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Thursday, October 21, 2004

Little Progress in E-Gov, According to PPI

The Bush administration has failed to meet many of its e-government priorities, according to a new report released by the Progressive Policy Institute. E-government is "the delivery of government services through digital information technologies, including the Internet." The PPI report found that during the Bush administration, the U.S. has fallen behind in developing e-government services. The report claimed that the Bush administration has failed to meet the e-government objectives that it set out in 2002. Those services that the administration has created have been poorly publicized. Even those within the federal government often do not use the e-government services, according to the report. From Unsatisfactory Progress: the Bush Administration's Performance on E-Government Initiatives:

[T]he Bush administration has made, at best, halting progress. For example, less than 60 percent of federal transactions were available online by the October 2003 deadline established under the 1999 Government Paperwork Elimination Act. Meanwhile, the administration proposed 25 e-government initiatives -- with 91 specific objectives -- of which only 33 had been fully or substantially achieved as of March 2004, according to the General Accounting Office. Moreover, the government has done little to market the e-government services it has developed, so few Americans are even aware of them and even fewer use them. For example, only 8 percent of Americans have visited recreation.gov and only 5 percent have been to benefits.gov -- both signature Bush administration e-government initiatives. Even federal agencies do not use the Bush administration's e-government services. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency, the lead government agency for the Bush administration's e-rulemaking initiative (a website that lets citizens and businesses file comments on administrative rulemaking), does not post most of its own regulations to the site for comment.