AI in Government Act of 2020: OMB Guidance and Successor Law

The AI in Government Act of 2020 is a federal statute that created the first government-wide framework for how executive branch agencies adopt, manage, and oversee artificial intelligence. Enacted on December 27, 2020 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (Public Law 116-260), it works through three institutional channels: a technical assistance center at the General Services Administration, binding policy guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, and workforce development led by the Office of Personnel Management. Later legislation and OMB memoranda have layered concrete obligations on top of that foundation, so what agencies must actually do today comes from both the 2020 Act and the rules built on it.

What the Act Set Up

The law divides responsibility among three agencies. GSA runs a consulting hub that helps other agencies figure out where AI can improve operations and how to implement it responsibly. OMB writes the binding policy that agencies follow when acquiring or deploying AI. OPM handles the people side: identifying the skills federal AI work requires and making sure the classification system can hire and retain those workers. Each of those roles has generated its own line of implementation activity since 2020.

The AI Center of Excellence at GSA

The Act established an Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence inside GSA’s IT Modernization Centers of Excellence program. It functions as a shared resource for agencies that don’t have in-house data science teams. Its services include governance assessments, process automation, workflow mapping, and identification and deployment of AI solutions across an agency’s operations.¹ A smaller agency can tap the center for the same technical consulting a larger department would build internally, and the center also helps agencies develop the governance plans they need to comply with OMB’s policy requirements.

The Act also assigns the center a research role: studying the policy, legal, and ethical questions raised by federal AI use, including effects on privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights.² So GSA is meant to track not just whether tools work, but whether they create risks the government needs to manage.

OMB Policy Guidance

The Act directs the OMB Director to issue a memorandum providing government-wide guidance on how federal agencies acquire and use AI. That guidance covers both regulatory and non-regulatory approaches and functions as the binding standard executive branch agencies must follow.³

The original Act required the memorandum but set no update schedule. That changed in 2022, when the Advancing American AI Act required OMB to update its guidance within two years of the initial memorandum and then at least annually for the following ten years.⁴ The current version is OMB Memorandum M-25-21, issued in February 2025, which now serves as the primary policy document governing federal AI use.³

Federal AI Workforce Requirements

The Act directs OPM to take four specific steps within 18 months of enactment: identify the key skills and competencies needed for federal AI positions, establish or update an occupational series for AI work, estimate how many federal employees currently hold AI-related jobs at each agency, and prepare two-year and five-year workforce forecasts.⁵ OPM also had to submit a plan and timeline to the relevant congressional committees within 120 days.

OPM has since acted on those requirements. It issued a competency memorandum in 2023 and followed with a more detailed competency model in April 2024 covering both technical and general skills for AI work.⁶ On the classification side, OPM has published guidance on how to identify AI work within existing job series so positions are classified accurately. The point is to build clear career paths for data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI policy specialists in federal service.⁷

How the Advancing American AI Act Expanded the Framework

Congress reinforced the 2020 Act two years later. The Advancing American AI Act, enacted as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 (P.L. 117-263), amended the original law in several ways. The biggest was the mandatory OMB update schedule described above. It also added agency-level obligations the original Act didn’t contain:

Agency heads must prepare and maintain public inventories of their AI use cases, assess existing AI for consistency with OMB guidance, and develop plans to retire applications that don’t meet federal standards.
OMB must identify at least five new use cases for cross-agency AI systems and begin piloting them within one year, using the Technology Modernization Fund.
The Department of Homeland Security had to revise its AI procurement and approval processes within 180 days to account for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.

Those additions turned the framework from mostly institutional scaffolding into one that imposes specific, measurable duties on agencies.⁴

What Agencies Must Do Now Under M-25-21

OMB Memorandum M-25-21 is the most current implementation of the Act’s mandate, and it sets concrete deadlines. Within 60 days of the memorandum’s issuance, every agency head must retain or designate a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer responsible for promoting AI adoption, managing risk, and ensuring compliance with federal policy. Within 90 days, each CFO Act agency must also convene an AI governance board to coordinate AI-related decisions.³

Additional deadlines follow on a rolling basis:

Within 180 days, agencies must develop an agency-wide AI strategy and submit a compliance plan to OMB, then repeat every two years through 2036.
Within 270 days, they must update internal policies on IT infrastructure, data management, cybersecurity, and privacy to align with the memorandum, and develop a policy on acceptable use of generative AI.
Within 365 days, they must document compliance with minimum safeguard practices for high-impact AI uses.

For AI systems classified as high-impact, the rule is direct: if a specific use case doesn’t meet the minimum practices, the agency must discontinue that AI functionality. Agencies must also inventory their AI use cases at least annually, submit the inventory to OMB, and post a public version on their website. The Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community are exempt from the inventory requirement.³

The Statute vs. Executive Orders

In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” directing senior officials to review actions taken under President Biden’s Executive Order 14110 and to suspend, revise, or rescind anything inconsistent with the new administration’s policy of promoting AI innovation with fewer regulatory constraints.⁸

The distinction matters. The AI in Government Act of 2020 and the Advancing American AI Act are statutes and remain in force regardless of which administration is in office. M-25-21 explicitly states its requirements are consistent with both laws. Executive orders carry different weight, and the review of EO 14110’s directives could affect the pace and scope of certain privacy and safety-oriented requirements. The statutory framework itself continues to require OMB guidance, GSA technical support, OPM workforce development, and agency-level accountability.

Implementation Gaps

A 2024 Government Accountability Office review found uneven compliance across the federal government. Of 23 agencies reviewed, only ten had fully implemented all AI requirements specific to their agencies. Twelve had implemented some but not all, and one was exempt.⁹

The inventory requirement has been a particular problem. GAO found that only five agencies provided comprehensive information for each of their reported use cases, while the other fifteen had incomplete or inaccurate data. Some inventories were missing required elements such as the AI lifecycle stage or whether a use case was cleared for public release.⁹ The transparency goals of the framework depend on those inventories being accurate, so gaps at that level have oversight consequences for everything above them.

1
GSA. Artificial Intelligence – IT Modernization Centers of Excellence
2
Congress.gov. H.R. 2575 – AI in Government Act
3
Office of Management and Budget. M-25-21 – Accelerating Federal Use of AI through Innovation, Governance, and Public Trust
4
Congress.gov. S.1353 – Advancing American AI Act
5
Congress.gov. H.R. 2575 – AI in Government Act of 2020
6
Office of Personnel Management. Skills-Based Hiring Guidance and Competency Model for Artificial Intelligence Work
7
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The Artificial Intelligence Classification Policy and Talent Acquisition Guidance – The AI in Government Act of 2020
8
The White House. Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence
9
U.S. Government Accountability Office. Artificial Intelligence – Agencies Have Begun Implementation but Need to Complete Key Requirements