News Feature

The E-Government Act: The Cost, the Hurdles, the Future

By Todd Datz

March 01, 2003 — CIO — On Dec. 17, 2002, President Bush signed the E-Government Act into law. The signing was muffled amidst the drumbeat of war talk with Iraq, and with scant controversy behind its bipartisan passage, it was little more than a blip on the radar screen of the nation’s media. Yet by the simple action of signing the act, the president had taken a giant step toward launching the federal government into the information age.

E-government is designed to make it easier for citizens and businesses to access government information and services by encouraging interagency IT initiatives that, while improving customer service, also consolidate redundant systems, decrease paperwork, increase productivity and save money. As Mark Forman, associate director for IT and e-government at the Office of Management and Budget, told a gathering last year of the Open Group?a standards body?e-government will enable "an order of magnitude improvement in the federal government’s value to the citizen; with decisions in minutes or hours, not weeks or months." Ultimately, it’s about making government citizen-centric so that you can go to websites to get information about unemployment benefits, comment on proposed clean air rules or apply for an import license. You save time. And the government gets more for its IT dollars.

That’s no small matter. The federal government’s proposed IT budget for the 2004 fiscal year is a whopping $59 billion. Yet that money has traditionally been appropriated and spent on an agency-by-agency basis, with little regard to how a system might fit into an overall federal architecture and with little focus on using IT to improve citizen services.

Money and budgets aside, the E-Government Act is a logical extension of President Bush’s management agenda, which cites e-government as one of the five key cornerstones of his efforts to run government more like a business. "The idea behind this law is for the federal government to take full advantage of the Internet and other information technologies to improve its efficiency and to secure its electronic information," said Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), author of the act, in a statement released last December.

The new legislation aims to further the inroads Forman and his staff at the OMB have been making; they have been using IT to help improve government efficiency and make services more responsive to citizens. The OMB’s 25 various e-government initiatives are a prime example (see "Emphasizing Business Value," Page 48). One of the projects, the Department of Labor’s Govbenefits.gov site, aims to help citizens locate and determine their eligibility for benefits and services. Patrick Pizzella, CIO at the DoL, is justifiably proud of the new site. "In 30 to 60 days, we’ll have [close to] 300 government benefit programs on the site.... It saves [citizens] a lot of time, and it’s available around the clock," he says.