Hello, Guest.!
/

OMB: Two Open-gov Sites to Close, Others to be Scaled Back

2 mins read


Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Photo: CIO.gov

The Office of Management and Budget has announced it will close down two open-government federal websites because of cuts to the E-Government Fund, Federal News Radio reports.

The two sites slated for shuttering are FedSpace, the General Services Administration’s online collaboration portal, and the Citizen Services Dashboard, which was to collect data on the quality and customer satisfaction of federal services.

In addition to the closures, nearly all other open-gov web projects will experience a “slow down,” because of the reduced funding for the E-Gov budget that Congress passed in March.

The news comes in a letter from federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra to Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.). In April, the senator requested information from OMB about what effect the open-gov budget cuts would have.

“While we believe that we can make progress on several important initiatives, several projects will experience a sharp decline given the limited amount of funding,” Kundra wrote in the letter obtained by Federal News Radio. “No project will go unaffected.”

Earlier this year, the White House had requested $35 million for the fund. The House initially proposed $2 million before finally settling on $8 million, a 76 percent cut.

According to the letter, Kundra said the cuts would impact even the government’s flagship open-gov websites.

“We will maintain important initiatives such as USAspending.gov, the IT Dashboard, Data.gov and Performance.gov at their current levels of operation,” he wrote. “While we will continue to work with agencies to improve the quality of data on the IT Dashboard and USAspending, we will not be able to fund development efforts to improve data accuracy through automation and streamlining, nor will funds be available to increase transparency.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.