The electronic government funding saga continues, even if the e-government fund would no longer exist under a spending bill approved today by a House appropriations subcommittee.
As tech-conscious readers might remember, Congress whacked the e-gov account from $34 million in 2010 to $8 million in the year-long continuing resolution enacted this April. Under a fiscal 2012 spending bill approved today by the subcommittee, the fund would be folded into the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services, said Daniel Schuman, policy counsel for the Sunlight Foundation, an open government group that has been birddogging the issue.
In all, the combined operation would receive $50 million under the bill.
How much of that would go to e-gov? Schuman estimates $13 million, assuming the citizen services office gets the same $37 million received last year. So, that would be substantially more than this year, but still a heckuva lot less than last year. A few weeks ago, the Obama administration said that this year’s reductions will force an end to two initiatives: Fedspace.gov and the Citizen Services Dashboard.
But with months of budget wrangling still ahead, this story is definitely to be continued.
