Budget request addresses some open government costs

Achieving the Obama administration's vision of government transparency will not be cheap. But the White House has anticipated some of the costs in its fiscal 2011 budget.

The agenda, driven by a December 2009 open government directive, demands that agencies rapidly release downloadable statistics, award prizes to Americans for innovative solutions to government problems and reduce backlogs of requests for public information under the Freedom of Information Act. The $79 billion fiscal 2011 budget request for information technology proposes launching so-called dashboards, or Web sites that track progress of certain activities. The sites are aimed at increasing transparency in "every operation of government," federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said on Tuesday during a conference call with reporters. New dashboards scheduled for fiscal 2011 will monitor human resources and procurement practices, for example. The IT budget documents do not specify line-item funding levels for such initiatives and some allocations have not been finalized. But the 2011 request creates a $50 million account for the "integrated, efficient and effective uses" of IT, which would include architectural assistance to make agency IT systems across government talk to each other. And the proposal would add $3 million to a $17 million pool of money for "governmentwide innovations, initiatives and activities" on the condition that the increase fund test projects requiring collaboration among multiple agencies that are aimed at improving specific outcomes.