Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of my bill, the Source Code Harmonization and Reuse in Information Technology Act, otherwise known as the SHARE IT Act. This bill is a commonsense solution to a longstanding, overlooked inefficiency within our Federal Government. Each year, the government spends approximately $6 billion on software development, a portion of which funds the creation of custom code for agency-specific programs. These investments are often necessary to manage the complexity of government operations, but without a clear mandate for code sharing, agencies are left operating in silos. This leads to costly duplication as they pay contractors to recreate solutions that already exist elsewhere within the vast sums of the Federal Government. In 2016, the Office of Management and Budget introduced a Federal source code policy which led to the establishment of code.gov, a platform housing over $1 billion worth of custom-developed software. However, without such strong enforcement mechanisms, the full potential of that policy has yet to be realized. Several Federal agencies still do not consistently share their code, resulting in millions of dollars of taxpayer money being wasted on duplicative efforts. The SHARE IT Act addresses this problem directly.…”