As Congress began to settle in last week, and policymakers gathered in Las Vegas for CES, the White House generated two VERY big — albeit VERY lightly reported — victories for the digital policy world.
First, the President signed into law the America COMPETES Act of 2010, following congressional passage of this legislation as one of the last acts of the highly-productive Lame Duck session in December. The legislation authorizes significant investment in R&D and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. America COMPETES has been a virtually unanimous high priority for the entire U.S. IT sector, and it’s now officially law.
Second, the White House did a loud shout-out to IT interoperability in a memo issued on Friday by three top officials calling on Agencies to seek “technology neutrality” in their efforts to IT products and services. The memo, from Fed. CIO Vivek Kundra, Procurement Administrator Daniel Gordon and IP Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, calls on agencies to select “suitable IT on a case-by-case basis” to consider “factors such as performance, cost, security, interoperability, ability to share or re-use, and availability of quality support.”
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