The bill, known as an omnibus because it consolidates a majority of individual spending bills, secured Senate passage Dec. 17 in a 67-32 vote a day after the House approved it 296-121. President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.
The bill funds the e-government fund at $12.4 million and keeps it separate from GSA's Federal Citizen Services Fund, which gets $34.1 million. Congress earlier this year considered merging the two in fiscal 2012, which started on Oct. 1.
The Federal Citizen Services Fund pays for the salaries of the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies within GSA. It supports efforts including Challenge.gov, USA.gov and promotes the adoption of mobile apps within the government.
The e-gov fund supports a number of efforts, including data.gov, USAspending.gov and FedRamp; the amount approved by a conference of House and Senate lawmakers is more than the $8 million the fund received in the current fiscal year. Last year's amount was a significant decreases relative to the $34 million it received the year before, although a Government Accountability Office suggests that at least some of that $34 million was spent on efforts that failed to return on their investment. Among the failed efforts of years' past was a social network for federal employees that received $5 million in funding before being canceled in May 2011.
OMB, meanwhile, will also gain another $5 million under a line item called "Integrated, Efficient and Effective Uses of Information Technology." In the budget request the White House delivered to Congress in February, it said OMB would make use of the fund to "to implement a phased approach to a shared services delivery model for federal information technology."
GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy is set to get $61.11 million under the omnibus. OGP funds, among other things, an effort to consolidate federal online acquisition systems into a single website known as SAM.
For more:
- download the conference report covering independent agencies within the fiscal 2012 omnibus (.pdf)
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Autor(en)/Author(s): David Perera
Quelle/Source: Fierce Government IT, 18.12.2011
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