USA.gov should be the single online platform for the entire federal government, asserted outgoing Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra during a July 14 House hearing.

"The idea is that for an average American person, they shouldn't have to navigate the federal bureaucracy to figure out what services they want. They should be able to go onto USA.gov search," he said while testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on technology, information policy, intergovernmental relations and procurement reform.

The White House is currently leading an effort to revamp agency websites, but other officials involved in it have stressed that one giant federal website won't necessarily be the outcome.

During the hearing, Kundra also gave a new figure for the number of data centers closed by an Office of Management and Budget effort to have federal agencies shutter 137 of them by the end of this calendar year. The number of closures now stands at 67, Kundra said. In order to make the Dec. 31 deadline, OMB must close data centers at a rate of 12.73 per month, assuming that the rest of July constitutes exactly .5 a month.

That's a rate slightly higher than the rate of closures in the months following OMB's April 27 announcement that they had closed 39 data centers so far. Again, assuming exactly half a month for July, the data rate closure in May, June and July has been 11.2 a month.

On the day following the House hearing, Kundra also spoke for an hour before the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Asked by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt why the federal government doesn't have a common information technology infrastructure, Kundra pointed to the congressional appropriations system, which directs funding not on a governmentwide basis, but to individual agencies and prevents them from sharing appropriations.

Kundra reiterated his belief that the government could function with just three major data centers and said IT infrastructure should be run on a governmentwide basis by a "center for information technology."

Reflecting on his time as federal CIO, Kundra said his greatest asset when he assumed office "was my naïveness [sic], because I asked those questions" about governmentwide distribution of IT infrastructure.

Asked to give advice for his successor, Kundra said that "the hard work has been done" for reforming federal IT has been done with release of the OMB 25 point plan for reform.

"Too many people come to White House, and they have a self image that they're only going to focus on policy and not on execution. And, I think what ends up happening is you end up with a lot of great ideas, but nothing gets done," he said.

For more:
- go to the House hearing website (prepared testimonies and webcast available)
- go to a webcast of the July 15 PCAST meeting

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