Administration's 2012 budget plan relies on IT savings

Tim Sloan/Newscom

President Obama is asking Congress to end, pare back, or overhaul 211 federal services to recapture $33 billion in 2012 as part of a five-year freeze on discretionary nonsecurity funding. The programs targeted for the chopping block in the president's 2012 budget partly rely on three information technology initiatives slated to save taxpayers $149 million, including a plan to consolidate Treasury Department data centers and to eliminate many IT contractors.

The Treasury data center consolidation -- part of a larger overhaul of federal computing announced in December 2010 -- would combine the IT backbones of the Bureau of Public Debt and the Financial Management Service to shave $3 million off the department's budget in fiscal 2012 and $96 million through 2015. Treasury in 2011 would start merging five separate systems at the bureaus into two.

Under President Obama's proposal, the agencies in 2012 will link common IT services and "lay the foundation for insourcing selected contractor functions," which would mean bringing private sector jobs in-house. The department intends to shut down 13 of its 42 data centers by 2015.

The White House also wants to chop off $37 million, over five years, from a troubled digital preservation project at the National Archives and Records Administration. Watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office in January reported to Congress that the Electronic Records Archives, intended to ensure records can be opened decades from now regardless of the technology people are using, faces significant schedule delays and cost overruns.

The reduction reflects a plan to shift from the building phase of the project to live operations. NARA will finish developing the system with 2011 appropriations, according to the budget. After White House officials this summer flagged the electronic archives as one of about 30 major IT projects at risk of failure, NARA put the program on a fast-track schedule for deployment.

The cutback "reflects a reprioritization of work and an acceleration of rollout of services to all federal agencies in 2011," the budget documents stated. "The 2012 budget provides for ERA operations and maintenance only . . . ERA will meet its core objectives, including safely preserving the government's electronic records and providing online public access."

Another program on the cutback list is travel. The fiscal 2012 plan requests replacing travel expenses at the Health and Human Services Department with less expensive telework technology. "The utilization of information technology tools for virtual meetings, desktop sharing, webinars, etc., will significantly change the manner how the Internet is used to connect with people from remote and noncentralized locations," the budget noted.

The president proposes increasing the use of Web-collaboration tools across HHS by 25 percent to save $16.6 million through 2015. The department already has begun using such applications at the Health Resources and Services Administration to do away with face-to-face meetings when officials have to review grant applications.

The budget does not break out the cost of executing the administration's IT procurement reforms unveiled in December 2010. It reinforces the strategy without specifying costs or savings from the plan's requirements, which include expanding the IT acquisition and program management workforces, sending beleaguered IT projects back to the drawing board and shifting to so-called cloud computing, or on-demand Web-based tools shared by multiple agencies.

The budget stated, "By consolidating data centers and leveraging cloud computing the federal government will reduce the nation's data center footprint, strengthen security and yield savings in the form of real estate, energy, equipment and maintenance costs that can then be redirected toward the projects with the greatest benefit to the American taxpayer."