GAO finds spotty agency compliance with IDEA Act requirements

The reporting that agencies are required by a 2018 law to do on various website and digital services benchmarks is often incomplete and inconsistent, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

The congressional watchdog found that full compliance with the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act — which mandates annual reports from the 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies on federal website standards and eight modernization requirements — is lacking, resulting in submitted reports with “varying levels of content and detail.”

“The lack of detailed guidance contributed to the varied reporting, and the reporting requirement ended without producing consistent reports that could be used to reliably determine agency performance and government-wide progress,” the GAO stated.

On the law’s modernization callouts — requiring websites and digital services to be accessible, consistent, customizable, encrypted, mobile-friendly, not duplicative, searchable and user data-driven — the GAO found some agencies that had addressed all eight requirements and others that had completed none, per submitted 2022 and 2023 reports.

“In addition, agencies submitted 84 (or 70 percent) of the 120 total required annual 21st Century IDEA reports,” the watchdog noted. “Further, the contents of the reports, including the extent to which they addressed the eight modernization requirements, varied significantly.”

In 2023, 109 out of 192 modernization requirements — eight per each CFO Act agency — were met, up from 84 the previous year. But over the same time period, the number of unaddressed requirements climbed from 28 to 35. 

There were several positives in the GAO’s report, including the singling out of seven agencies that met all eight requirements in 2023: USAID, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the departments of Commerce, Education, Homeland Security and Interior. 

The GAO’s report also examined four offices identified by the Office of Management and Budget as High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) — which provide or fund “customer-facing services that have a high impact on the public” — that are meeting the 21st Century IDEA Act mark. 

The public-facing websites of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency, Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service and DHS’s Transportation Security Administration, the GAO said, all leveraged resources from the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services to “meet the requirements related to modernizing federal websites and digital services and enhancing the user’s customer experience.” 

Those resources include FedRAMP, Search.gov, the U.S. web design system, Login.gov, and various survey platforms, the GAO reported. All four HISPs additionally made use of OMB’s customer experience team.