Group – three organizations who are immersed in Information Sharing efforts.

Unisys is working closely with many sectors of the Federal government, DHS, DOD, and the Intel community as well, says Ed Vaccaro Partner, Homeland Security, Federal Systems at Unisys.

“Through our experiences there in providing services and supporting a lot of the efforts, that are going on there, we’ve taken those experiences and are beginning to work on products that help enable a lot of the activities around Information Sharing and we will be introducing as these opportunities come along.”

“BearingPoint has been working with all the agencies here on either Information Sharing or Enterprise Architecture and performance management, notes Glenn Cruickshank, Senior Manager, Information Management Practice at BearingPoint.

“What we are finding is that Information Sharing is really a hard problem to solve. It’s really hard to measure, so we’ve been working on developing an Information Sharing maturity model, an assessment tool, and a series of user metrics that we can take to agencies and help them develop road maps and to assess where they are, where they can go and the types of things to measure, how well they are doing Information Sharing.”

Michael Angelakis, President of Integration Technologies Group says that “we feel that at the end of the day, what we all want is the ability to collect relevant useful data, to advance the data by monitoring it properly, and to have all that cost as little as possible.”

“What we are doing in this area right now is we are looking at a standard that will allow organizations to handle those processes required to collect valid, useful, vetted data and allow it to be monitored appropriately.”

Specific Solutions

“We are doing a lot with the Transportation Security Administration,” says Unisys’ Ed Vaccaro. Unisys is working on a shipping application that will allow private shippers to register themselves with the Transportation Security Administration.

“This will help improve the flow of goods through the system so that they can get pre-checked and not have to go through rigorous paper work,” explains Vaccaro. “That’s one of the things we are working on most recently as a matter of fact and that went on line in December.”   

According to Cruickshank, the company used its expertise from the commercial part of BearingPoint who have worked on news media standards. “We can learn something from the commercial world, so we’ve been developing joint teams of commercial public service practice people who are working together to develop those standard practices,” adds Cruickshank.

“Information sharing can play a very important role in making the government citizen centric. A good example of that is in medical information systems; how we can track medical information from prenatal care to the child bearing process as children grow up, they go to college, they become adults.”

By being able to cross reference the data and from a variety of view points along the history of the individual we can add tremendous value to the data notes Angelakis.

“We’ve been working in this area and we are working with respect to the architecture and methodology for integrating data from different sources; setting data among applications, mapping data in different structures and resolving conflicts between models.”

Future Visions

From the “need to know” to the “need to share” to now the “responsibility to provide” shows that the views and actions on Information Sharing are changing rapidly. 

While the future for Information Sharing seems bright, by no means is it something that can be checked off as being done.

“We have a lot more work that needs to be done, because I don’t know that any of us will ever sit back, at least in my tenure, and say, “Gosh, we have completed everything and so we can close up shop and go home, says OMB’s Karen Evans. “This is a job that will be never ending and we need to do it because the American people are depending on us to do a good job in this area.”

Evans would like everyone to read the Information Sharing Environment Implementation Plan. It outlines a very aggressive schedule out there, with very specific milestones, functionality, types of services, types of things that we would like to accomplish.

“I would like to come back a year from now and tell you that we have accomplished all the milestones that we have outlined,” says Evans, “that the agencies have signed off for on this plan, that we said we would do in this next year,”

To do that Evans says is “going to take people that are trained, it is going to take tools in that environment and it is going to take knowing where the information is. So we have a plan, the agency signed on to the plan, the President has accepted that plan, and now we need to make that plan a reality.” 

Optimistic, But Much Still To Do

I think last year when I was here I said I was optimistic about Information Sharing,” says Dr. Carter Morris of DHS. “And I’ve seen nothing to dissuade me from that. I continue to be very optimistic about where we are and how we are proceeding and I really do believe that people get the information they need today.”

But Morris says there is still much work to be done. “One of the challenges that I’ve spoken about already is that we need to build that collaborative trust environment with state and locals and private sector in the Federal government. I don’t think we are quite there across the barrier yet, I think we still need to work on that.”

And as better tools are built that provide access to more information, there will be real issues. “One is the private civil liberties issue and how do we consent to look at data, handle data, move data, and protect data,” says Morris. “I am in agreement with that. And as the information gets more available and the tools get better, I think we’ll become more cognizant of that.”

Finally for Morris there is the classic challenge that everyone in the community faces. “How do we share information from the operation community to the non-operation community? That’s where the real barriers are. People who have to have that information to do their job are very conscious about who they share it to because it may compromise the ability to do their job. And we’ve got learn how to deal with that.”

Collaborate Today

Also optimistic about the future is FBI CIO Zal Azmi. “I think the future is bright. We have made great progress in the last year. The infrastructure is almost there, the policies and standards are being developed thanks to the OMB, DNI and DoJ.”

“I think we next need to concentrate on preparing the data for sharing. I think one of the points that my colleagues made was we need to find out what we have, what we want to share and who we want to share it with,” says Azmi.

“I think that’s the key right there. We have to really build the collaborative environment where we can communicate with our partners directly and find out exactly what information they need, in what form they need it and circulate that information.”

Collaboration between the FBI and Justice is standard operating procedure.

“The two main missions of the Department of Justice are law enforcement and counterterrorism, says CIO Vance Hitch. “And I think through these Information Sharing efforts, which I help coordinate, I really do see the opportunity to transform the way law enforcement’s done in the United States.”

Information Sharing will help Justice connect the dots according to Hitch whether it helps prevent terrorist attacks or provides good old-fashioned intelligence-based policing to help catch the bad guys at whatever they are doing.

Don’t Forget, It’s All About People

“I think it’s important to bear in mind that all problems are people problems, says Dale Meyerrose, DNI.  “And when you are talking about Information Sharing, collaboration that is what we are talking about, we are talking about people problems.”

For Meyerrose relevance is a continually changing paradigm in solving those issues. “We’ve got a four pronged attack in which we are trying to recruit, train and retain the right intellectual capital to solve the nation’s problems from the intelligence community,” explains Meyerrose.

“We are going to focus on role-based identity, data structures and certification and accreditation of systems as means of working at the very foundations of Information Sharing to carry out our responsibilities.”

Solutions At Work

While government leaders hammer out the policies and procedures, the private sector is developing solutions.

“We are the people who make the tools along with the rest of the private sector,” says Michael Angelakis, Integration Technologies Group.

“We are going to be working this year on a new set of tools for global management. Global management is an organization’s ability to recognize multiple incidents as having a common thread. So we are developing software that can scan databases and look to connect the dots if you will and identify potential threats.”

BearingPoint’s view here today is that this is going to take a balanced approach to solve the problem,” says Glenn Cruickshank.

“It’s going to take a blend of governance, it’s going to take standards, it’s going to take people, it’s going to take process, and it’s going to take technology and all of those things working together. And it’s going to probably also going to take (working with) the commercial world that’s been trying to solve the problem for many, many years. That whole blend is going to be a key to the success.”

“We at Unisys have had a unique opportunity to watch all this unfold since we’ve been around since the beginning, since Homeland Security was conceived, says Ed Vaccaro.

“We’ve been working alongside the Department as a partner and I think industry in general has the ability now to continue that partnership; lend advice and experience; enable what is now going from policy and concept to actual reality; and take these capabilities and make them easier to implement and easier to realize.”

Leaders Who Act

“The challenge is that we as a community need to find ways to band together and work these issues,” says Jim Flyzik, Federal Executive Forum moderator.

“Basically what I have heard today and the other shows that we’ve done I’m convinced that the key things are leadership, and courage to take risk and courage to make change and courage to challenge some traditional ways of doing things, to move forward.”

“In addition to that leadership, we need tools and quality processes to be in place. And what I am hearing today from our industry counterparts is that they are putting place those tools and quality process and I know based on hearing our government panelists here that we have leaders sitting at the table here that are taking those risks, and are stepping up, and are moving our country forward.”