DHS communications project faces cancellation
Agency reportedly has told contractor to stop work on Disaster Management program; DHS officials say it is under review.
A digital interoperable communications tool used to support hurricane response faces cancellation by the Homeland Security Department, according to sources close to the initiative.
DHS reportedly issued an order in mid-July to Ohio-based nonprofit government contractor Battelle to immediately stop development work on Disaster Management, an 8-year-old project that the Office of Management and Budget designated in 2002 as one of 24 e-government initiatives.
Disaster Management's mission is to create interoperable communication standards for emergency management software, as well as distribute free rudimentary disaster management software to local governments that otherwise could not afford to buy such a tool. DHS houses the Disaster Management program office and provides most of the funding.
The department requested $10.3 million to fund the effort for fiscal 2007. An estimated $40 million to $50 million has already been spent on the initiative, which started in 1999 as a Marine Corps Systems Command project called Consequence Management Interoperability Services.
The stop-work order stipulated that Battelle cease operations and maintenance work on the project by Aug. 1, sources affected by it said. They report that DHS since has been pressured to release $4 million in funds to continue work past that date.
Battelle executives referred calls to Homeland Security. DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie said the department is conducting an internal review but will not necessarily cancel the project. OMB spokeswoman Andrea Wuebker said cancellation "is not an option."
Representatives from OMB are pressuring DHS not to kill the project, and have met at least once in person with DHS officials, sources said.
About 60,000 federal, state and local users have registered to use Disaster Management, and it was deployed to coordinate emergency assistance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The Navy recently installed Disaster Management in its southeastern U.S. bases located inside the hurricane zone as a means of coordinating emergency response with local governments.
Scott Charbo, DHS' acting undersecretary for management and chief information officer, wants to combine Disaster Management with another project run by DHS headquarters called the Homeland Security Information Network, sources said. But that network doesn't physically exist, said a government official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"HSIN is a myth," the official added. Although DHS might call its action an effort to merge redundant programs, "it's really the end of Disaster Management," an industry official said.
Some question whether DHS has the authority to cancel a project designated by OMB as a presidential initiative.
"If DHS can cancel an e-gov program, then my advice would be to pull out of every e-gov project we're a part of, because we can't count on any of them to deliver service," the government official said.
OMB has for years tried convincing federal agencies to shut down in-house systems in favor of governmentwide information technology systems such as Disaster Management.
But, "if any agency can shut down e-gov, where's the trust?" the industry official asked. Cancellation also risks eroding the confidence of state and local governments that have come to rely on the project, the government official said.
Maryland and Florida have statewide implementations of Disaster Management and Texas chose the system for its health care responders, according to the Battelle Web site.
Project proponents said Disaster Management has long suffered from neglect. An April 2005 Government Accountability Office report (GAO-05-420) said the initiative had experienced funding shortfalls.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency adopted the project as its own shortly before FEMA was absorbed into DHS. With a few exceptions, the project faced executive-level resistance almost from the start of its transfer to civilian control, proponents said. "They took something that couldn't be screwed up, but they managed," the government official said.
Even supporters concede that Disaster Management's technical architecture does need updating. The program requires data to flow through particular servers. "The Disaster Management backbone in its open form is a kind of intermediate step to using genuine open standards," an industry manager said.
But that simply means the nearly decade-old program needs updating, not cancellation, the government official said. The stop-work order "came out of nowhere," the official added.