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Show Me The E-Government Money
by Aliya Sternstein
As lawmakers get set to tackle the fiscal 2008 budget, e-government funding may not be their top priority, but policy experts say both parties should support funding for information technology projects when those programs are discussed.
December marked the fourth anniversary of the presidential act that expanded online government services. The law was designed to identify money-saving initiatives that use Internet-based technology to both modernize the federal government and make it easier for Americans to interact with the government. E-government initiatives focus on eliminating redundant government services by consolidating operations online.
Completed projects include in-house operations like electronic systems to handle payroll and security clearances, and public outreach activities like the customer-service program USAServices, which helps agencies respond to public inquiries via the Web, e-mail, telephone or the mail.
Karen Evans, the administrator of e-government and information technology for the White House Office of Management and Budget, said many people "still think about [public] Web portals" as e-government, but the word "is really about the strategic use of IT [in] managing government information" for federal workers and the public. With the e-payroll system, "the citizen doesn't see how that works, but it affects every single federal employee," she said.
New Terminology, Same Focus
Going forward, the Bush administration wants to organize e-government into lines of business covering financial management, grants, information security and federal health IT, among other wheels of government that hinge on good technology.
Mark Forman, a KPMG principal who was the first administration official to oversee the e-government program, said e-government has always been a bipartisan issue. "It's about improving government and improving government to the citizen," he said.
Similar to e-business, e-government was the craze five years ago, but society has moved to next-generation vocabularies and technologies, like Web 2.0. Now, doing work digitally is intuitive, said Forman, who was Evans' predecessor. "You might not see something labeled e-gov [in the budget] ... but you will see funding for projects that are network-based approaches to the government doing its work. The terminology has changed, but the focus is the same."
Some of the more than 20 initiatives launched four years ago are no longer relevant in today's high-tech environment, Forman added. Consolidation has been completed or outmoded by sharing. Projects such as the electronic systems for managing government payroll and travel are being turned into Web services or rolled into more comprehensive management systems.
Forman said the major challenge for e-government is definitional. "It's hard to differentiate between an average IT project and an e-gov project," he said. "There are virtually no IT projects going on in government that don't use network-based communications."
Web 2.0 efforts and virtualization will further blur the boundary. There also are overlaps in responsibility for implementing e-government projects because technology chiefs, financial managers and other government executives are all so dependent on information technology that they feel they need their own capabilities. The redundancy creates exactly the kind of problem that e-government was intended to resolve: duplicative programs in multiple departments.
Yet the future funding for such projects is unknown. The budget is "being prioritized by the crises of our times," namely homeland security, Forman said. E-government measures that touch on hot topics like government ethics may stand a better chance of gaining support.
Not An Easy Sell On Capitol Hill
A spokesman for the Democratic side of the House Appropriations Committee said lawmakers currently are focused on a stopgap spending bill to cover many government programs for the rest of fiscal 2007. Senate Appropriations is not looking at the e-government right now, either.
"At this point, the committee is focused on completing the long overdue fiscal 2007 appropriations bills and then will turn its attention to the more than $100 billion administration funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Tom Gavin, a spokesman for Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert Byrd, D-W.Va. "At this point, discussion of specifics of the fiscal 2008 process would be premature."
Margaret Wicker, a spokeswoman for Senate Appropriations ranking Republican Thad Cochran, R-Miss., said "the administration has not produced sufficient information to tell whether this huge investment of taxpayer dollars has been well spent." Cochran is waiting for agency e-government data, Wicker added. "Once we get that cost-benefit analysis and ensure OMB's underlying questions and assumptions are accurate, we will be able to evaluate the success or failure."
Forman said OMB's planned Google-like search engine of federal spending is one of the major programs that deserve future funding. The searchable database, authorized by Congress and the president last fall, will track an estimated $1 trillion in federal grants and contracts and will itemize all transactions.
"Transparency and accountability in government [spending] is a key element and will continue to be a key element in our times," Forman said.
Evans said the search tool need not be a major financial investment because OMB can re-use existing technology for much of the Web site's infrastructure. The agency is taking inventory to determine what remaining items are needed, according to officials.
Other IT experts agree that e-government has proved itself but believe that congressional sentiment toward future funding will be lukewarm. Paul Wohlleben, a partner at Grant Thornton and a former federal chief information officer, said the reasons for lackluster support include poor congressional understanding of e-government's merits, the traditionally small appropriations for OMB and the fact that Congress and the president are unlikely to support each other's programs.
Lassoing financial operations into a common system has been harder than eliminating redundant payroll systems partly because financial management consolidation is more complex, he said. With large dollars at stake and competitive bidding for work among multiple companies and government agencies, that effort may take up to 15 years to demonstrate its advantages.
Suspicious Democratic Minds
Some scholars of government policy say there is no reason for Democrats to oppose something that saves the government money and improves efficiency, but their suspicion of President Bush is such that any White House OMB management initiative may face opposition.
Donald Moynihan, a public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, noted that former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., who heads the Senate committee that oversees e-government, led passage of the 2002 law. Lieberman's committee has not finalized its plans for e-government oversight, a committee spokesman said.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has not addressed its jurisdiction over e-government issues yet, either, according to a spokesman.
Moynihan noted that one of the most significant adoptions of e-government in decades -- e-voting -- has been largely overlooked by the e-government program.
"The faith in these e-voting machines reflects a wider faith in e-government as a way to produce better and more efficient public outcomes," he said. "The most important e-government policy issue that Congress should focus on is to return to the [2002] Help America Vote Act and consider how they might improve the security of elections."
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