OMB Pushes Up Y2K Deadline

The Office of Management and Budget is directing agencies to speed up their fixes of computer systems that may fail at the turn of the century.

Several agencies are scrambling to get their systems ready for the year 2000, when programs that use two-digit date codes--12-31-99, for example--are expected to break down. The federal government's original deadline for making sure all its systems are operational was November 1999, leaving little time for eleventh-hour fixes of missed or malfunctioning systems.

OMB has advanced the final deadline for implementing renovated systems to March 1999. It has also advanced the deadline for the renovation phase, when systems are actually repaired, from December 1998 to September 1998.

"The sense of urgency should be clear to both our private-sector suppliers and to those with whom we exchange data," OMB said in its recent quarterly report on the government's year 2000 conversion progress.

In addition to moving up the deadlines, OMB is pushing agencies to get cracking on year 2000 fixes by making non-year 2000-related technology budget requests contingent upon progress in exterminating the millenium bug.

OMB added three agencies--the Office of Personnel Management, the Energy Department and the Department of Health and Human Services--to its list of agencies that are in serious danger of missing the year 2000 deadline. They join the Agriculture, Education, and Transportation Departments and the Agency for International Development on the list.

The Federal Aviation Administration, OMB noted, is particularly far behind schedule. The FAA has completed the first step of the year 2000 fix, the assessment phase, on only 38 percent of its systems. This does not include an additional 245 systems the FAA has only recently identified as "mission-critical" but have not yet been assessed.

Similarly, the Energy Department has just identified an additional 69 mission-critical systems.

Overall, the government must still repair or replace 67 percent of the 8,589 systems that have been identified so far as mission-critical. Recognizing that "most of the work still remains to be done," OMB says its $3.9 billion estimate of the cost of the year 2000 problem may still be a low-ball figure, even though it is up $100 million since the administration's August estimate.