President's advisory group finds most federal IT funds being misused

Every year, federal agencies get roughly $4 billion for research and development of information technology. The goal of that funding is to bring the best available networking and communications technology into government.

But an independent study by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- a group that includes Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and Microsoft Chief Technologist Craig Mundie - has found that a scant amount of that money actually goes toward information technology development.

At the National Institutes of Health, for example, just 2 percent of the $575 million in awards were used for network research and development. The report found that about only 4 to 11 percent of awards in more than a dozen agencies were used on information technology R&D. Instead, the funds went toward infrastructure, other R&D projects, and other technology -- not for their purpose of advancing networking communications within the government.

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