Federal Manager's Daily Report

The bipartisan leaders of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have asked the GAO to clear the clouds on conflicting assessments of agency compliance with a “cloud first” directive for IT purchasing.

A letter to GAO notes that of the nearly $90 billion the government spends annually on IT, three-fourths goes to operating and maintaining existing systems. OMB in 2011 issued a policy requiring agencies to consider whether secure, reliable and cost effective cloud-based services are available before making new investments.

GAO in 2014 found that only 2 percent of IT spending in seven agencies it reviewed went toward cloud-based services and that they didn’t even consider such services for two-thirds of their IT spending. “Two years later, the GAO recommendations from the report remain open,” says the letter.

In contrast, the White House’s fiscal 2017 budget request claimed that the government is spending 8.2 percent of its IT budget on cloud-related services, it says.

The committee asked GAO to reassess agency compliance with the cloud first directive, saying a current assessment will be particularly important “as a new administration begins to assess priorities in federal IT management.”