Wastage in US $82 Billion IT budget
By Asha in USA

The United States Government spends $82 Billion a year on IT.  And if a US-based Government watchdog is to be believed, a lot of that is wasted. Public Resource is a registered nonprofit with the  motto of making Government information more accessible. Carl Malamud, the  President and Founder of Public Resource, is the author of 8 books and numerous national Digital awards.

Carl Malamud was previously founder of the Internet Multicasting Service and the Chief Technology Officer at the Center for American Progress. He is the winner of the Berkman Award from Harvard “for his extraordinary contributions to the Internet's impact on society,” the Pioneer Award from the EFF, and the Bill Farr Award from the First Amendment Coalition.

This week, Carl Malamud, gave a speech in which he listed facts and figures to show how a large part of the USD 82 Billion is wasted.

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Our federal government spends $81.9 billion a year on Information Technology. Much of that is wasted effort. We build systems so badly, it is crippling the infrastructure of government.

Last December, Congress asked me to testify about the Electronic Records Archives system NARA has been trying to build for a decade..

ERA is meant to hold in perpetuity the archived electronic records of the federal government, and this is surely the main challenge NARA faces for the future, it is the very core of their mission..

We've spent over $250 million dollars so far on ERA, the lifetime cost is supposedly $500 million, and I'd bet the render farm that this boondoggle comes in at a cool billion..

The Inspector General testified he had no idea what the system did or how much it costs. GAO issued reports saying they couldn't figure it out either..

Best as I can tell our $250 million bought a 100-terabyte system and a couple small servers to do the ingest..

Keep in mind this is an archiving system. Turns out there is no backup or offsite replication in the current design..

There's no public access to speak of built into the ERA design. As far as the Internet is concerned, the system is basically write-only memory..

For $250 million, we also got a bunch of T3 lines they can't get to work. So, when the ingest center gets their records from the 4 test agencies, they periodically unrack the ingest server, throw it in a van with a rent-a-cop and drive to Greenbelt, where Lockheed Martin does their “post-ingest processing,” and then they drive to West Virginia and load up ERA, then back to the ingest facility. They measure throughput in bits per gallon..

This system is all custom, proprietary code, so a state archive can't download the package and run it themselves. .

This is so broken that to negotiate the 3,000 page contract, NARA had to hire an outside law firm..

This is so broken that Lockheed Martin went and got itself 19 patents on work the government paid for, and the government probably doesn't have rights to those patents..

These are just a few highlights of ERA. I could go on. The good news is the new Archivist gets it, and Vivek Kundra put the project on his watch list..

I'd urge you to spend a bit of time on Vivek's IT dashboard and you'll see that NARA is not an anomaly, it is a reflection of best current practices. This is how it is done in Washington today..

There's the FBI's Sentinel system, a $451 million fiasco that quite simply didn't work, and now the FBI is saying it might cost an additional billion. Meanwhile, the FBI remains hobbled..

There's the FAA's NextGen system which Transportation's IG has said “puts billions of taxpayer dollars at risk.” While NextGen treads water in an ever-mounting sea of money, our air traffic control system remains distinctly last-gen..

There's Homeland Security with $6.5 billion in 2010 IT spending, Commerce with $6.6 billion, the list goes on..

And this isn't all about money, this is about clue, about attitude..

Take the IRS. They make nonprofit tax returns available only on DVDs. They don't scan the tax returns into PDF files, they put each page in a separate TIFF file, so each month you get a dozen DVDs with a million TIFF files..

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His full speech is worth reading.  It seems America, like India,  has its share of babus who think they know best.