The White House's proposed US IT budget for 2005 is
showing signs of increased strain amid a ballooning national
deficit, the continued war on terrorism and the urgent demands of
homeland security.
The George W Bush administration requested $59.8bn for its
governmentwide IT budget - a trivial increase from its $59.1bn IT
budget.
The paltry increase apparently stems from the administration's
desire to rein in spending and deliver on its promise to halve the
national deficit during the next five years. That, in turn, has
forced the White House to take a close look at all federal IT
programmes to ensure that they are based on a sound business case
and support the president's management agenda, which covers areas
such as human capital management, financial management and support
for e-government initiatives.
According to the budget, "agencies must remediate the shortfalls
identified in their business cases or the administration will not
support the expenditures until agencies have demonstrated their
ability to address the weaknesses".
Homeland security remains a growth area in this year's budget.
While civilian agency IT spending increased by only 1% and defence
IT spending by 2% compared with this year, the Department of
Homeland Security's proposed IT budget grew by more than 8%.
"The statement of this budget is clear. Protecting the homeland
continues to be a critical priority for this administration," said
secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge.
IT security vulnerability research, sponsored by the
Infrastructure Assurance and Infrastructure Protection directorate
at the DHS, would get $16m for the financial year beginning 1
October. Other IAIP directorate programmes received significant
funding increases, including incident handling and response,
red-teaming activities to uncover vulnerabilities in both physical
and cyber infrastructures and support for a distributed network of
homeland security operations centres.
Customs and border protection, as well as initiatives aimed at
port, transportation and immigration security, remain driving
forces behind the DHS IT budget increase.
Dan Verton writes for Computerworld