ATO is the single longest lever on a federal AI project's timeline. A model that runs in a developer tenant in two weeks can sit in pre-IATT limbo for two quarters if the SSP, POA&M, and continuous-monitoring plan aren't shaped right. The posts tagged here come from projects that pushed AI systems through the RMF without shortcuts that the authorizing official would reject.
The ATO acceleration playbook is the one to read first. The MLOps post covers the continuous-monitoring side — which matters because "ATO" is not a single event, it's a commitment to a monitoring cadence that has to survive a three-year reauthorization cycle.