Good Morning, this hearing of the Department Operations, Nutrition, and Foreign Agriculture Subcommittee will come to order. The subject of today's hearing is the management and use of information technology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Today we will hear from USDA's Chief Information Officer Anne Thomson Reed regarding the current situation at the Department, and we will also hear from Joel Willemssen from the General Accounting Office, who will summarize several year's worth of GAO reports and studies regarding information technology at USDA, and provide us with an assessment of the current efforts underway at USDA to improve information technology management. For brevity's sake, I will now be referring to information technology simply as I.T.
Basically, the continuous criticism can be summarized like this: USDA does not do the required analysis and planning before it spends substantial amounts on automation. An analogy would be automaking: it doesn't make sense to spend millions on building a car assembly line before you even know what type of car you want to build-you first need to know who wants your car, what features they want in a car, and where they want to go with the car.
The timing of today's hearing is important for several reasons:
First, Congress will soon be considering the fiscal year 1998 agriculture appropriations bill, for which USDA has requested about 1.2 billion total dollars in I.T.-related spending (which, by the way, consumes about 6,200 full-time employees, as well). During a time when all Federal agencies, including USDA, are attempting to deliver programs more efficiently, USDA's billion-dollar plus budget for I.T. certainly needs particular scrutiny, given the less than rave reviews contained in the numerous reports and audits prepared by the GAO and USDA's own Inspector General over the past decade.
Second, USDA is now facing a new and different world, with new and different authorities. In the 104th Congress, we passed an historic farm bill, and a sweeping welfare reform bill, both of which substantially changed the nature of the programs administered by several of USDA's agencies. The need for USDA to evaluate and improve its program delivery methods has never been so great. Also, USDA has gotten additional legislative direction from Congress regarding how to improve management and administration of its programs: The 103rd Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act , which is designed to make agencies more accountable by requiring annual performance goals that are measurable; and, in the 104th Congress, we passed the Information Technology Management Reform Act of 1996 (also known as the Clinger/Cohen Act) which, in addition to requiring each department to have a Chief Information Officer, specifically targets Federal agencies' managment of I.T. It has now been over three years since the Results Act was passed, and over 9 months since Clinger/Cohen was enacted, it is now time to determine if USDA is using these authorities in a meaningful way to evaluate its delivery of programs in an efficient manner, especially in light of the sweeping changes made by the farm bill and welfare reform.
Third, today's hearing is very timely because of the historical mismanagement of USDA's I.T. budget, which is now measured in the billions of dollars. GAO, along with USDA's Inspector General, the Office of Management and Budget, and others, have repeatedly criticized USDA for its inability to plan for I.T. investments before spending the money. In fact, many of the reports that will be referenced by the GAO today were prepared several years ago, when we had a Republican Administration and a Democrat Congress. If, after hearing today's testimony, we find that USDA's management of I.T. is really no better than it was prior to Clinger/Cohen and the Results Act, then we, as the Subcommittee with jurisdiction over department operations, should probably begin to explore other legislative alternatives that will result in some long-needed improvements to USDA's I.T. management. It is unconscionable that, at a time when the beneficiaries of USDA's many programs and functions - from farmers to food stamp recipients to USDA's own county employees - are being asked to tighten their belts and accept less, USDA continues to waste many millions of dollars and ignores sound advice from GAO and other auditors and examiners over the past decade.
On this third reason, I want to be clear, in the current budget environment, waste cannot be tolerated. A dollar wasted on computers is a dollar that could have gone to critical ag research or ag promotion. The Agriculture Committee has the responsibility to ensure that the Department delivers programs effectively and efficiently. Because USDA has such a poor track record of I.T. management, I think it is likely that there will be a substantial cut in the I.T. funding available in FY 1998; and I also think that a substantial cut in this area is probably justified and long overdue. However, because it is still possible for USDA to continue to spend even a reduced amount of I.T. money poorly, I want to determine if there is anything that we can or should do legislatively to improve the Department's management of I.T.
Finally, I want to comment on the issue of I.T. within the bigger picture of how USDA is changing its operations in the field. Farmers and other rural residents everywhere are currently witnessing the closure or relocation of many county offices, and are hearing phrases such as "consolidation," "one-stop shopping," and "streamlining" as being the justification for these changes. These kinds of changes can be good, and can contribute to efficient program delivery. However, about the first time a farmer walks into a new one-stop service center, and finds out that, because NRCS and FSA do not have computer systems that can share information, he has to provide the same information to two different agencies, even though they are located in the same building, he will wonder what the benefit of one-stop shopping is, and so will we. It seems to me that the proper management of information technology is an absolutely necessary prerequisite to any kind of field office consolidation or one-stop service center implementation.