OMB touts accomplishments as others question whether fatigue has set in
Agencies are making considerable progress in implementing the administration’s E-Government goals, but a recent report to Congress says the ultimate benefits of the initiatives are still a few hurdles away.
The Office of Management and Budget, in its annual Expanding E-Government report to Congress, found that agencies reached two of the five goals it set last year, yet fell short on a handful of others, including cybersecurity and workforce management (see chart).
New initiatives
While OMB said the report shows that E-Government programs are closer to becoming the “utility” service the administration envisions, one former government official said it also reveals that agencies are struggling to incorporate many of the new initiatives.
“This is a real difficult period of time for many agencies,” said the former official, who requested anonymity. “What you’ve got is the half-full/half-empty problem and right now they’re hitting the wall.”
In some ways, the report de-monstrates that several agencies are feeling E-Government fatigue, the source said. “This is a struggle. This is not easy stuff.”
But Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for E-Government and IT, said at a speech in November that agencies have been well aware of the E-Government requirements and should not be surprised or fatigued.
“We finalized [the milestones] with the agencies in September,” Evans said. If agencies “think there [are] too many milestones—they agreed to them. ... We did try to be very reasonable.”
The administration’s reports on E-Government play a bit of a good-cop/bad-cop role. The recent OMB report lets the administration tout the successes of E-Government by taking a broader view of how agencies have progressed this year. Conversely, the E-Government portion of the quarterly President’s Management Agenda scorecard is more of a blunt instrument with which OMB grades agencies on whether they’ve met their milestones.
In the most recent quarterly scorecard released in November, for example, six agencies slipped from the coveted green status.
The PMA scorecard “tends to accentuate the negative,” said Fred Thompson, vice president of management and technology at the Council for Excellence in Government in Washington. “But this report shows the longer-term view of these things and it shows a lot of progress.”
Rep. Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican who co-authored the E-Government Act and is the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said he was “quite pleased” with the progress agencies made last year.
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