The group of federal IT professionals selected runs the gamut of U.S. government offices, from the Social Security Administration to the Department of Commerce. A full list of the task force members and a Q&A on the program is available on USA.gov.
The announcement follows on the heels of President Barack Obama’s “Campaign to Cut Waste.” The campaign seeks to eliminate unnecessary and stupid spending, including reducing the more than 2,000 federal government URLs in existence. One example included the now-defunct fiddlinforesters.gov, which once hosted the music of U.S. Forest Service rangers using U.S. taxpayer money.
The White House estimated there are 2,000 top-level .gov domains and 24,000 smaller sub-sites. Officials said that the cost of maintaining each of these websites is small one by one, but the savings will add up.
In tandem with the task force announcement, the White House also released a list of 1,759 top-level federal executive branch Web domains.
A three-month freeze is currently in effect where all new federal website domains must be approved by Kundra. According to a June 13 memo from Jeffrey Zients, federal chief performance officer in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), agencies have 120 days to “identify domain names that are no longer needed, websites that should be consolidated or eliminated, and website content that needs to be improved.”
