Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President. I rise to join Senators CARPER, LIEBERMAN, and BROWN in introducing a bill that would bring more management and oversight of major information technology, IT, investments across the federal government.

In fiscal year 2011 alone, the federal government plans to spend nearly $80 billion on IT investments, about half of which is for major IT investments. According to the Government Accountability Office, nearly 40 percent of those major IT investments, totaling nearly $20 billion, are at risk for significant cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance problems.

Rampant cost and performance problems in IT investments occur across the government. Most recently, we have seen a total breakdown in the National Archives and Records Administration's, NARA, Electronic Records Archive initiative.

Since 2001, NARA has tried to develop a system to preserve and provide access to a massive volume of electronic records. Originally slated for a 2012 rollout at a cost of $317 million, NARA has had to repeatedly revise the plan and cost estimate and finally decided to produce a scaled-down system this year. Last month GAO estimated the project would cost between $762 million and $1 billion--three times more than originally planned.

We see time and time again with these big IT contracts that requirements are not clear up front, leading to chaos down the road that wastes hundreds of millions of dollars.

Such was the case with the 2010 Decennial Census handheld devices. After spending eight years developing a completely new approach to census-taking, the Census Bureau scrapped plans for using handheld computers and reverted instead back to paper and pencil.

Problems managing the contractor, major flaws in the Bureau's cost-estimates, and kicking the can down the road added about $3 billion to the census price tag. Three billion!

The problems keep coming. DHS has tried twice--since 2004--to integrate its many-siloed financial management systems. The Department spent approximately $52 million on one failed attempt before abandoning the project nearly two years later. DHS tried again only to encounter severe schedule delays. The Department is now planning to roll out the project incrementally, which is of course how they should have started years ago, and is what is recommended under the OMB guidance for managing large IT projects.

Large IT project failures have cost U.S. taxpayers literally billions of dollars in wasted expenditures. While never acceptable, especially now given our current fiscal crisis, we just cannot afford to accept this type of incompetence and mismanagement one more day. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that, when federal IT projects fail, they can undermine the government's ability to defend the nation, enforce its laws, or deliver critical services to citizens.

Again and again, we have seen IT project failures grounded in poor planning, ill-defined and shifting requirements, undisclosed difficulties, poor risk management, and lax monitoring of performance.

For the last several years, Senator CARPER and I have pushed the Office of Management and Budget to improve the management and oversight of these IT investments. To help address the concerns we have raised, OMB has instituted several new initiatives over the last year and a half.

For example, in June 2009, OMB announced the creation of the ``IT Dashboard,'' which is a website that displays cost and schedule information about major IT investments, as well as the agency Chief Information Officer's, CIO, evaluation of the status of each project. OMB has also instituted comprehensive face-to-face reviews of these investments, known as ``TechStat'' sessions.

As a result, OMB has reported reducing the life-cycle costs of 15 investments by approximately $3 billion by narrowing the scope of some projects and even shutting down others and cutting the losses. Added transparency from the IT Dashboard, as well as comprehensive reviews via TechStat sessions, should improve agency management and Congressional oversight of the projects.

The bill Senator CARPER and I introduce today would require agencies to use the Dashboard in a standardized way. It would also expand inputs to include cost, schedule, and performance data, using a metric called Earned Value Management, EVM. EVM prevents the kind of ``hide the ball'' game that agencies often play to cover up performance shortfalls, cost overruns, or schedule slips.

The bill institutes triggers so that, if an investment deviates more than 20 percent from its original cost, schedule, and performance targets, CIOs would be required to conduct the type of comprehensive TechStat sessions currently taking place at OMB on a more limited scale. These sessions would generate information for Congress as well as the public, by requiring agencies to post the results of the TechStat sessions on the IT Dashboard. These reports would have to describe in detail how the failures occurred, naming names, and describing how exactly the shortcomings are going to be fixed.

If an investment deviates more than 40 percent, the TechStat session would get bumped up to the OMB level, to be run by the Federal Chief Information Officer. In addition to information about how to improve the performance of the project, OMB would be required to provide to Congress a recommendation of whether the project should be pared back or cancelled if it cannot be overhauled.

On top of this aggressive oversight ramp-up, the bill would require agencies to identify and heighten the planning and management for a handful of top priority, most expensive projects. For these ``core'' investments, agencies would submit additional data on performance, key milestones, and lifecycle costs.

Because of their scope and importance to agency missions, these core projects would have lower thresholds for oversight triggers and would get bumped up to OMB TechStat review with a deviation of 20 percent. The ``get-well'' plan would then be sent to Congress and published on the Dashboard for maximum accountability. This early intervention at the highest level would ensure that these critical projects are either saved or scrapped long before they can threaten to waste billions of dollars or endanger agency missions.

If an agency fails to comply with the requirements in the bill for any given project, that would be the end of taxpayer support for the project until it is brought into compliance.

If this bill had been law during the past decade, early warning signs would have alerted Congress and possibly saved some of the billions wasted on so many IT projects currently crowding various high-risk lists.

I urge every Senator to support this much-needed and bipartisan bill.

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