Environmental agencies’ $1.5B IT budget - where does it go?
Author Reed Van Beveren is Senior Manager for Technology Policy at EPIC
Update (July 2023): Based on updated data, environmental agencies have added 13 new investments and over $100 million in FY23 funding since January 2023. For additional information about all mission-oriented investments, see our IT investments dashboard.
Agencies and bureaus that work directly on protecting the environment and managing natural resources (“environmental agencies”) are investing over $1.5 billion dollars in information technology in furtherance of their environmental goals in Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23) according to the Federal IT Dashboard. As shown in the table below, across 10 key federal agencies and bureaus, there are over 200 active investments, which involve many more individual projects. The vast majority (96%) of these investments are funded by a single agency.
Table 1: Investments in IT at 10 federal agencies and bureaus for FY2023
| Agency | Bureau | Number of Investments | Number of Investments /w External Funding | Funding Total - Internal & External (FY23) (in millions of $) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Department of Agriculture | U.S. Forest Service | 8 | 0 | $186 |
| Natural Resources Conservation Service | 6 | 1 | $132 | |
| Department of Commerce | National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | 15 | 2 | $478 |
| Department of the Interior | Bureau of Land Management | 19 | 0 | $42 |
| Bureau of Reclamation | 21 | 0 | $51 | |
| National Park Service | 26 | 1 | $29 | |
| U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service | 11 | 0 | $34 | |
| U.S. Geological Survey | 11 | 0 | $260 | |
| Environmental Protection Agency | Agency-wide | 78 | 3 | $189 |
| U.S. Army Corps of Engineers | Agency-wide | 7 | 2 | $101 |
Note: the investments in the table are those designated as contributing to “mission delivery” (e.g. directly related to programmatic goals), as opposed to “mission support“ or “standard” IT investments that are more general in nature (e.g. email services). External funding means funding from a source that is not the lead agency.
These investments represent a significant opportunity to accelerate the pace of environmental progress, but getting the best value from them will require breaking out of organizational silos, encouraging interoperability, and learning from similar past investments and projects. This in turn depends on the ability to proactively identify IT projects and systems that either should be connected through digital infrastructure, for example because the decisions they support should be coordinated, or that are similar enough to serve as an example for current investments.
Understanding Federal IT Investments
To better characterize the extent and scope of the active mission-related federal IT investments, we used natural language processing - a set of methods that enable computers to understand text. We assigned the FY23 investments of the 10 federal agencies and bureaus listed above to 16 different categories. The heatmap below shows the number of investments in each category by agency and bureau.
The results show the magnitude of the challenge and opportunity facing federal environmental agencies charged with taking a coordinated approach to using IT to tackle environmental problems. Agencies and bureaus are making dozens of investments in each category, and because of the nature of the investments they often fall into more than one category at a time. However, these data also show that there are many potential opportunities to collaborate and connect IT systems across agencies. For example, we identified 15 separate investments related to “wildlife” that were spread across 6 federal entities. Some categories, such as water and permitting, span nearly all the agencies and bureaus and represent upwards of 50 investments each. In practice, the owners, users, and stakeholders of the systems covered by these investments are the ones best positioned to evaluate which specific investments and systems are ripe for better collaboration and sharing of best practices. To help illustrate the opportunity, EPIC has made the categorized data on these investments available in a dashboard, with information down to the individual project level where available.
Figure 1: Number of IT Investments by Category for Select Environmental Agencies and Bureaus (FY23)
Note: Many investments were assigned to multiple categories and therefore the numbers above do not add up to the total investment for each agency. These categories are based on the short descriptions in the IT dashboard and may therefore under-represent the categories that should be assigned to an investment. Investments categorized as “other” did not fit into any of the 15 named categories above.
We also identified investments in “shared services” - those with some source of external funding - at environmental agencies and bureaus to see how common they were across these categories. Shared services, such as RIBITS, are used by multiple agencies to track and share information across organizational boundaries and with the public. Having a financial stake in the success of an IT investment and the resulting systems across agencies can be important for catalyzing action and devoting the staff time and other resources to make it a success. However, shared services are still relatively rare among investments in environmental IT as shown in the table above and the heatmap below. Shared services can face challenges associated with added layers of approval, review, and coordination that can limit their effectiveness. Nonetheless, shared services are one important way that agencies can collaborate and ensure that data are accessible to those who need it.
Figure 2: Number of IT Investments with Multiple Funding Sources by Category (FY23)
Note: The same investment shown above may be assigned to multiple categories. The heat map above shows only the lead agency and not those that contributed funding.
Recommendations
Taking advantage of these opportunities requires scaling up capacity and collaborations that promote interoperability and organizational learning:
Strengthen Coordination between Chief Data Officers: Chief Data Officers are a newly established position with great potential to improve inter-agency coordination and help ensure that data flows across organizational boundaries. However, for them to be successful in this endeavor, they need additional resources and staff. As a recent Data Foundation report on CDOs makes clear, although CDOs have made important progress toward their coordination goals, they face severe resource constraints given the magnitude of their task. In their 2022 survey, 83% of CDOs said that they do not have adequate resources, and about half said they had less than 10 full time equivalent staff to carry out their mission. Increasing the full-time staff available to CDOs would have a direct impact on identifying related opportunities, improving interoperability and, ultimately, saving money on IT investments.
Leverage Public-Private Collaborations: Collaborations between the public and private sector to link together existing digital infrastructure are another path to improving interoperability. For example, the Internet of Water Coalition was formed to” advance the transformation and modernization of water data infrastructure in the United States by developing affordable, open-source technologies for sharing and integrating water data.” This has spurred complementary efforts among federal agencies, such as the Advanced Water Mapping Initiative involving the U.S. Geological Survey, EPA, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Identifying and catalyzing the creation of similar collaborative efforts in other sectors is a huge opportunity to get the best out of federal IT investments.
Deploy New Shared Services: IT services that are shared across agencies and bureaus are set up from the outset to promote interoperability. For example, interoperability is one of the guiding principles of GeoPlatform.gov, a shared service led by the Department of Interior. Shared services are typically led by one agency with funding from others. It is important to find innovative ways to make these work, especially where they can reduce duplication, reduce data silos, and improve the user experience.
By scaling up these types of efforts across the landscape of environmental technology projects, federal agencies and their partners have the opportunity to ensure that each and every environmental protection and natural resource management decision is made with the best available information, as envisioned by the Evidence Act of 2019. Furthermore, these measures are necessary to advance whole-of-govt initiatives, such as Justice40 and America the Beautiful, where programs across differing agencies will be reporting on a similar set of parameters, with overlapping sets of data and technology needs. Without significant investment in the coordination of digital infrastructure across federal agencies, a critical gap will remain to effectively and efficiently execute the Administration’s vision.
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EPIC’s technology team will continue to refine this analysis to identify opportunities to bring the public and private sectors together to accelerate the development and use of technology for environmental stewardship. If any of these concepts resonate with you and you would like to collaborate on solutions, please reach out to Reed Van Beveren at reed@policyinnovation.org.
