A new Government Accountability Office report concludes that about one quarter of the federal government's information technology investments, totaling $8.7 billion, are in "urgent" need of attention due to poor management.
As of the end of May, 178 of the total 738 major IT investments were in "urgent" need of management attention due to their high risk, David Powner, the GAO director of information technology management issues, told Congress this week.
"This underperformance of federal IT projects can be traced to a lack of disciplined and effective management and inadequate executive level oversight," Powner told a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subcommittee.
"Although the executive branch has undertaken numerous initiatives to better manage the more than $80 billion that is annually invested in IT, federal IT investments too frequently fail or incur cost overruns and schedule slippages, while contributing little to mission-related outcomes," he said.
Powner said the Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for overseeing technology management among federal agencies, fully implemented only 23 percent of the 737 recommendations that the GAO made between 2009 and January 2015.
He also provided six examples of already-failed IT projects that collectively cost more than $8 billion.
The first failed investment Powner cited was the Department of Defense's Expeditionary Combat Support System, which was cancelled in December 2012 after spending more than $1 billion. The program was stopped after eight years "because it lacked a clear objective" and "organizational will," according to a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee, reports The Daily Caller.
An additional $1 billion was wasted on the Department of Homeland Security's Secure Border Initiative Network program, which was nixed in January 2011 after the program, intended to reduce border smuggling, failed to meet cost-effectiveness and viability standards, Powner said.
The most egregious waste came from a 16-year-long, $5 billion attempt to establish a weather satellite program. The joint project between the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Defense and NASA was abandoned after "management deficiencies" caused the project to become "behind schedule, over budget and under-performing," according to the White House Office of Science and Technology.
The Department of Veterans Affairs' Financial and Logistics Integrated Technology Enterprise program, which was supposed to have been delivered last year for $609 million, was terminated in October 2011 because of challenges in managing the program, Powner said.
Another failed VA investment - the Scheduling Replacement Project - was terminated in 2009, after spending an estimated $127 million over nine years, due to "a lack of effective oversight," the Daily Caller reported.
The final example cited by Powner was the Office of Personnel Management's Retirement Systems Modernization program, "which was canceled in February 2011, after spending approximately $231 million on the agency's third attempt to automate the processing of federal employee retirement claims."
