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July 14, 2011 By News Staff
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled the names of a 17-member task force that has been tasked with paring down the number of federal government websites and considering policy adjustments to prevent future bloating of government URLs.
The group of federal IT professionals selected runs the gamut of U.S. government offices, from the Social Security Administration to the Department of Commerce. A full list of the task force members and a Q&A on the program is available on USA.gov.
The announcement follows on the heels of President Barack Obama’s “Campaign to Cut Waste.” The campaign seeks to eliminate unnecessary and stupid spending, including reducing the more than 2,000 federal government URLs in existence. One example included the now-defunct fiddlinforesters.gov, which once hosted the music of U.S. Forest Service rangers using U.S. taxpayer money.
The White House estimated there are 2,000 top-level .gov domains and 24,000 smaller sub-sites. Officials said that the cost of maintaining each of these websites is small one by one, but the savings will add up.
In tandem with the task force announcement, the White House also released a list of 1,759 top-level federal executive branch Web domains.
A three-month freeze is currently in effect where all new federal website domains must be approved by Kundra. According to a June 13 memo from Jeffrey Zients, federal chief performance officer in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), agencies have 120 days to “identify domain names that are no longer needed, websites that should be consolidated or eliminated, and website content that needs to be improved.”
You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/policy-management/Kundra-Names-Task-Force-to-Consolidate-Federal-Websites.html
The article says that there was once one silly site was found and shut down. If this effort were anything other than self-aggrandizment and personal PR for Vivek Kundra its first effort wouldn't have been to have put up yet another silly site - using taxpayer money. The site is so poorly built it's pointless. Key OMB 300 sites are not listed, nor does it list its own incompetent self (sub domains arent listed? Was the only issue with "Fiddlin Foresters" that it was a top level domain?). The only real outcome of this effort seems to be another wasteful government site, put up to satisfy the ego of Vivek Kundra. The hypocricy is stunning.