With the White House's deadline to eliminate the year 2000 bug from federal computer systems a year away, agencies still must fix or replace 60 percent of the government's most important systems.
In its quarterly report on the government's progress on year 2000 conversion, the Office of Management and Budget warned federal agencies that the majority of work on the year 2000 problem remains to be done. The price tag for fixes continues to rise as well. OMB estimates agencies will spend $4.7 billion from 1996 through 2000 to fix the year 2000 problem. That's up $800 million from the $3.9 billion estimate OMB made in November.
"Overall, the federal government continues to make progress in addressing the Y2K problem," OMB concluded, noting that most agencies have revised their systems renovations schedules to meet the governmentwide March 1999 deadline for year 2000 fixes. "However, while good progress is being made, it is not rapid enough overall."
Progress is uneven across the government. The Social Security Administration has completed all phases of year 2000 conversion on 74 percent of its 308 mission-critical, or vital, systems. By contrast, the Education Department has not completed the work on any of its 14 mission-critical systems.
Along with Education, the Energy, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Transportation Departments, and the Agency for International Development, were all chided by OMB for their slow progress. OMB said the costs and risks of the Federal Aviation Administration's strategy for fixing its Host Computer System, "the backbone of en route air traffic control centers," have yet to be determined. At the Labor Department, Secretary Alexis Herman has become personally involved to speed up the department's Y2K conversion program, according to OMB.
Several departments are having trouble keeping their sub-agencies up to speed. OMB said the Treasury Department needs to push the Financial Management Service and the U.S. Mint harder, Commerce has to get the ball rolling faster at the Patent and Trademark Office and the Census Bureau, and Transportation is having problems with several of its bureaus.
OMB noted that 35 percent of the systems agencies have identified as mission-critical are now year 2000 compliant, up from 27 percent in November. But Rep. Stephen Horn, R-Calif., last week questioned those figures because agencies re-classified, rather than fixed, nearly 1,000 systems since November. The Energy Department, for example, decided that 80 of the 468 systems it had previously deemed "mission-critical" were not really that important.
Several agencies have already conceded that some of their mission-critical systems will not be fixed by March 1999--or even by Jan. 1, 2000. OMB has instructed those agencies to develop contingency plans so managers can keep their programs running if computer systems fail at the turn of the century.
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