Appropriations bill hikes e-government fund

A joint House and Senate 2012 appropriations bill splits apart two funds that promote transparency initiatives, the e-government fund and the Federal Citizen Services Fund, a victory for champions of digital open government.

The conference bill appropriates $12.4 million to the e-government fund, up from $8 million in 2011. That figure appears to be a compromise between a House figure of about $15 million for e-gov and about $6 million in the Senate version. Because the e-gov fund had been combined with the Federal Citizen Services Fund in both chambers it's impossible to provide precise funding levels. White House officials and transparency advocates had criticized combining the two funds, saying that would water down e-gov's mission of promoting Web-based transparency across government and possibly endanger specific e-gov projects such as Data.gov, a repository for federal data sets, USAspending.gov, which tracks spending trends, and the Federal IT Dashboard, which drills down into information technology spending.