Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This bill, the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, is a slightly modified version of the one that left committee. It was changed only with my cosponsor's concurrence in order to make it more likely to easily pass both bodies. This is, in fact, substantially the same bill, as amended, as the full House voted last year to incorporate in the House version of the defense authorization bill.

H.R. 1232 reforms governmentwide the process by which the government annually acquires and employs, roughly, $81 billion of Federal information technology. To quote President Obama on November 14, 2013: ``One of the things the Federal Government does not do well is information technology procurement.''

Now, that was profound because, in the fifth year of his Presidency, it is very clear that the President has realized that this is a monumental task, one inherited by him, not one created by him.

There are systematic problems in the way that we procure IT, including the nature of the history of individuals at all levels thinking they can buy something, and often they can, but too often our committee sees and reviews billion-dollar writeoffs of IT programs in which you cannot find out who was in charge, in which you cannot find out how they went on so long, and the hardest thing to find out is why they don't work at the end of $1 billion worth of ``in and out'' of House production. Indeed, industry experts estimate that as much as 25 percent of the over $80 billion annual expenditure is mismanaged or is attributable to duplicative investments or simply doesn't come to be used.

We need to enhance the best value to the taxpayer. More importantly, good software saves billions of dollars and countless lives and countless hours if it works. Bad or poorly done software can frustrate the American public and can often deprive them of the very product or service that they expect to receive.

When this bill was originally envisioned, written, and passed out of our committee, no one had heard of the healthcare.gov Web site. Our committee, in fact, had looked at countless other failures within the IT procurement community, including ones at the Department of Defense and others, including ones that occurred under previous Presidents. We had determined, along with Mr. Connolly, that there were a number of areas in which we needed to make fundamental change. So, although the American people can certainly see the launch of healthcare.gov as a poster child for not done on time, not, perhaps, done on a budget that we would be proud of and certainly something for which you could not find the responsible parties, even when you called them before your committee, let us make this clear: this bill is not about one failure. It is about a governmentwide, longstanding failure that predates this administration.

Among the things that FITARA will do is to create a clear line of responsibility, authority, and accountability over IT investment and management decisions by empowering agency CIOs; creating an operational framework to dramatically enhance the government's ability to procure commonly used IT faster, cheaper, and smarter; and strengthening the IT acquisition workforce. I want to reiterate this, that this is the Federal IT acquisition force. There can be no better investment than to make sure the people whom you trust the most for procuring IT, both from a standpoint of functionality and security, be a well-trained workforce, which is part of what we want to make sure we have.

FITARA accelerates and consolidates and optimizes the organization of government's proliferating data centers, something that my colleague from Virginia has worked on tirelessly. It increases the transparency of IT investment scorecards by requiring 80 percent of governmentwide IT spending to be covered by public Web sites called ``IT dashboards,'' and it ensures procurement decisions give due consideration to all technologies, including open source. I might note that for the $677 million that initially was spent on healthcare.gov, some of the areas in which the code worked was proven open source technology that was made available.

The discussion draft of this bill was first posted by our committee on its Web site 18 months ago. We held two full committee hearings on the bill, and the language that has evolved through the course of several rewrites and extensive feedback by the contracting and technology communities and experts inside and outside of the government has given us the legislation you see before you today. This is a significant and timely reform that enhances both defense and nondefense procurement, and I urge all Members to support the bill.

I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 2 minutes.

My partners in this are sitting on the other side of the aisle. But this committee has come together to look at a problem as simple as chief information officer doesn't mean ``chief.'' It is simply a hollow title.

This bill, more than anything else to the American people, means that for every piece of major IT procurement, there will be a chief information officer; and that CIO will have budget authority and be held accountable, but also be given the ability to make those decisions, including pulling the ``stop'' button on a bad piece of legislation.

So the title of CIO and CTO and some of the other titles need to mean something. Our committee unanimously believes that if you are to be a chief, you have to be able to tell the Indians what to do. You can't be a chief in name only, and when something doesn't work, find yourself without the ability to call ``halt,'' to go directly to the agency head or do the other things we would expect the title ``chief'' to mean.

So, for that reason, I believe it has united a committee behind something that must pass today, go to the Senate and be taken up and become law, if we are going to begin regaining the American people's confidence in our ability to procure large information systems.

With that, I reserve the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. ISSA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

In closing, first, I urge all Members to vote on this important legislation to send a strong message that this is a do-something Congress when it comes to problems that have been around for a very long time.

Secondly, I would like to take a moment, in a bit of personal privilege, to say to the American workforce that work for the Federal Government that, in every investigation by our committee, we have found in every failed project there were legions of good Federal employees who recognized the problem, sent letters, and who tried to have a program that was not going right to go right or go better.

It is not for lack of many, many in the Federal workforce who are doing their job as best they can. It is for lack of a consolidated and predictable chain of command. It is for lack of the ability to have somebody know they are in charge, bear the full weight, and be qualified.

I have no doubt that, upon enactment of this law, the Federal workforce will begin to breathe a breath of fresh air to know that they are being empowered to do the work they so desperately want to do, and that the tools are going to be added for them and the titles will become a title earned and then used wisely.

Seldom do we spend a lot of time on the House floor talking about how great the Federal workforce is. We are talking about monumental failures. Let's understand that it is not for lack of good programmers, it is not for lack of good contractors, and it is not for lack of well-meaning and dedicated Federal workers that we come today. It is for the need to organize them in a way in which we believe they can be successful. And that is the other part of our committee. We are the Committee on Government and Oversight Reform, and today is a structural reform in how we purchase information technology.

For that, I want to thank my partners on the other side of the aisle because we have been right next to each other on this all the way. I particularly thank Mr. Connolly, who has put his staff and his own personal time into every aspect of this, and who also added his earlier legislation that allows us to bring about the necessary consolidation of duplicative centers spread around the country. They are simply a waste of energy and a waste of software power.

So I see this as a win-win, one in which Republicans and Democrats have come together in a Congress that does not have a great reputation but, on occasion, does great things.

I urge support for this, and I yield back the balance of my time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source