Committee: Feds waste $20B on IT

The federal government wastes as much as $20 billion per year on IT spending, according to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

If accurate, that would represent roughly one quarter of the $81 billion the government spent on IT in 2012, according to numbers provided by the committee.

In 2001, the federal government spend $46 billion on IT. But, today “program failures and cost overruns plague three-quarters of large federal IT programs,” House Republicans suggest.

“Information technology is at the heart of every federal agency or program’s ability to function successfully,” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said in a statement. “We’ve built an IT infrastructure that is bloated, inefficient, and actually makes it more difficult for the government to serve its citizens.”

The numbers were released Tuesday in conjunction with a committee hearing, “Wasting Information Technology Dollars: How Can the Federal Government Reform its IT Investment Strategy?”

“As we have previously reported, federal IT projects too frequently incur cost overruns and schedule slippages while contributing little to mission-related outcomes,” David A. Powner, director of Information Technology Management Issues for the GAO, said in a statement.