Federal ID Card Deadline Looming for Government Employees, Contractors
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- All federal agencies are required to begin issuing new secure identity cards to employees and contractors on Friday under a White House directive that is expected to cost more than $1 billion.
Analysts and government insiders are skeptical that IDs for a total of more than 10 million federal workers and contractors can be issued within two years as required by the directive issued after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
"What we're embarking upon is highly disruptive to the status quo and how we do business," says Ed Meagher, the Interior Department's deputy chief information officer. His agency awarded a contract to IBM Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corp., which is available governmentwide for the ID program.
Meagher's colleagues agree. "This is not a card implementation, it's an organizational change across government," says David Temoshok, the General Services Administration's director of identity policy and management. "We're used to PINs and passwords."
GSA, which also awarded contracts to meet the directive's requirements, is assisting 38 agencies in buying equipment such as card readers to scan IDs at building entrances or to gain access to information systems, Temoshok said.
Financial services firm Stanford Research Group predicts the effort will cost $1.3 billion. But Prabhat Agarwal, an analyst at INPUT, a government consulting and research firm in Reston, Va., said the costs will be closer to double that number. He also agrees that finishing within two years will be difficult.
Besides IBM and Lockheed, approved service providers include Northrop Grumman Corp., Accenture Ltd., General Dynamics Corp., Bearingpoint Inc., and Electronic Data Systems Corp. Other firms have approved offerings, including SI International Inc., Unisys Corp., Verisign Inc., L-1 Identity Solutions Inc., and Honeywell International Inc.
Information contained on the new badges includes a person's photo and fingerprints. There has been some internal grumbling about privacy issues regarding the new badges and the "contactless" nature of the readers. But security standards are in place and the need to meet the deadline has overridden those factors, Agarwal said.
Cultural change, not technology, is the biggest obstacle to implementation, experts say, considering some agencies are unsure if human resources, information technology, or facilities' personnel should manage the program.
At the Social Security Administration, which began issuing new IDs last week, the physical access office is running the show, said David Simonetti of consulting firm Jacob & Sundstrom, Inc.
The Homeland Security Department also has issued its first card, Temoshok said, adding that individual agencies' inspectors general will handle program oversight.
Credentialing programs are "10 percent technology, 90 percent implementation," said Jason Hart, chief executive at smart card provider ActivIdentity in Fremont, Calif., which has worked for years with the Defense Department on its common-access card program. He added that industry heavyweights have experience implementing programs with chip-embedded cards and fingerprint scans, which should ease the government's transition.
Social Security expects to take 20 months to deliver the new cards to all 85,000 employees at a cost of about $25 million, said Simonetti, who helped lead the department's efforts. |
