On December 17, 2002, President Bush signed the E-Government Act of 2002 (s. 803, H.R. 2458). Citizens have pondered why they have been able to research, locate, and purchase a myriad of private sector products and services online for years but realized little or no comparable convenience when interacting with their government. There’s hope – this legislation would establish an eGovernment czar within the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) and represents the first tangible effort towards a unified and comprehensive eGov and IT strategy for the federal government. The Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) applauds Uncle Sam in following the example of successful online vanguards like eBay and Amazon in improving user experience and convenience and especially supports the following provisions of the Act:
The buck stops here and breaks down barriers to eGovernment.
The existence of fiscally and organizationally siloed departments has traditionally been the primary impediment to undertaking successful eGov initiatives.1 Just as the appropriations process yields thirteen different bills each Congress to fund agencies, this only encourages thirteen different technology strategies and spending levels. This bill seeks to mitigate this issue with the creation of a single eGovernment fund, authorizing $345 million in federal funding over four years for interagency eGov work. This way, procurement and deployment can be coordinated to yield interoperability and consistent application and platform technologies across departments, both instances where the government track record is spotty. This bodes well for the industry as the bulk of these dollars should be spent with private, eGov motivated interests like Seibel, Microsoft, and SAP. In addition to this monetary commitment to intergovernmental cooperation, legislators also borrowed provisions from the stalled Digital Tech Corps Act (H.R. 3925) fostering private-sector-to-government worker exchange of IT managers to bring best of breed private sector practices to government administration.
Citizen’s social security numbers to be as private as their order history.
In both the private and public sectors, privacy still ranks highly in the minds of Internet users. For example, 60% of online consumers “seriously worry” about what will happen to their personally identifiable information (PII) they divulge online, holding back an estimated $15 billion in eCommerce revenue in last year.2 And there is no reason to believe government data management is any more trustworthy. This is especially troublesome since much of government interaction and data collection is compulsory, i.e. by paying income tax or applying for veteran’s or other social services benefits, privacy should be of paramount concern with regard to eGovernment. This Act contains provisions for a privacy impact assessment to be undertaken before funding for any agency tech project can be approved. While this is a great step forward, who will aggregate and manage these assessments so they can be utilized effectively? Mirroring the private sector, a federal Chief Privacy Officer should be installed within this office to provide critical accountability and respect the spirit of consistency in agency data management policies contained in the Act. For it is clear that although this Act’s attention to privacy is admirable, the issue is far from settled. Just recently, the General Accounting Office (GAO) gave federal computer networks an overall grade of “F” for security, the foundation for privacy, for the third time in three years.3
Every citizen to receive a Library of Congress card.
This Act calls for the Library of Congress (LOC) to work with several federal agencies as well as the private sector to create a national online library to increase citizen access to government. This is particularly warranted and valuable in the case of traditionally online-resistant LOC unit, the Congressional Research Service (CRS). ACT hopes this provision would make this same highly informative and objective research about the pending policy issues before Congress that is accessible to every staffer and member is equally available to those who pay for it, the taxpayers.
Endnotes
1 The August 2000 Forrester Report, “Sizing US eGovernment”
2 The September 2001 Forrester Brief, “Privacy Concerns Cost eCommerce $15 Billion”
3 “Computer Security: Progress Made, But Critical Federal Operations and Assets Remain at Risk,” November 19, 2002