White House: Don't cut E-Government Fund

President Barack Obama’s top tech lieutenants are working to shield a digital-era sacred cow from the congressional budget ax: federal dot-gov websites that help explain agency data, efforts to cut waste and spending to average citizens.

House and Senate Appropriations committees are taking aim at the E-Government Fund, which helps pay for tech initiatives like the administration’s cloud computing push and data center consolidation and various transparency websites — such as Data.gov, Performance.gov and USASpending.gov. White House officials and several members of Congress over the past several months have taken up the E-Gov cause to make sure the sites don’t go dark and projects don’t get stalled. “These aren’t big, huge government projects. Many of them are only a couple million dollars … or less, so they’ve never been on the radar screen,” said David McClure, associate administrator at the General Services Administration. “We’ve had to explain to the Congress how that fund is being used, and we’ve told that story pretty widely.” Administration officials are trying to bridge what they’ve described as a knowledge gap: Lawmakers, they say, simply don’t understand what the fund is used for and that makes it an easy target when it comes time to put programs on the chopping block.