The federal government wants to spend $79.5 billion on information technology in fiscal 2012, says the Office of Management and Budget.

The amount would add up to a 1.9 percent increase over the fiscal 2010 enacted amount of $78 billion, OMB adds in supporting documents released Feb. 14 as part of the executive branch's annual budget request to Congress.

The real IT spending number is higher, since the OMB figure does not include intelligence community spending, quasi-governmental organizations or the legislative and judicial branches. It also doesn't include Defense Department spending on IT that's embedded into weapons systems, and no modern weapons system is without significant electronic components. Plus, some federal officials will privately admit that their IT budget planning system probably does not capture all the IT activity going on within an agency.

Among some budget analysts, a rule of thumb is that the real figure is somewhere from 40 to 50 percent higher than what OMB says.

The number is revealed in a "special topics" section dedicated to IT within the analytical perspectives volume of the annual budget document.

Also discussed in the IT section are plans for the coming fiscal year (which starts Oct. 1), few of which are any surprise to anybody who's followed official OMB statements for even a short period time.  

Probably the only initiative in it not already widely discussed elsewhere is something called "CyberStat," under which the Homeland Security Department will hold meetings with agencies on cybersecurity based on OMB's "TechStat" model for agency IT projects. OMB recently instructed agencies to hold one internal TechStat meeting by March 31, also providing them with a toolkit of TechStat materials, including a seating chart and name placard template (.ppt).

To briefly summarize the rest of the White House IT oversight plans for fiscal 2012, OMB  expects agencies to embrace cloud computing, consolidate data centers, hold TechStat meetings and design IT projects to take less time.

It also say the Obama administration will work with Congress to establish pilot projects that would explore "a better balance" between legislative branch oversight and agency funding flexibility.

OMB continues to have a commitment to transparency and public participation, the document adds, and the White House agency would like Congress to approve $6 million in spending for data.gov in fiscal 2012, up from the $4 million it received in fiscal 2010 and is likely to spend in fiscal 2011.

Coincidently, a recent Congressional Research Service report (.pdf) obtained by the Federation of American Scientists and hosted on their website calls into question the efficacy of data.gov, stating that the vast majority of the datasets on the website come from two agencies, the Census Bureau and the U.S. Geological Survey. The report also says that data.gov doesn't necessarily contribute to government transparency, since the data sets are mostly that which the government collects in its regulatory capacity rather than data that reveals its inner workings, and that useful datasets relevant to a researcher's interest are difficult to locate.

"It may be difficult for a researcher to pinpoint the dataset he or she needs in a collection of similarly titled datasets," says CRS report author Wendy Ginsberg, with apparent understatement.

For more:
- go to a OMB webpage with the analytical perspectives budget volume available for download as a single .pdf or by section
- go to an OMB budget overview webpage

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