On 9/11’s 25th anniversary, modernizing government starts with remembering our past

As we mark the 25th anniversary of Sept.11, 2001, we honor those we lost and reflect on progress in our national security and public safety architectures. Yet behind the ceremonies lies a persistent, quiet vulnerability. Today, public sector Chief Data Officers and Chief Data and AI Officers have inherited the imperative to connect the dots, share information across boundaries, and better serve Americans. 

Too often, however, they stumble over the same structural barriers that blinded us a quarter-century ago: isolated data silos, stove-piped legacy systems, failures of intergovernmental coordination, and interagency turf wars. Worse, threats have accelerated, driven by transnational crime, rapid technological advances in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, and geopolitical conflict. These barriers are compounding into AI data readiness gaps. The cost of forgetting is not theoretical.

Following the 9/11 Commission’s diagnosis, legislation informed by the Markle Foundation required the President to establish a cross-domain, whole-of-government Information Sharing Environment (ISE). The ISE attributes were forward-leaning. They anticipated current efforts to catalog data, build trust architectures, and automate discovery. Sharing and safeguarding were treated as aligned, with guardrails for sharing allowing for more lasting, efficient,  and secure impact. The underlying approaches were a data-first approach to architecting enterprise transformation and not specific to terrorism-related information. 

Through ISE-linked governance, leaders established policies and technologies that strengthened secure information sharing. These efforts contributed to nearly $531 million in savings and allowed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to remove nationwide terrorism-related information sharing from its High-Risk List in 2017. In particular, GAO highlighted leadership commitment among federal, state, local, tribal, international, and private sector partners as a key driver for the collective results.  

Yet, a subsequent GAO review underscored that progress stalled as dedicated coordination, partner engagement, investment, and oversight were allowed to lapse. At the 2022 National Summit on Intelligence, hosted by the Department of Homeland Security and the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), more than 100 frontline leaders warned that without active governance, cooperation has drifted. Why are we still fighting these battles? We must use this anniversary to pause, remember, and build upon our past successes.

Bridging Federal, State, and Local Agencies

Like many others, I decided to be part of the solution post-9/11. I first served as the Department of Justice’s Chief Enterprise Architect and delivered the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) into use across all 50 states. I then served as the Federal Chief Architect at the Office of Management and Budget. Subsequently, I served for six years as the Presidentially-designated Program Manager for the Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE) and governmentwide lead for information sharing.

In that role, I saw firsthand the friction of cross-agency information sharing. Bridging the gap between domestic criminal intelligence and foreign intelligence meant overcoming cultural aversion and perceived risk. There was always tension and pushback from powerful agencies that preferred to operate unilaterally. I sat in rooms where the right answer was obvious and the institutional will to act on it was not. 

Acting as an empowered convener backed by the White House, the PM-ISE championed the collaborative, collective approaches that were otherwise impossible. Co-chairing the National Security Council’s (NSC) information sharing and safeguarding inter-agency policy committee, we developed and oversaw implementation of our national strategy. We embedded robust operational policies to protect privacy, and civil liberties—protections that were operationalized nationally and later affirmed in federal courts.

The Operational Impact of Federated Governance

Federated, transparent, participatory, and collaborative governance was the true engine of this progress. It worked because it aligned incentives rather than imposing control: rather than forcing local agencies into a monolithic federal database, we treated state, local, and private sector leaders as first-rank partners through interlocking advisory bodies. 

We built upon and integrated successful models like the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) division and its Advisory Policy Board. To bridge information sharing architectures, we partnered closely with industry and standards organizations. That collaboration continues today with NIEMOpen.

A core success of the ISE was delivering the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative into operational use. This standardized tips and leads, used the national network of fusion centers as local filtering, analysis, and information sharing nodes, and successfully integrated a million frontline officers into a national architecture protecting Americans. 

To make federated governance tangible for those frontline officers, we championed operational coordination and deconfliction between High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA), Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS), and the National Network of Fusion Centers. While dedicated professionals continue to share tactical intelligence locally, state-wide and regionally, and with federal partners daily through mechanisms such as Joint Terrorism Task Forces, it is the enterprise-level strategic governance required to scale these efforts and connect the dots nationally that has atrophied.

Fortunately, the DOJ’s Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative and its Criminal Intelligence Coordinating Council (CICC) have just been formally rechartered. We have a critical window to restore them to their capstone role with our public safety and domestic law enforcement architecture.

The Thread Forward: Evidence, AI, and Trust

The ISE structural reforms directly connect the hard-earned lessons of post-9/11 counterterrorism to the modern mandates of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, and the urgent need to counter AI-accelerated threats. Today, semantic interoperability is more critical than ever. As NIEM has evolved into NIEMOpen, it restricts governance overhead to the minimum common standards needed across a mission ecosystem, providing the crucial semantic foundation data leaders need.

If we attempt to fuel modern AI tools using the siloed, non-interoperable data architectures of the past, we risk billions in failed IT modernization and dangerous algorithmic hallucinations. Federated and open frameworks like NIEMOpen are not just administrative best practices; they are the semantic prerequisites for trustworthy and interoperable AI.

The Call to Action

On this 25th anniversary, our nation faces a clear choice. To secure our communities and lead in the AI age, the Administration and Congress must take decisive action:

1. Fully Restore Global and the CICC: Fully empower the newly rechartered Global advisory committee and its CICC. For a local police chief, this federated governance means receiving a single, actionable threat picture rather than drowning in duplicative, siloed federal alerts with resulting likely gaps.

2. Reconsider the PM-ISE: Congress and the Administration must resolve statutory ambiguities to formally re-establish and empower the Program Manager. Anchoring this role as in the past with the NSC and OMB will provide the independent leverage needed to align federal equities, integrated state and local needs and perspective, and refresh and broaden our national strategy.

3. Embrace Federated Data Governance for AI: Follow the principles of the Evidence Act and NIEMOpen. We must treat data as an enterprise asset governed by shared semantic standards and robust safeguards. To lead this effort, OMB should lean on agency CDOs to refresh the Federal Data Strategy and consider use of NIEMOpen as the basis for inter-agency and state and local data sharing standards. ensuring our AI models generate trustworthy insights.

The technology of government matters, but it is people, trust, and federated governance that make it work. By bringing back the human and structural DNA of the ISE, we can honor the legacy of 9/11 with enduring institutional renewal.

Kshemendra Paul retired from federal service in 2025. He is recognized for his pioneering results and solutions to improve government services and operations. He started his career in the private sector as technology leader and entrepreneur. In the second half of his career, he served in a variety of federal agencies and the White House in leadership roles such as assistant inspector general, governmentwide lead for information sharing, federal chief architect, and chief data officer. His focus now is public policy advocacy. He also advises leaders and organizations on data and artificial intelligence strategy and governance.