Walkinshaw, who served as [Gerry] Connolly’s chief of staff for 11 years, is vying for Virginia’s 11th congressional seat this fall to succeed the late congressman following his death from cancer in May. He currently serves on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.
When asked how he would counter DOGE’s efforts, Walkinshaw cited Connolly’s work on the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, and the bipartisan process his former boss used to get the landmark bill passed.
The legislation, passed in 2014, remains the foundation for chief information officers in the federal government. Connolly continued to make it a priority in the years that followed, holding biannual FITARA Scorecard hearings and meetings and sounding the alarm this year over DOGE’s impact on the federal workforce.
“One of the things I will do … is talk about the process that we went through, that Congressman Connolly went through, to develop and then implement FITARA,” Walkinshaw said, adding that “FITARA is a perfect model of how to improve government efficiency and do it the right way.”
The Trump administration has encouraged the use of AI to streamline government workflows, and agency heads have repeatedly pointed to automation to make up for workforce cuts.
“It’s hard to tell how much of that is smoke and mirrors and how much of that is legitimate,” Walkinshaw said. “I’ll just say, to do that effectively, you really have to have good people who understand the agency’s mission and know how to do it. And they fired a lot of those people.”
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