White House defends selection process for e-gov projects

The head of the White House's e-government initiatives on Thursday responded to a government report that criticized the effort as lacking key information.

The General Accounting Office said in its report that the White House Office of Management and Budget had not obtained complete "business case" information before it identified 24 projects for the White House's e-government initiative. Those 24 projects focus on various ways to put government services online.

GAO specifically found that less than half of the projects contained information addressing the customer needs of online services. Moreover, GAO said only eight of the projects included outlines of how they would increase collaboration among government agencies and Congress.

"GAO is working off an inaccurate benchmark here," Mark Forman, OMB's associate director for information and e-government, told National Journal's Technology Daily in an e-mail response to the report. He defended OMB's approach to choosing the e-government projects by saying that the office used a rigorous formula based in private-sector practices.

"We used a commercial e-strategy 'best practice' approach," he said. "It's all documented in both the president's [fiscal 2003] budget and e-government strategy, including the use of a rigorous, multi-attribute scoring algorithm to pick initiatives that met the strategic criteria," he said.

Forman disputed the GAO characterization of how his agency approached the e-government projects. "The 24 initiatives are not new systems that we started, but consolidations of redundant and overlapping projects that were underway or proposed," he said.

"They were the 24 initiatives, out of an original list of over 300, that reflected the best opportunities to simplify convoluted government initiatives, reduce [the] redundant paperwork burden and save money by consolidating redundant efforts within 18-24 months."

He said OMB developed "detailed business cases" to justify choosing the various proposals and that they have been updated as the projects have moved forward.