E-Gov at Five Years, Part One: A Pivotal Point

When Bush administration officials launched a series of electronic government initiatives in the fall of 2001, they said the projects would fundamentally change government operations through the application of information technology.

Five years later, the results of the effort are mixed. It's still unclear whether the e-gov projects will become institutionalized as core functions of agency operations or be pushed to the wayside in 2009 as political remnants of the Bush administration.

Now, at what administration officials, agency IT managers and observers describe as a pivotal point for e-gov, the Office of Management and Budget is working to secure its future.

The e-government initiative began as a collection of 24 agency projects, including the Health and Human Services Department's Grants.gov project, the General Services Administration's eTravel effort and the Internal Revenue Service's online tax filing system.

The projects were spread across four categories: government-to-citizen, government-to-business, government-to-government and internal efficiencies and effectiveness. Since then, the administration has added an e-authentication portfolio -- including the effort to develop high-tech identity cards to employees and contractors under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 -- and nine "lines of business" initiatives aimed at consolidating agency back-office systems.

OMB has had its share of difficulty selling the e-gov projects in agencies and on Capitol Hill. For example, Congress regularly slashes the administration's request for $45 million for the General Services Administration-managed e-government fund down to $2 million to $3 million. Nevertheless, legislators have appropriated more than $1 billion for e-government initiatives so far.

But now the effort faces its greatest challenge to date, from lawmakers who are less interested in the cultural changes e-gov could bring to federal operations and more concerned about concrete cost savings.

Language in several agency fiscal 2007 appropriations bills would strike financial body blows against e-gov efforts.

For example, the Senate version of the fiscal 2007 Science-State-Justice-Commerce appropriations bill does not provide any funding for e-gov initiatives. And the House version of the Labor-Health and Human Services-Education fiscal 2007 appropriations bill requires that a career agency official sign off on requests to reprogram funds for e-government projects.

In addition, in a report on the House's version of the fiscal 2007 Transportation-Treasury Appropriations measure, legislators ripped e-gov. "Many aspects of the initiative are fundamentally flawed, contradict underlying program statutory requirements and have stifled innovation by forcing conformity to an arbitrary government standard," the report states.

A lack of communication between the administration and Congress is the root cause underlying appropriators' resistance, many e-government insiders and observers say.

"I talk in technology, appropriators talk in cost savings," said Karen Evans, OMB administrator for e-government and IT, in an interview earlier this month.

OMB officials have repeatedly told members of Congress that the e-government initiatives are all about increasing services to the citizen at the current cost or lower. But appropriators complain that OMB has not been forthcoming about the projects' successes and failures.

At least partially to allay congressional concerns, OMB earlier this month told agencies to begin documenting the savings associated with e-gov initiatives by Sept. 30.

Whether or not this improves appropriators' view of the effort remains to be seen. A Senate Appropriations Committee staffer expressed frustration that OMB tries to sell the projects based on questionable estimates of cost savings rather than by acknowledging that the projects won't necessarily pay for themselves through efficiency improvements.

Several of the e-gov initiatives have been successfully completed, such as the Interior Department's Recreation.gov site, while others are barely off the drawing board, such as the Social Security Administration's eVital initiative, a program to automate the death registration process with state governments. Originally, the 24 projects were characterized as "low-hanging fruit," based on the assumption that they could be quickly implemented to produce impressive results.

In the next four articles in this series, we'll look at how the e-government effort has unfolded to gauge its progress and future prospects.