Vice President Cheney recently (February 27) unveiled the administration’s plans to harness the Internet to make government more responsive and accessible, focusing mostly on transactions, such as the filing of taxes. Taken on its own, this is a positive step. Improving service delivery and communication through use of the Internet has the potential to dramatically save time and resources for all involved -- from different levels of government to private industry and nonprofit grantees to everyday citizens. Yet as a plan for comprehensive electronic government (or e-government), it is notably incomplete. In particular, the administration’s plan gives little mention of efforts to improve dissemination and accessibility of government information -- though clearly the American people, as well as Congress, view this as a priority. As the graphic on the front page of the Executive Report shows, a recent Hart-Teeter poll found that Americans see greater accountability as a key result of e-government. This tenet of democracy must be addressed as electronic government moves forward and becomes the norm. As a starting point, the administration should give public support to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s (D-CT) “E-Government Act of 2001.” In fact, this may be about to happen. After months of negotiations with the administration and Sen. Fred Thompson (R-TN), Lieberman will offer a substitute compromise bill at a mark up scheduled in the Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday, March 21, which is expected to be voted out of committee unanimously. Lieberman’s substitute sets up a framework and a process for moving the executive branch forward to provide better electronic access to government information. More specifically, it:

• Calls for steps to identify both the information technology and the cataloging/indexing standards in use by agencies, to limit the use of proprietary standards, and to move the government rapidly toward interoperability of its standards;
• Sets up a process for agencies to inventory information, catalog or index it, and make it accessible online;
• Creates a process to identify and establish standards and policies for public access to information on a permanent basis, critical for meaningful public access over time;
• Creates pilots for data integration and public access;
• Encourages agencies to allow public comments on proposed regulations through email;
• Creates a new Office of Electronic Government with the Office of Management and Budget to oversee all e-government and agency information technology issues; and
• Authorizes $345 million for e-government over four years.

What’s the First Step? The U.S. government needs an inventory of all its available information. How would you know what information to look for if you don't even know how much or what types of information are out there? Building an inventory of all available information is an extensive project, but a necessary step to ensure that there is organization to the overwhelming amount of U.S. government information available both on- and off-line. It would be helpful to think of organizing the information in terms of arranging a library. All information has to be catalogued for it to be searchable. Ideally, the public should be able to obtain not only a listing of documents on agency web sites, but also a list of government information in all its manifestations (publications, databases, records schedules, etc.) and an indication of whether the public can obtain such information. If the information is available electronically, a link to such information should be available. If the information is not available electronically, a description of why it is not available and how to otherwise obtain the information should be provided. If this information is being withheld from the public, then an explanation should be provided; a policy should be developed to determine what information should not even appear on the inventory, such as information pertaining to national security. Agencies should play the lead role in implementing this framework, placing inventories and links to information on their web sites. The government’s central web portal, FirstGov.gov, could also play a powerful role in helping the public find information it is looking for through its index of information -- which would incorporate agency inventories. As FirstGov's usage statistics show, more and more people use FirstGov as a fast and direct way to get government information online. A key component of e-government, President Bush calls FirstGov the "front door" to his administration's e-government initiative. Yet a major hurdle to improving accessibility through FirstGov is that the government does not actually own the indexed database of government information created for FirstGov because the programming used to organize it is considered proprietary. (Read more about FirstGov's history). This index is created by spidering every open government web site. If the government truly owned the indexed database, it would be in the public domain, allowing any number of organizations, companies, and libraries to use the information and make it available in whatever format they see fit. Moving Information Online With an inventory, government can begin to move information online in a systematic manner. Each stage in the process of moving information online should be consultative and open, and information, priorities, and schedules should also be posted on agency web sites. The end goal is to make as much government information directly available through the Internet as possible so that Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests become an avenue of last resort when the public is trying to locate government information. Under the Electronic Freedom Of Information Act (E-FOIA), enacted in 1996, agencies are required to make all official agency pronouncements available through the Internet (or some other electronic means) and provide reference guides for accessing information electronically. Yet there should also be a commitment to making government databases web-accessible. The government keeps data on everything under the sun, from civil rights and criminal activity to public health and flight safety. Some of this information is available through the Internet, but most of it is not. Integrating Agency Data The public wants access to government information regardless of where it sits, whether it is in a database or held by several agencies. A list of government information is a good start, as discussed above, but there must also be public access to government databases through FirstGov and other entry points to government. This involves better linking and integration among government databases, which the Bush e-government plan fails to address. For example, the public has a right to know about regulatory compliance by industry. An individual should be able to enter the name of a company in a search box on a government web site that accesses public databases across agencies -- such as the Toxics Release Inventory at EPA, accident and injury data from OSHA, and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This will require the establishment of corporate or facility identification numbers, which will enable integrated use of data submitted to the government by U.S. businesses (which John Graham, administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, recently advocated in a prompt letter to EPA). Currently, FirstGov does not provide access directly to databases; there is no common identifier so that information about a company or its subsidiaries can be properly searched within a database; and there is no plan for a distributed database structure to link databases from different agencies. Who’s Responsible? As e-government begins to take such an essential role in government operations, there must be a central point of responsibility for e-government at the federal level. In its February 2002 annual report to Congress, OMB found that many agencies have significant deficiencies in electronic information security, and identified a number of common agency security weaknesses, which include a lack of senior management attention and inadequate accountability for job and program performance. Moreover, a recent report from the General Accounting Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- found that the executive branch’s plan for managing information is inadequate to meet potential challenges of the post-Sept. 11 environment, as well as broad information challenges the government may face as it becomes more electronic, as described further here. A senior level management position must be created that is accountable to the president for agency e-government activities. Lieberman’s bill address this problem through the creation of the Office of E-Government, which should coordinate and standardize agency technology and methods of performing services online, as well as the dissemination of information to the public via the Internet. In the past, such responsibility has fallen to the administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), who is charged with providing leadership on information policy, including dissemination issues, under the Paperwork Reduction Act. However, since its creation in 1980, OIRA has always given short shrift to information issues, preferring instead to focus on regulatory policy. This inclination is not likely to change, especially under the leadership of John Graham, who has spent his life dedicated to regulatory issues. The administration is moving in the right direction with the appointment of Mark Forman to oversee issues surrounding electronic government throughout the federal government. Forman should help guide the development of a policy framework to address all issues of dissemination and public access to government information. Yet to this point, Forman’s position lacks clarity -- both in terms of responsibility and authority -- and has not been focused on greater dissemination and public access, which is somewhat understandable given the immense breadth of e-government issues. To truly be successful, Forman, or someone like Forman, will require lieutenants in charge of various e-government issues (i.e., security, transactions, dissemination, etc.), the authority to make things happen, along with more resources and greater commitment from the president. In addition, greater leadership and resources at the agency level will also be needed. The president does have an E-Government Task Force, which formed in response to an August 2001 memo from Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mitch Daniels (Memorandum M-01-28). Yet neither the memo forming the task force (which includes 81 members representing 46 agencies), or the E-Government Strategy produced by the task force adequately addresses improving information dissemination or public access to information. Instead, the E-Gov Strategy has focused on services and transactions between citizens and government, businesses and government, as well as interactions within government, including different levels of government. This is important to be sure, but the administration, perhaps once again using the task force, would be wise to now address issues of public access and dissemination that it has mostly ignored. Funding Issues Federal agencies will need increased funding for e-government initiatives in addition to the agencies' operational budget. As stated above, Lieberman’s substitute authorizes funds of $345 million over a four-year period -- $45 million in 2003, $50 million in 2004, $100 million in 2005, and $150 million in 2006. Lieberman’s original bill authorized up to $200 million each year over three years, but the administration and Thompson considered this too expensive, forcing a compromise. Already, agency investments in overall information technology (IT) have been steadily increasing over the past three years, but the transition to e-government will require increased agency funding for an interim amount of time until electronic processes and operations are implemented and running smoothly. In the end, e-government will save the government billions of dollars, but during the transition period agencies will require extra funding in order to both continue operating in the "old-fashioned" way of performing services -- by processing paperwork and telephone calls -- as well as moving to an electronic system of performing services. To move in this direction, federal agencies must begin to put a mechanism in place to process electronic information. There are agencies that have been open to the idea of accepting electronically filed information, yet some agencies are not equipped to process that information electronically, so they continue to print out the information and process it in the same manner as a paper submission. Electronic processing of information is absolutely essential to propel agencies into the age of e-government. Privacy and Security As agencies process more and more information electronically, the privacy of information that citizens provide to the government and the security of performing transactions online must be a top priority. A recent GAO report on the state of information security at federal agencies shows federal systems are not being adequately protected from computer-based threats. These threats range from federal assets and payments being stolen or lost, to sensitive information -- such as taxpayer data, social security records, medical records, etc -- being inappropriately disclosed and illegally used. A recent example of this happened when millions of dollars were stolen from the Indian Lands Trust Fund by hacking the Department of the Interior's website. The Administration has, however, highlighted privacy and security issues in its E-Government Strategy. Each project initiative of the strategy must address security, and three of the 24 initiatives focus specifically on security, including one project that promotes e-authentication of electronic signatures. This will enable citizens to continually interact with government by enabling agencies to recognize a person by his/her electronic signature on each visit while keeping that information secure.