House, Senate back Interior digital mapping effort

The House and Senate appear ready to back the Interior Department's plans in fiscal 2004 for a digital "national map," a database of geographic information available online for government purposes such as environmental protection, homeland security and disaster management.

On July 17, the House passed an Interior Department spending bill, H.R. 2691, that would provide money for the project. The vote was 268-152. The Senate Appropriations Committee, meanwhile, approved a similar measure, S. 1391, on July 10.

The House rejected the nearly $9 million in cuts for the program that the Bush administration had proposed and increased funds for data collection and outsourcing. The total spending under the House bill would be about $130.2 million.

The Senate recommended a slightly smaller budget for the project, sharply criticizing Interior's outsourcing of jobs in general and noting that outsourcing projects were funded at the expense of critical management and maintenance projects.

Interior's U.S. Geological Survey oversees the digital-mapping project and intends to create a central repository of data that could be used by any federal agency for mapping purposes.

The agency already houses the world's largest collection of satellite imagery. Combining that database with other geographic statistics in advanced computer models is expected to produce high-resolution topographical maps; chart the flow of rivers and waterways; outline buildings, government districts and public lands; and classify surface areas according to population density.

Collecting and mapping such geospatial data supports one of the White House Office of Management and Budget's 24 e-government initiatives: the "geospatial one-stop portal." The information it would provide could be vital in an emergency, especially if it becomes necessary to evacuate an entire community.

The extra money that the House approved would go toward expanding public/private data-collection projects, plus $1.2 million toward an additional outsourcing venture designed to enhance the map's data integration.

"[A]rchived data are critical to federal, state and local governments for protecting the homeland, natural-disaster assessments and understanding global climate change," the House committee report on the bill states. "With emerging technologies, the volume of collected, archived and distributed data at the electronic data center (EDC) is growing exponentially."

The report also targets the mapping project as fertile ground for outsourcing. In 1996, 60 percent of federal mapping jobs were outsourced, and the report said the quality of work has remained high.

The Senate bill, however, would provide $128.8 million for the project and reinstate nearly all of the administration's planned cuts, including $6.6 million in information technology cuts.

That cut "exceeds the IT savings proposed for much larger agencies and bureaus, such as the Forest Service or the National Park Service," the report notes. "The committee has not been given information that would substantiate such a large reduction and, therefore, has restored all but [$1.05 million] to the program."

The Senate measure also added $1 million to create a digital map of Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens' home state of Alaska.