Federal Government Identifies 100 Data Centers for Closure This Year

A look at the week of April 18 in public advocacy for the IT channel  

This week, President Obama signed the bill repealing the much-debated 1099 tax provision.  The federal government will be closing a third of its data centers and shifting agency programs to the cloud in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency.  Farzad Mostashari, the new health IT coordinator, is beginning his position in a much different political environment than his predecessor and faces significant challenges ahead.

Obama Repeals 1099 Tax Reporting Burden — President Obama on Thursday repealed the 1099 tax reporting requirement, the first provision of the Democrats' law to get the ax.  Obama signed the bill, which was defeated several times, despite taking issue with the how the funds will be replaced. The Hill reports that funds meant to be generated by the new 1099 will be paid for in a “clawback" provision that goes after people who get more in healthcare subsidies than entitled to under the healthcare reform law.

Federal Government Identifies 100 Data Centers for Closure This Year — The federal government has identified 100 data centers that could be shuttered by the end of the year as part of an effort by 2015 to shrink its total data center count by more than one-third, reports The Washington Post.  Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, spoke at a hearing last week and said that the government is  getting ready to move about 75 agency-identified programs to the cloud in order to comply with the new “cloud-first” policy.

New HIT Coordinator Faces Challenges — Farzad Mostashari, the newly-appointed leader of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), is going to face some stiff policy challenges.  Physicians have been slow to adopt health IT despite the incentives offered through HITECH. Also, budget battles are lava-hot on Capitol Hill, and promise to continue to be right through to the 2012 election, GovernmentHealthIT says.