Business magnate and presidential hopeful Steve Forbes last week took the Clinton administration to task for failing to devote enough attention to the year 2000 computer problem.
Forbes blasted federal agencies' slow progress getting government computer systems ready for the century change, but the Republican held most of his wrath for Vice President--and competing presidential hopeful--Al Gore.
"What has the administration's technology point man, Vice President Al Gore, been doing for the past five years?" Forbes asked in a letter to members of Congress and conservative leaders. "With the Clinton-Gore administration AWOL, Congress must urgently fill this leadership vacuum."
Forbes said only 63 percent of the federal government's most important computer systems will be fixed before Jan. 1, 2000.
Clinton administration officials dismissed Forbes' contention that not enough is being done on the year 2000 problem.
"With all due respect to Mr. Forbes, he's flat wrong," said Jack Gribben, a spokesman for the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, the White House task force charged with battling the millennium bug. "Agencies are working hard on the problem, and the President has told agency heads that they are personally responsible for ensuring that their agencies' mission-critical systems are ready for the year 2000. Agencies have assured us that they are confident virtually all of their critical systems will be ready."
Former Office of Management and Budget deputy director John Koskinen heads up the council, which President Clinton created in February.
Besides Forbes, other GOPers are also starting to blame Gore for year 2000 failures more than a year before any actually would occur, including Rep. Steve Horn, R-Calif., Rep. Connie Morella, R-Md., and Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, who was recently appointed to head a special Senate committee on the year 2000 problem. The millenium bug could prove to be a major headache for Gore, because if the doomsayers' predictions come true, the worst effect of the crisis will hit during the 2000 presidential primary season.
But politicians are not the only ones taking pot shots at the man credited with coining the phrase, "information superhighway." Pundits have had similarly tough words for Gore.
In a May 12 editorial, the St. Petersburg Times urged Gore to "put aside his efforts to 'reinvent government' and take on a problem that, if not fixed, could reinvent--or at least gum up--government in ways no one really wants to think about."
"President Clinton and Vice President Gore love photo-ops with students at computers. But they've virtually neglected the Y2K problem," columnist Robert J. Samuelson wrote in an opinion piece that ran in the May 6 Washington Post.
"How could it be that the administration's self-appointed Computer-Nerd-in-Chief is nowhere to be seen on what is, indisputably, the biggest information technology challenge of the 20th century?" Frank Gaffney, director of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based think tank, wrote in The Washington Times on May 5.
Gribben said the 30-member White House council has split up into subcommittees to develop year 2000 strategies for specific industries, including utilities and telecommunications. In addition, federal agencies are required to submit quarterly reports to OMB on year 2000 progress.
The federal government's price tag for fixing the year 2000 problem is rising. The most recent estimate places Uncle Sam's costs at $4.7 billion from 1996 to 2000.
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