House and Senate lawmakers have approved a spending package for federal agencies covering the remainder of the fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.

The bill, known as an omnibus because it consolidates a majority of individual spending bills, secured Senate passage Dec. 17 in a 67-32 vote a day after the House approved it 296-121.  President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.

In it, appropriations for Homeland Security information technology programs are generally, and unsurprisingly, lower than requested.

However, a conference committee of House and Senate lawmakers that worked out the differences between the two chambers' versions of fiscal 2012 spending bills ensured that DHS data center consolidation receives some new appropriated funding, settling on $70 million. The House-approved DHS spending bill would have appropriated $0.

US-VISIT, meanwhile, is a rare program that will receive more than requested. In the report (.pdf) accompanying the final bill, conferees say DHS should use the extra money to prepare a plan for implementation of a biometric information exist system implemented at airports. US-VISIT has long collected fingerprint data of people entering the United States, but has yet to implement a system that would collect the same information for those on the way out.

Secure Communities also would get a bump, with the extra money to be spent on digitization of paper fingerprint cards and the inclusion of that biometric information into the DHS Automated Biometric Identification System, also known as IDENT.  Secure Communities is a controversial information sharing program under which DHS matches local law enforcement collections of arrestee fingerprint data sent to the FBI for criminal checks against the IDENT system.

For more:
- download DHS section of the conference report (.pdf)

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