Is IT spending at risk because of fed's inaction on deficit reduction?

Federal spending on IT in the next fiscal year could be hurt by the failure of the Congressional Super Committee to agree on a deficit reduction agreement last week, although experts still expect purchases to rise one or two percent.

Federal budget proposals are set to start landing on desks in February, though how administrators are hit by the requirements for the government to cut $1.2 trillion in spending over the next decade will vary.

Because the government already has begun an aggressive program to reduce spending through the use of a variety of unified communications platforms and an increasing reliance on cloud services, it is likely to continue that spending, said Ray Bjorklund, chief knowledge officer at Deltek. The government plans to close 34 percent of its own data centers, about 962 operations,  by 2015.

IDC analyst Shawn McCarthy agreed, but warned that as non-IT related programs are cut to reduce the deficit, IT spending associated with those programs will be cut, too.

For more:
- see this NetworkWorld article

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