The Clinger-Cohen Act, 10 Years Later: The Five Percent Solution

Part One: The Five Percent Solution

With the arrival of the Clinger-Cohen Act's 10th anniversary, it's worth pausing and asking: Are we better off? A decade on, has this legislation achieved its aims?

It may come as no surprise that there is no clear "yes" or "no" answer. The landscape of federal information technology is not a clearly defined plain of reference points that can be empirically studied in pure isolation. The CCA is just one of at least half a dozen major pieces of legislation with implications for IT. It shares space with a host of laws and memoranda and executive orders, all of which tend to make it difficult to issue tidy proclamations about where we are in terms of how well the government buys and uses information resources.

That said, there is a passage tucked within the CCA that provides some tangible scope to the legislation -- a tiny little nuance of a mathematical formula upon which to gauge the grand question of progress. "It is the sense of Congress," the passage reads, "that, during the next five-year period beginning with 1996, executive agencies should achieve each year at least a 5 percent decrease in the cost (in constant fiscal year 1996 dollars) that is incurred by the agency for operating and maintaining information technology, and each year a 5 percent increase in the efficiency of the agency operations, by reason of improvements in information resources management by the agency."

It's fitting that Congress only indicated its "sense" that this goal be achieved, because it defies objective measurement. Apparently, legislators simply wanted to impart their overall expectation that somewhere, somehow, the government should reap some tangible benefit as a result of the law. Nevertheless, the question persists: Have agencies achieved the CCA's pair of 5 percent directives-if not within five years, then in the 10 years since the law was passed?

Perhaps the easiest and most obvious means to address this is to look first at the anticipated reduction in costs. The steady rise in the aggregate IT budget line would certainly seem to mock Congress' intent. When the CCA was passed, the federal IT budget was $28 billion. It now stands at more than $64 billion, despite the fact that the price of a government PC has fallen more than 50 percent in the past decade. So while Congress envisioned a 5 percent spending decrease, the cost of IT is actually rising at an average of 9 percent a year.

To be sure, a host of both anticipated and unforeseen factors has contributed to the spending increases, including Y2K, homeland security efforts, military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the heady requirements posed by major cybersecurity initiatives. Given the major changes in the world in the past decade, rising budgets can be forgiven, if not expected. What's more significant is how the money is being spent. A great deal of the expertise associated with the implementation of new and upgraded systems lies not in government but in industry, which has resulted in significant increases in outsourcing. According to a report by market research firm INPUT in Reston, Va.,, the outsourcing market is one of the most dynamic sectors of federal IT, expected to reach over $17 billion by 2010.

This growing outsourcing market could, in theory, be tempered by cost-cutting measures such as offshoring, but lawmakers are largely opposed to government operations being sent overseas. So, not only is federal IT governance expensive in and of itself, but exigencies have arisen that demand the commitment of more dollars, and the government cannot numb the bite by subscribing to the same cost-cutting measures available to industry.

Next week: Measuring Efficiency