It’s hot in Washington, so the White House must be fending off congressional attacks on e-government.
In each of the past five summers, legislators have cut allocations to the governmentwide E-Government Fund—by a total of more than $87 million—and placed restrictive riders on certain spending bills. But this year, the cuts are among the harshest agencies have seen and could stall the Bush administration’s effort to modernize and consolidate agency IT systems.
House lawmakers placed severe limits on how agencies reprogram funds for interagency projects into nearly every agency appropriations bill and the part of the Transportation, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development and the Judiciary bill that applies government- wide. The restrictions would require the Office of Management and Budget to submit to Congress an operating plan detailing how much money would be transferred and the reasons why.
“The committee has never been a big fan of these programs and has never given it much money,” said John Scofield, House committee spokesman. “OMB is intentionally going around Congress, and we’ve said multiple times that this program doesn’t make a lot of sense, and OMB continues to do a poor job convincing us that it does make sense.”
Requests ignored
Asking permission to reprogram funds might not sound like a big deal, but former and current federal officials said the process hasn’t always gotten results. Last year, lawmakers never acted on a reprogramming request from the Commerce Department, thereby shutting down the agency’s ability to contribute money to e-government projects. Officials fear that Congress would turn a deaf ear to requests across all of government, experts said.
And the fears are not misplaced. In the committee report, lawmakers said OMB has forced the e-government projects on agencies and “many aspects of this initiative are fundamentally flawed, contradict underlying program statutory requirements and have stifled innovation by forcing conformity to an arbitrary government standard.”
The Senate versions of the bills do not include many of the same provisions, with the exception of long-standing provisions in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration section of the Commerce, Justice and State bill and a specific provision targeting two e-government projects, Safecom and Disaster Management, in the Interior bill.
Digg
De.licio.us
Slashdot
Technorati
