With the House of Representatives balking at funding the Bush administration's E-government initiatives, the White House on Thursday issued a statement of administration policy urging Congress to approve its request for $45 million for two dozen interagency, Web-based IT projects. As has been demonstrated by successes from the modest $5 million invested in each of the last two years--including E-Rulemaking, Recreation.gov, E-Authentication, Geodata.gov, E-Training, and Firstgov.gov--the E-Gov Fund can bring significant improvements across agencies while reducing the need for each agency to reinvent the IT wheel, the policy statement said.
Two influential senators are backing the president's position on government IT matters. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Conrad Burns, R-Mich., both note that the E-Government Act stipulates funding such programs. In a recent letter to Sen. Richard Shelby, R.-Ala., chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Transportation, Treasury, and General Government, the two senators called for restoration of the E-government money into the appropriations bill, saying the $45 million would provide "crucial seed money to promote innovation and help create the government of the future."
Without the funding, says Jim Flyzik, former Treasury CIO and the immediate past vice chairman of the federal CIO Council, the administration would be forced to get the money to support these programs by a more cumbersome route. That process, he says, would require individual agencies and departments to voluntarily and collaboratively contribute funds and resources and win the approval of the corresponding Congressional appropriations and oversight committees. "On paper, this approach makes lots of sense, but in reality it's problematic, requiring lots of MOUs [memorandums of understanding] and coordination of committees," says Flyzik, who's now a partner in a government-IT consultancy, Guerra, Kiviat, Flyzik and Associates. "It's a difficult challenge to get the money. That's going to require knocking on the doors of government agencies and a lot of passing the hat."
The White House also urged Congress to restore the $2.5 million earmarked to support the federal enterprise architecture to let the government document, analyze, and find redundancies in its IT systems and business processes. For the first time, through this funding, the federal government will be able to identify redundant IT investments across all agencies, thereby preventing new and eliminating existing wasteful spending, the administration said. As a result, the statement said, the federal government will obtain a higher return on its investments, recoup the cost of this investment, and ultimately save taxpayers billions of dollars.
Quelle: Information Week
