Creating the front door to government: a case study of the Firstgov portal

Library Trends, Fall, 2003 by Patricia Diamond Fletcher

A critical aspect of the act is funding. It appropriates $45 million for funding of electronic government initiatives in the current fiscal year (Executive Office of the President, 2003). In subsequent years, the Office of Electronic Government will have a total of $345 million to be expended over five years. This is a needed shot-in-the-arm for electronic government development, which had been appropriated a mere $5 million for fiscal year 2002. Some of the funds will go to improvements on the FirstGov portal. The development of a subject-based taxonomy for users is a vital component of the changes envisioned for FirstGov. This will move the portal, and the federal government, away from the current agency-based locus of information.

There are many other laws that frame the electronic government environment. The development of an information resources management environment has been a slow and deliberate process in federal government, and it created the framework for an electronic government to flourish. The Commission on Federal Paperwork, created under the Ford administration, was the bellwether for the development of many of the following laws related to the electronic management of information. Some of the key laws that have enabled an electronic government to evolve are the following:

* The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C. chapter 35);

* The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 (40 U.S.C. 1401(3));

* The Government Information Security Reform Act of 2000 (EL. 106-398):

* The Computer Security Act of 1987, as amended (P.L. 100-235, 15 U.S.C.);

* The Privacy Act of 1974 (5 U.S.C. 552a);

* The Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act of 1988 (P.L. 100-503); and

* The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-104).

Another defining policy statement in support of electronic government was set out in the President's Management Agenda of 2001. The Bush administration developed five government-wide goals for its tenure, one of which is the expansion of an electronic federal government. Thus, the imprimatur for continuing evolution of an electronic government was set. A high-level task force was created from an July 18, 2001, memo (OMB01-28) which called for the task force, informally named "quicksilver," to develop the priority strategic actions needed to enable electronic government. The group was in service by August of 2001, and it quickly set out an ambitious agenda for electronic government. This agenda was reported to the President's Management Council on October 3, 2001--truly Internet speed! The initial electronic government agenda was further refined and formalized in the February 27, 2002, release of the E-Government Strategy (Executive Office of the President, 2002). This strategy created a vision that is citizen centered, results oriented, and market based in nature. It mandates cross-agency sharing of data to simplify access to government and to reduce information resources expenses across government agencies. The strategy focuses on four groups of end-users--government-to-citizen, government-to-business, government-to-government, and intragovernmental--to improve internal efficiency and accountability of federal agencies. An initial thirty-four projects were singled out for the first round of funding, with completion dates scheduled no later than eighteen to twenty-four months. All approved projects represented cross-agency applications. The haste to get them online is a further measure of the importance of electronic government to the administration's overall policy.