Dot-Gov Reform Effort Making Progress

The push to drastically reduce the number of government-run websites is making quiet progress.

The list of all top-level federal Web domains posted to Data.gov -- which has hovered around 1,650 for more than a month -- dropped to 1,551 over the weekend. About 280 of the remaining sites are listed as redirects from other dot-govs.

The General Services Administration, which runs the government's dot-gov reform effort, regularly updates the Data.gov list when agencies report they've shut down or redirected new sites, a GSA spokesman said, but agencies don't report to GSA on a regular schedule, so information on the site can lag.

GSA expects to issue a progress report on the reform effort in January, the spokesman said.

That effort is aimed both at substantially reducing the federal Web presence and at making agency sites more rational, readable and better organized.

The federal Web footprint grew to about 2,000 top-level domains and more than 20,000 individual sites between the early 1990s and mid-2011.