The Mystery Of E-Gov Spending

I refer, of course, to the fact that Congress recently recommended appropriating $3 million for the E-Government fund despite the president's request for $45 million. In federal budget terms, $3 million comes across as spare change--hardly enough to do anything, let alone support 24 different E-Government initiatives charged with the task of transforming government.

This appropriation has got to be something of an embarrassment to the president. After all, his bold commitment to $100 million in E-Government funding between fiscal year 2002 and fiscal year 2004 has resulted in exactly $13 million actually appropriated by Congress during that time period. That's where I get confused.

During the same time period, the federal government has created an enterprise architecture fund of more than $1 billion in annual spending, and Congress hasn't blinked an eye. Huh?

Enterprise architecture, if you'll remember, was originally proposed within the Quicksilver recommendations as a cross-cutting initiative, similar to the E-Authentication program, supporting all of the 24 customer-facing programs. It has since been separated out from the Quicksilver list, apparently to good effect since it has plenty of funding, while E-Government projects have not.

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What's the trick? Well, nothing really. Enterprise architecture has been made part of the budget-approval process by the federal government. Agencies that can't demonstrate how their enterprise architecture will accommodate their proposed IT investments will not be funded. It's as simple as that.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has made enterprise-architecture spending easy to track by coding it separately in the IT budget reports (since fiscal year 2000, I might add). So we know that federal agencies have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on enterprise architecture for the past three years, culminating in estimated enterprise architecture spending of more than $1 billion in fiscal year 2003 and a request for more than $1 billion again in fiscal year 2004.

The absurd thing about this situation is that E-Government is extremely similar to enterprise architecture in terms of priorities and execution. When you get right down to it, enterprise architecture is really just a component of the E-Government strategy.

Moreover, federal agencies are, in fact, already spending plenty of money on E-Government projects. Input's most recent forecast for E-Government spending by federal agencies is $3.6 billion for fiscal year 2003, growing to more than $5 billion in the next five years. The simple truth is that the more IT becomes embedded in federal-agency operations, the more E-Government becomes just a fact of life.

So, here's my recommendation to the president and the OMB. Create another code in the budget spreadsheet and start tracking the billions of dollars of E-Government spending that's already happening at the agency level. Spare us the annual frustration of waiting to see if the E-Government fund will finally be funded, and claim your own success.

Payton Smith ([email protected]) is senior federal market analyst for Input.