IT receives slight budget increases, some cuts in omnibus bill

The $410 billion omnibus appropriations bill the Senate considered on Tuesday would provide modest boosts for key information technology programs in agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, Food and Drug Administration, and Federal Aviation Administration.

The bill incorporates nine spending bills Congress did not pass last year and would fund most civilian agencies, including the Treasury, Transportation, and Health and Human Services departments, for fiscal 2009, which ends Sept. 30. These agencies have been operating on budgets equal to what they had in fiscal 2008 budgets for most of fiscal 2009. The House passed the bill on Feb. 25.

FDA would be one of the agencies that would receive a large boost in spending. The omnibus bill gives it a $2 billion budget, an increase of 19 percent from the fiscal 2008 budget. Nearly $256 million of the $325 million increase would fund food and medical product safety programs. Top Senate and House leaders sharply criticized FDA in January 2008 for not adequately funding programs that ensure the safety of food, drug and medical products. Part of the budget increase will pay for information systems and screening tools to test the safety of imported foods.

The spending bill also increased funding for the IRS' Business Systems Modernization program by $7.3 million, a 3 percent increase above the agency's requested $222.7 million budget.

But the Senate is concerned with the program, which has experienced cost overruns and long delays. Language in the bill stated the program, started in 1999 to replace aging computer systems, "will continue to require vigilant management attention for several years."

The bill would cut some IT projects, such as the Justice Department's fiscal 2009 budget for its IT program, a central account that the department's chief information officer manages to fund departmentwide IT projects. The Senate would trim the IT program's budget to $80 million, a decrease of about $14 million, because of delays and other issues with the deployment of the Unified Financial Management System at the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to the bill.

Congress is "concerned about the department's ability to meet appropriate standards of success for this project," which has been under development since 2006 when Justice awarded IBM a $150 million contract to build the system.

Jolenen Lauria Sullens, deputy assistant attorney general and controller at Justice, said the report language does not reflect the current status of the financial management system project, which is based on Momentum Enterprise Resource Planning software developed by CGI.

Sullens said she delayed the live deployment at DEA for three months, from October 2008 until January 2009, because of its complexity. She said the Momentum software is designed to manage financial systems and workflow processes across the department. Sullens said the financial management system is "on schedule and healthy" and intends to ask Congress to reprogram funds to fund the project through fiscal 2009.

IBM and Justice have started to deploy the financial management system at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said Lia Davis, an IBM spokeswoman.

Congress also zeroed out a $10.7 million funding line requested by the FBI for a planned National Security Analysis Center, which would use predictive data modeling technology that could "violate the privacy and civil liberties of law abiding America citizens," the bill said. The FBI originally requested funding for the center in 2007, and at the time said it eventually would store 6 billion records, or about 20 files for every person in the country.

Although the stimulus bill passed by Congress last month provided $19 billion for health information technology, the omnibus bill would cut spending for the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. The Senate would cut the fiscal 2009 budget for the office, which is part of HHS, to $61.2 billion, $4.9 billion below what the Bush administration requested and only $670,000 above the office's fiscal 2008 budget.

Dave Roberts, vice president of government relations for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, said the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has started to develop the infrastructure to establish, for example, policy and standards committees to "make [health IT] happen." But he cautioned that Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, whom President Obama nominated as secretary of Health and Human Services, must define the future of the program.

Dennis Williams, selected on March 3 as deputy assistant secretary for recovery act coordination at HHS, will play a key role in determining how HHS manages the health IT portion of the stimulus bill, Roberts added. Williams previously served as deputy administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration.

The bill would give FAA the $300 million budget it requested for its program to develop an advanced satellite-based air traffic control system. The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast system is the core component of its Next-Generation Air Transportation System. Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said Congress is likely to provide additional funds for the surveillance system, which uses Global Positioning System technology to locate and track aircraft, in the 2009 FAA Reauthorization Act, which the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed on March 5.

The Transportation Department's Office of the Chief Information Officer received its requested budget of $12.9 million, but the Agriculture department's Office of the Chief Information Officer had its budget request cut $800,000 to $17.5 million.