Commerce Department Appoints Brian Epley as CIO

The Department of Commerce has named Brian Epley as its new chief information officer, effective June 3.

Epley, currently the principal deputy CIO at the Department of Energy, will replace Andre Mendes, who left federal service to be the CIO for Tarrant County, Texas.

At the Energy Department, Epley contributes to the development of strategic direction focused on IT, cybersecurity and data usage protection and modernization for the agency’s CIO office, Federal News Network reported.

Before joining the the department, he served nearly seven years in various leadership roles at the Environmental Protection Agency, including principal deputy assistant administrator for administration and resources management, deputy CIO and director of the Office of Information Technology Operations.

He also became Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12 technical director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Information and Technology and IT services director and chief information security officer for the Virginia Information Technologies Agency.

His private sector career includes time spent as a program manager at Northrop Grumman and Computer Science Co. and as a consultant for North Highland.

The Federal IT Dashboard showed that Epley would manage spending an IT budget worth $2.9 billion once he joined the Commerce Department.