(Washington, D.C.) - The nation’s premier watchdog group, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), yesterday raised questions for members of the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management to ask at this morning’s hearing on the President’s plan to eliminate wasteful spending in information technology (IT). Last June, Peter Orszag, then-director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), made three recommendations to “advance IT reform.” He proposed streamlining IT projects, reviewing the highest risk IT projects, and improving IT procurement and management practices.
CAGW’S questions included whether progress on these recommendations had been made, as well as whether moving to the “cloud” first is advisable given past problems in IT procurement and management. Some controversy arose at the hearing when Subcommittee Chairman Tom Carper (DDel.) asked witnesses from OMB and the General Services Administration (GSA) a question raised yesterday by CAGW related to the Justice Department’s revelation that Google Apps for Government does not have Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification despite the company’s insistence that it is so certified. GSA Associate Administrator for Innovative Technologies Doug McClure replied that GSA certified Google Apps Premier, but Google Apps for Government is a new product that is a “subset” of Premier. Mr. McClure said that when the agency found out about that, GSA had to re-certify the product, “based on those changes that Google has announced for the ‘Apps for Government’ product offering.” It was not clear from his testimony whether he was talking about re-certifying Premier, or certifying Apps for Government for the first time. Chairman Carper tweeted that he “Asked for further info, want to get to the bottom” and called it a “serious” issue.
CAGW President Tom Schatz said, “Government agencies have long been behind the curve on technology, and there are many challenges facing them as they move into cloud computing. The integrity of the procurement process is at risk, along with the taxpayers’ money, if contracts are agreed to without agencies being aware of whether or not a product is certified by the government.
We look forward to hearing the answers to Chairman Carper’s follow-up inquiry on Google Apps for Government, and thank him on behalf of CAGW’s members and supporters for raising these important questions at the hearing.” Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government. The Spending Cut of the Week calls attention to a federal program that is wasteful or duplicative.