Big IT projects for agencies tucked inside stimulus package

One of the biggest winners among federal agencies in the mammoth economic stimulus bill President Obama signed on Tuesday is the State Department, which will receive $290 million to strengthen information security and modernize its networks.

The 2009 American Recovery and Investment Act directed State to work with the U.S. Agency for International Development to develop IT systems that will increase efficiencies and eliminate redundancies, including consolidating backup facilities. The $290 million bestowed to State represents about a third of its annual IT budget in fiscal 2008.

While much of the IT funding in the package goes to the private sector via federal agencies in the form of grants to prime the economy, including $6 billion for rural broadband communications systems, the act also allocates billions of dollars for systems within federal agencies, a sum that represents a large portion of the government's $70 billion-plus annual IT budget. In addition, Congress typically appropriates funds for large IT projects over years, but the stimulus package dumps huge sums in one year. The Social Security Administration, for example, received $500 million for a new National Computing Center, an amount that is nearly half the agency's $1 billion annual IT budget.

The public is just now realizing the billions of dollars that Congress and the Obama administration have earmarked for special IT projects within agencies. Besides State and SSA, other IT appropriations in the stimulus bill include $50 million for systems for the Veterans Benefits Administration. The agency's claims processing systems are decades old, and VBA is managing a crash program to develop a new system in cooperation with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command to process complicated claims for benefits outlined in the new GI bill, which goes into effect in August.

Much of the $19 billion in health IT in the stimulus package will be disbursed as grants to doctors and hospitals to acquire computer systems and software to create electronic health records. About $300 million will fund regional health information networks to help build out the Nationwide Health Information Network, which doctors will log on to in order to share the patient files.

Developing standards to manage health care information is key to a national system and the stimulus bill allocates $20 million to the National Institutes of Standards and Technology for this task.

The Indian Heath Service (HIS) received an appropriation of $85 million in the stimulus package for infrastructure development t and deployment of its health IT system, the IHS Resource and Patient Management System used at more than 190 facilities nationwide.