From: FederalNewsRadio.com 1500 AM
House lawmakers began their effort to update the laws that govern federal technology spending.
But federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said the current laws are not the problem.
“I definitely think there is room in the existing law on the policy side and the implementation of people side that definitely allows us the flexibility for us to be successful,” VanRoekel said Tuesday during a hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
When asked more directly by Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) whether existing laws gave the Office of Management and Budget the authority and ability to do what he needed to do to improve the oversight of IT spending, VanRoekel said more plainly, “I do believe so.”
This was the committee’s first of what likely will be many hearings to inform and help them develop a new IT reform bill.
Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) floated a draft bill in September and has been collecting input from industry, academia and federal experts.
Time has come for an update
Congress last addressed federal IT oversight in the E-Government Act of 2002, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in December. Before that, lawmakers passed the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, which is considered the granddaddy of federal IT oversight and process laws.
But a lot has changed in a decade since the E-Government Act, and Issa believes not always for the better. He said the same problems around project management, duplicative systems and cybersecurity still plague the government.
“Estimates suggest that as much as $20 billion of taxpayer money is wasted each year [on IT programs],” he said. “But let us understand in this case, it’s not the waste of the $20 billion, it’s what that $20 billion could do properly applied to our transparency into our government. The leveraging of $20 billion to save $200 billion is why it is essential we fix this part of government that seems to be so broken.”
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