The House Oversight Committee approved a bill on July 19 that would extend the deadlines for several federal IT efforts established under the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, according to The Hill.
FITARA, which was originally passed in 2014, sought to modernize federal IT and encourage better practices through streamlined technology acquisitions and data center consolidations. The new bill would extend some of FITARA's rules, as their expiration date approaches.
The FITARA Enhancement Act (H.R. 3243) would add two years to the federal data center consolidation initiative, stretching its deadline to December 2020. The bill also proposes to eliminate end dates for rules that require risk assessments of IT investments and reviews of IT portfolios, programs and resources.
Before the FITARA passed, the committee was told agencies had 1,100 data centers which the bill aimed to reduce to 275, the bill's author Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said, according to The Hill.
"What we discovered after the bill passed was there were actually 11,000 data centers. You can't do ten times as big a job in the same amount of time," he told The Hill.
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