Federal Technology Czar Proposed

Alien54 writes: "The E-Government Act, which Sens. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) introduced Tuesday, is designed to make it easier for citizens to access federal information and services online. As reported in Internet Week, the bill [S.803]will create a federal chief information officer and allot $225 million annually to improve government services over the Internet. The Bill text has yet to be posted to the web, but should be up in a week or so."

Comments

*ding!* You've got mail!

[RasputinAXP]

Forwarded by: Joe Lieberman <lieberman@senate.gov>

MAKE MONEY FAST!

You're not going to believe this!!

If I start getting magic Tweetie birds and Neiman-Marcus cookie recipies from my senators and representatives because they got $225 million to start reading their e-mail I'm going to get upset.
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[sharkey]

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"Pay no attention to the man outside your window. Or the one on your roof. The beeping which will accompany all your phone calls from now on means nothing. Enjoy your documents."

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Aren't they already net-enabled enough?

[Brento]

I filed my taxes online this year. I'm filing for student aid online this year - did you know you could do that? They do the whole process online, right down to your digital signature. I can renew my Texas driver's license online.

In fact, I can't think of a single interaction I've had with state or federal governments in the last year that I haven't been able to do entirely online. I'm not quite sure where that $225 million is going, but I don't like it. Instead of making more services accessible, they should give Senators and Representatives e-training classes to make them more aware of current issues and get them to check their friggin' e-mails. Start there, before throwing more money at the problem.

Re:Aren't they already net-enabled enough?

[acceleriter]

I'm filing for student aid online this year - did you know you could do that? They do the whole process online, right down to your digital signature.

While it's certainly cool that you can file your FAFSA on line, the PIN number they use is only a digital signature in the legal sense--it's not a public key based digital signature, but, rather, a shared secret. (The government is working on public key certificates, q.v. the Federal PKI group.) The IRS does it the same way, with pins.

I think if you look closely, you'll find that the guts of these operations are outsourced to contractors in both the Departments of Education and Treasury. Particularly egregious is the symbiotic relationship between Treasury and electronic tax filing services--Treasury has basically agreed not to compete with them, so there will never be a way to file electronically without paying a fee, save for the sop thrown to very low income people filing very simple forms. I believe the taxpayers have already paid once for the IRS infrastructure, and should not have to pay either a private vendor or the government an additional fee to file electronically.

Perhaps a technology czar would create the expertise in the civil service to bring those services in house, where they can be maintained without the danger of future problems often associated with the extensive use of contracting.

great!

[holzp]

if they do as good a job as the Drug Czar, the Internet will be back in the money in no time!

Re:A few points. . .

[shaper]

No way! Your new Federal Standard will be MS Windows for the OS, MS IIS for the web server, MS SQL Server for the database, MS Visual C++ as the main development language, MS Office for productivity apps, and so on and on and on....

This is not just your standard anti-MS rant, because I have been-there-done-that with Gov't "standards" efforts, including representing the US Navy on IEEE POSIX committees, only to watch it all go to waste in the last 7 years of Microsoft's ascendancy.

The movement to an all-Microsoft world in US Gov't IT has been going on for some time now, at least in the Dept. of Defense, all in the name of supposed cost savings from using COTS (Consumer Off-The-Shelf) products. And don't even say that you can buy Linux off the shelf. In the minds of 99% of management types, off-the-shelf means Microsoft, and gov't management is the same as corporate management, only more so in all the bad ways.

And if there is any significant IT standardization across much of the US Federal Gov't, watch out. The US gov't is the single largest procurer (both dollars and volume) of software in the entire world. Overall US Federal Gov't procurement in products and services makes the largest multi-national corporations' all look like piddling chump change. You're dreaming if you think that any Federal CIO would pick a free or open source product for any significant Federal IT standard.