President's advisory group finds most federal IT funds being misused

Every year, federal agencies get roughly $4 billion for research and development of information technology. The goal of that funding is to bring the best available networking and communications technology into government. But an independent study by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- a group that includes Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Microsoft Chief Technologist Craig Mundie -- has found that a scant amount of that money actually goes toward information technology development.

The report, scheduled to be released Dec 16, seeks to emphasize the importance of accounting for spending within government agencies and to highlight how the United States risks falling behind other nations that are investing more heavily in IT research. Many agencies use information technology to advance research in their own fields, such as the large databases of protein sequences that are important to biomedical research. These applications represent important infrastructure and are legitimately categorized as R&D expenditures, but they are not "information technology" R&D, as defined by the Office of Management and Budget.