Sharing Federal Digital Services with the Other Layers of Government
The U.S. and Canadian governments are both considering legislation to enable it.
With last week came the good news that the Government of Canada, in an omnibus budget bill, has included language granting the Canadian Digital Service (and its parent department) a new and important capability: Soon, knock wood, a legislative amendment will enable CDS to provide its digital platform services like GC Notify, GC Articles, and GC Forms not just to other federal departments, but to provincial, territorial, indigenous, and local governments throughout Canada, fulfilling a commitment the current government made in its 2022 budget.
The United States is not far behind. There’s a bill in the Senate right now with bipartisan support which, if passed, will enable federal agencies — like GSA’s Technology Transformation Service (TTS), home of login.gov, cloud.gov, search.gov, Federalist, and other valuable services — to make their technology services available to state, local, tribal, and territorial (“SLTT”) governments. The US bill (predictably?) bows more to the private sector than Canada’s legislation, but its intent is plainly the same: “Congress must not allow agencies at various levels of government to operate in completely independent silos, especially when Federal benefits and programs are being administered at the State, local, territorial, and Tribal levels, which, in doing so, requires far greater taxpayer resources to be spent developing and maintaining systems, programs, projects, and other services that can be better delivered and managed cooperatively between jurisdictions.”
Share this Resource:
