The events of September 11, 2001, underscored the importance of the role private and public institutions must play to ensure the protection of our country and the safety and well-being of our citizenry. Fulfilling this role embodies more than ensuring our ability to provide physical protection for our homeland. It also involves ensuring the preservation of systems that serve as underpinnings to the American way of life.

Most experts agree that our next line of defense will be our cyberspace. We have become increasingly dependent on information systems and networks that, without adequate safeguards and protections, have made us more vulnerable. Therefore, the Office of Personnel Management has teamed up with several key agencies to create "Scholarship For Service," a program aimed at helping Federal agencies meet this challenge. This program provides scholarships to selected students at participating institutions in exchange for service at a Federal agency after graduation. The result is a pool of top-notch graduates from which Federal agencies may draw to reinforce the cadre of professionals that protect the Federal Government's critical infrastructure.

Federal agencies that participate by providing internship and long-term placement opportunities for these students accomplish several objectives. Besides responding to Congress' concern that their lines of defense are inadequate, they take a step forward in pursuing a central goal of this Administration: the protection of our country and its citizens. There is hardly another objective that responds better to the first two tenets in the President's call for a government that is citizen-centered, results-oriented, and market-driven. The reinforcement of their cyberspace lines of defense will also help agencies fulfill their responsibilities under the Government Performance Results Act.