Forman pushes House to meet e-gov fund request

The Bush administration is applying a full-court press to the House to authorize its request for a $45 million e-government fund. Mark Forman, the Office of Management and Budget’s associate director for IT and e-government, yesterday told lawmakers that the fund was “critical to achieving the promise of e-government.”In the past, Forman has said, there is plenty of money in the projected $52 billion IT budget for fiscal 2003 to fund the 24 Quicksilver projects. But Forman testified before the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology and Procurement Policy that the $45 million would let his office pay for the consolidation and integration of redundant systems, which would free up agency money for other mission-critical work.“There is no question that if we have the e-government fund, we can move further faster,” he said. “By the same token, Congress needs to show it supports cross-agency projects. The Senate has passed the bill with our funding request, and it is critical that the House show its support.”The Senate Appropriations Committee allocated $45 million in the Treasury-Postal bill, but the House version allots only $5 million—the same amount OMB received in fiscal 2002.Forman said even if OMB receives its full request, his office still would instruct agencies to stop redundant spending.“Clearly there are a number of areas where we are overinvested,” Forman said. “We saw this with E-Training. When we launched , we were able to buy the technology once and scale it out for everyone to use.”Forman’s comments came as he testified before the subcommittee about the administration’s support for the E-Government Act of 2002, HR 2458, which would authorize the e-government fund to be $200 million a year for 2003 and 2004. The Senate passed a similar version of the bill, S 803, which approved $345 million between 2003 and 2006 for the fund, including the president’s request for $45 million in 2003 and $55 million in 2004. But the House version contains a number of differences from the Senate bill that the administration does not support, such as establishing a federal CIO.