Budget proposal includes 2.6 percent increase for IT
Number of technology investments rated as well-planned and managed drops.
The Bush administration's fiscal 2008 budget proposal contains a 2.6 percent increase for information technology, but offers few new governmentwide technology projects.
The budget includes about $65.5 billion for IT, up from the $63.8 billion requested for fiscal 2007. Because Congress has failed to finish up the fiscal 2007 spending bills, a detailed breakdown of the request traditionally available upon the budget's release will wait until the spring. In fiscal 2006, the administration sought $65.2 billion for IT.
Jonathan Breul, a senior fellow at the IBM Center for the Business of Government, said the increase in IT spending is not unexpected, "but there was reason to worry that [IT spending] was not going to increase as much."
"My bet is that a good deal of all that is money that's going to national security and homeland security," Breul said. "In many cases, you can count your program several ways … Budget guidance as I understand it was that the war, defense and homeland were going to get 'all that was needed.'" This gave agencies incentives to frame their activities that way, he said.
The 2008 budget proposal stated that the percent of "well planned and managed" major IT investments went down 17 percent from fiscal 2007 to fiscal 2008, from 594 to 494. Meanwhile, the number of "not well planned and managed" major IT investments rose 32 percent, from 263 to 346. The overall number of major IT investments declined from 857 to 840.
As previously reported, the budget identified agencies that will provide information security services to others as part of the Office of Management and Budget's "lines of business" effort to consolidate back-end IT systems across government. The Office of Personnel Management, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Defense Department will provide shared service centers for security awareness training, and the Environmental Protection Agency and the Justice Department will offer centers for meeting the reporting requirements in a federal law -- the Federal Information Security Management Act.
OMB did not announce new lines of business consolidation projects, as it has in previous budget proposals.
Ray Bjorklund, senior vice president of McLean, Va., Federal Sources Inc., said the lack of initiatives is likely because OMB is still trying to achieve stability for the existing ones.
The budget proposal's update to the lines of business consolidation initiative lists the adoption of uniform governmentwide best practices under its accomplishments. A section on next steps does not include the creation of more shared service centers.
The budget proposal has a heavy emphasis on information security. The proposal stated that the percentage of certified and accredited IT systems rose from 85 percent in fiscal 2005 to 88 percent in fiscal 2006. But certification and accreditation processes deemed "satisfactory" as determined by agency inspector general offices decreased from 68 percent in fiscal 2005 to 60 percent in fiscal 2006 and the number of agencies that can demonstrate an effective process for correcting security weaknesses fell from 19 to 18.
In addition, the budget release included a document evaluating the effectiveness of agencies' IT management and e-government processes, a list of the number of agency IT investments on OMB's management watch list and updates on the e-government initiatives.
Jenny Mandel contributed to this report.