The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

lion. In September, the Government Accounting Office issued a critical report, arguing that DHS had neither the money nor manpower to make the project work. By some accounts, when fully operational the systemwill process as many as 600 million transactions every year. According to the GAO, its actual cost may be more than double the DHS estimate of $7.2 billion through 2014. Bush e-Government Agenda Lagging? A November investigation by the Federal Times and a survey conducted by the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association found that financial constraints, resis- tance from affected agencies and other problems continue to bedevil the ambitious program, and its com- pletion by the end of the presiden- tial term is unlikely ( http://federal times.com/index.php?S=2378353 ). The program involving 24 priority “e-initiatives” identified by President Bush in October 2001 has a home on the Internet ( www.whitehouse.gov/ omb/egov ), wh ere fact sheets, news releases and progress reports are avail- able. In December, a new, compre- hensive Web site containing informa- tion about finding and applying for all federal grant programs, www.grants. gov , was unveiled. In November, the GovBenefits site, www.govbenefits. gov , developed to serve citizens as the first government-wide resource for citizen benefit information and eligi- bility screening, was overhauled. The site, managed by the Labor Depart- ment, now has a new home page and improved questionnaire, and also includes state benefit information. The site presently contains informa- tion on benefit programs from 48 states and 418 federal agencies. But GovBenefits was identified in the GEIA survey as exemplary of the problems many projects were encoun- tering: federal agencies stalled the effort by refusing to share information about their benefit programs. Under the threat of constricting budgets, agencies also question whether the expenditure is worthwhile. Even some managers leading projects ques- tion OMB’s commitment to funding. The e-government projects are one part of the president’s management agenda; the other is reforming how agencies manage IT. On that score, while the need for updated business cases and enterprise architectures has generally been accepted, project man- agement requirements and informa- tion security assessments are still in contention.  C Y B E R N O T E S u 8 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4