Assistant Commissioner

At U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Mr. Sanjeev “Sonny” Bhagowalia currently holds the Senior Executive Service position of Assistant Commissioner (AC), Office of Information and Technology (OIT) and CBP Chief Information Officer (CIO).

Mr. Bhagowalia has over 40 years of senior technical, managerial, and executive leadership experience in private industry, the U.S. Government, and state government. Mr. Bhagowalia has spent over 26 of those years in senior executive capacity, including over 22 years as a member of the Senior Executive Service (SES) and one year as a Senior Level (SL) in the Federal Government, and three years as a Senior Executive in State Government. He has served in key CIO leadership roles at five government agencies: Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department of the Interior, State of Hawaii, U.S. Department of Treasury and CBP, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He also served in senior executive leadership roles as a Deputy Associate Administrator for Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at General Services Administration, and as a Program Management Executive/Assistant Director at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice. Mr. Bhagowalia also served for 14 years in Industry at Boeing, a Fortune 30 company, ultimately serving for five years in senior technical leadership roles as a Chief Engineer/Manager and as an honorary Senior Principal Engineer in the Boeing Company.

He has used his knowledge of IT/Information Resource Management (IRM), cybersecurity, and business process re-engineering to transform and secure organizations, and has helped the Federal CIO/CTO to roll out foundational White House Government-wide initiatives such as Open Data, Federal Cloud, FedRAMP, and the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.

Mr. Bhagowalia has received over 50 awards from the U.S. Government and Industry, including a rare distinction of two Presidential Rank Awards for Meritorious Executive Service; three Federal 100 Awards; four Golden Gov Executive of the Year awards (including three in a row); two Wash100 awards; State Gov Executive of the Year; Government CIO of the Year; Government Innovator of the Year; NASA Silver Snoopy; NASA Award of Merit; Asian American Chamber of Commerce Elite Titan; Service to the Citizen; and the White House Champion of Change. He led the team that won the Chief Information Officer 100 award for data.gov; and “Best of the Web” State Portal award from Center for Digital Government (CDG) for Hawaii.gov. He was inducted into the Boeing Technical Excellence Fellowship Program in 2014, recognizing the top one percent of engineers and scientists in the Boeing Company; the 2014 Federal Enterprise Architecture Certification Institute Hall of Fame; and the 2015 National Defense University IRM College Hall of Fame.

Mr. Bhagowalia has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering (EE) and a Master of Science (MS) Degree in EE from Louisiana State University, and an MS in IRM from Syracuse University. He is also a twice-distinguished graduate from the National Defense University, U.S. Department of Defense, with an IRM Diploma and Federal CIO Certificate.