Some federal agencies fail to meet secure ID October deadline
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had set 27 October as the deadline for agencies to issue the cards to all federal employees and contractors; 28 percent of the federal employee workforce and 30 percent of contractors who require the cards have received credentials
The federal government failed to meet an October deadline to issue secure personal identification cards to agency employees and contractors, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) reported. NextGov’s Jill Aitoro writes that less than a third of all federal employees and contractors, about 29 percent, had been issued a new high-tech ID card, which contains a cardholder’s biometric information. OMB had set 27 October as the deadline for agencies to issue the cards to all federal employees and contractors.
Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and information technology at OMB, said the number of ID cards agencies had distributed was not “an acceptable level of performance. There are agencies that should be commended, because they did what they said they’d do, [and] there are other agencies that were challenged. We’re going back and saying, ‘You missed your target. It will be reflected on the score card appropriately.’ The next step isn’t to say tough luck, [but] to make sure they have what they need to meet this goal.”
Aitoro writes that OMB found that 12 of the 16 agencies it tracks as part of the President’s Management Agenda met or nearly met their targets for card issuance that were set in previously agreed-upon implementation plans. These targets were not the total number of credentials required, however. In total, agencies issued almost 1.6 million credentials by the 27 October deadline, an increase of 300,000 since OMB issued its 1 September report on HSPD 12 implementation. About 1.25 million, or 28 percent, of the federal employee workforce and 338,451, or 30 percent, of contractors who require the cards have received credentials.
