FITARA could expand to include IT salaries

The sponsor of stalled IT acquisition reform legislation signaled his receptiveness to the idea of expanding the proposal to include more competitive compensation for federal workers responsible for buying technology on behalf of the government.

The suggestion came at a Jan. 9 hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that featured testimony from two key senators, Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, respectively.

Coburn said he believed as much as half of the federal government's annual IT expenditure of $82 billion was wasted.

"The problem is we don't know what we want when we go to buy, and we're gamed a lot," he said. He attributed the problem to a culture of federal procurement in which "there are no consequences for non-performance on the part of contractors and no consequences for procurers within the government...if they screw up."

One possible way to fix the problem is to raise the level of expertise of the federal IT procurement workforce by making salaries more competitive with the private sector, Coburn said. He and Carper have backed proposals to raise the pay of some tech workers at the Department of Homeland Security, over which they have direct oversight authority, in order to improve recruitment and retention of the best workers.

"We probably need to do that in a lot of areas in government in terms of IT because that's an area where we can't compete," Coburn said. "To get the quality people to make those decisions, we have to raise the level of salaries."

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House oversight committee and author of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, said he was willing to consider adding incentives for tech workers to the larger reform package. FITARA passed the House overwhelmingly as an addition to an early version of the defense spending bill last June but was scrubbed from the final measure in conference. The Senate has yet to hold hearings on the legislation, although it was proposed on the Senate side as an amendment to the defense bill when it came up for a vote in December.

Issa and co-sponsor Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) have said they will continue to push the legislation, which includes giving department-level CIOs budget and hiring authority over agency IT spending and data center consolidation policy, and making changes to the way IT procurement officials are trained.

Carper told the House committee that he, Coburn, and Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) are committed to moving the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act through the Senate. A version of that bill, which requires government financial data to be published with more transparency and in machine-readable formats, originated in Issa's committee and easily won passage in the House.

Issa and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee's ranking member, told Carper and Coburn that they would pass any bill the Senate could deliver that eliminates or trims a program identified as wasteful or duplicative in Coburn's annual "Wastebook."