Budget battle hobbles White House tech tool

A cutting-edge online dashboard launched by the White House in 2009 to help keep federal tech projects on time and on budget has been largely unusable — it hasn’t been updated since August — because of the struggle between Congress and the Administration over federal spending. The reason: To be on budget, you need to know your budget.

Now, as the clock ticks down on fiscal cliff negotiations, information technology officials across federal agencies find themselves in a tough spot marked by uncertainty over just what their 2013 budgets will look like. The technology dashboard website was created to help agency officials and the public analyze and evaluate more than 7,000 different federal information technology projects, including such features as providing data on how agency initiatives have performed historically. While the updates have ceased temporarily before, this year’s data drought is longer than ever and leaves agency officials and the public largely in the dark on how investments are performing.