The Office of Management and Budget initially set a deadline of Oct. 27, 2007, for agencies to issue electronic identification cards to employees and contractors who had been with the agency for 15 years or less. Agencies are to issue cards to more senior employees and contractors by Oct. 27.
OMB’s governmentwide figures, as of March, showed these percentages.
3 percent, or 143,000, employees had received cards.
3 percent, or 36,000, contractors had received cards.
59 percent, or more than 2.5 million, federal employees had completed necessary background investigations.
42 percent, or more than 500,000, contractors had completed necessary background investigations.
— Ben Bain
Agencies are foundering in their efforts to use smart identification cards, and they will continue to struggle until the administration establishes realistic, governmentwide milestones for employing all of the features of the cards, according to government auditors.
Agencies are to issue the cards to all federal employees and contractors. However, the Office of Management and Budget found that only 3 percent of federal employees and contractors had received them. All of the agencies surveyed by the Government Accountability Office in February missed an original October 2007 deadline for issuing the cards. On Oct. 23, four days before the deadline, OMB issued a memo offering to work with individual agencies to reach agreement on a new time frame.
Under questioning from lawmakers at a hearing last week, Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for e-government and information technology, said her agency will work more closely with individual agencies to speed the process.
Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) chided Evans for agencies’ lack of progress toward meeting goals associated with Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12, which requires federal employees and contractors to use computer-readable ID cards. The cards are meant to bolster the security of federal buildings and information systems and ensure interoperability governmentwide.
“There has been so little movement that there needs to be some priorities made here, and this is a very simple one that was laid out not just by the president but by the men and women that studied the 9/11 situation and said this is our No. 1 Achilles’ heel in the United States,” said Bilbray, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s Government Management, Organization and Procurement Subcommittee, which held the hearing.
Evans agreed with GAO and lawmakers that the slow issuance is disappointing but she added that agencies have made progress. “What’s critical here is getting the foundation and those business processes normalized and harmonized across the government so that you can trust it,” she said. Once agencies issue cards, they still must decide where to install card readers.
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