President George W. Bush Monday afternoon signed the Homeland Security bill
into law, creating a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security
combining 22 federal agencies with an estimated budget of $37.4 billion,
including $2.12 billion for IT.
The measure represents almost a year of often intense legislative debate
and calls for the most sweeping reorganization of the executive branch in
the last half century. The U.S. House of Representatives passed its
version of the bill on Nov. 13, followed by the U.S., which passed its bill
on Nov. 19. Bush called the passage of the legislation “the single most
important business” before the lame duck Congress.
The major agencies giving up their independent status and joining the
Department of Homeland Defense include the Secret Service, the Coast Guard,
the Customs Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the
Immigration and Nationalization Service.
The bill includes allowing the new Secretary of Homeland Defense to
designate a lead research organization to help coordinate security research
across the government, the academic community and the private sector.
Another provision establishes and funds a Homeland Security Advanced
Research Projects Agency, similar to Department of Defense’s DARPA, to help
identify promising technologies.
The legislation also includes two provisions that “encourage partnerships
between government and the private sector to better protect civilian
infrastructures such as telecommunications, transportation nodes and power
grids.”
In addition, it establishes procedures to encourage private industry to
share infrastructure vulnerabilities with the government to help identify
and correct weaknesses and calls for a so-called NET Guard, volunteer teams
to help local communities respond and recover from attacks on information
systems and communications networks.
The combined 2002 IT budgets for the agencies being incorporated into the
new department is $1.47 billion. That number is expected to jump to $2.12
billion in 2003. Overall, the Government Electronics and Information
Technology Association (GEIA) is predicting total federal IT spending will
be approximately $53 billion. According to GEIA federal IT spending will reach
approximately $67 billion by 2008.
Chantilly, Va.-based Input, which specializes in IT market research, issued
a report Friday which predicted will spend more than $2.1 billion on IT in
the first year. Input said it expects the new government giant will spend
money on biometric technologies, data mining and geospatial information
systems. Homeland security director Tom Ridge plans to interconnect the
previously separate federal agencies through a secure network that will
link disparate government databases.
According to Input, the new department will have four priorities: first
responders, biological defense, border security and the fusion of
information and intelligence. In the next year, the government is expected
to award a variety of contracts for information security, reliable
communications and advanced knowledge systems.
