Washington DC, 24 May 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

The Sunlight Foundation discusses in an article the letter that US federal CIO Vivek Kundra sent to US Senator Carper on the impact that budget cuts will have on e-government programs.

Last month it became known that the total budget for these e-government programs would be cut by more than 75% from 34 million US dollars last year to 8 million this year. As a consequence "no project will go unaffected." The budget cuts come even though last year, as Vivek Kundra writes, one of the affected projects, the IT Dashboard, helped reduce 'planned IT budgets by $3 billion in 2010 alone'.

Important projects such as the IT Dashboard, data.gov and usaspending.gov will continue to operate at current levels but not be further developed, and data quality may suffer as a consequence. Two projects will be terminated: FedSpace, a internal federal platform currently in beta testing, and CitizenDashboard providing data on citizen facing federal services.

Kundra also announces he will seek a budget in 2012 at 2010 levels.

The full letter is enclosed below: