The House last week voted to approve a bill that would require agencies to share custom-developed source code with each other in an effort to reduce duplicative software contracts across the Federal government.
The Source Code Harmonization And Reuse in Information Technology (SHARE IT) Act was introduced in September by Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., with backing from William Timmons, R-S.C. The bill would require Federal agencies to publicly list custom code they either make or buy and share this code with other Federal agencies.
“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,” Rep. Langworthy said Dec. 4 on the House floor. “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 federal government.”
“The SHARE IT Act addresses this problem directly,” he continued. “It mandates that agencies publicly list and share their custom code – allowing solutions to be reused across the government, saving both time and money.”
Existing policy from 2016 instructs Federal agencies to share code with one another, but it lacks requirements to report agencies that refuse to share their code. As a result, 13 Federal agencies still do not share the code they buy with the rest of government.
The SHARE IT Act would mandate code sharing across the Federal government, with exceptions for code made for national security systems, classified code, or code whose disclosure would create an identifiable risk to individual privacy.
The bill also would require agency chief information officers to oversee code sharing and submit annual reports to Congress documenting compliance.
Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Gary Peters, D-Mich., introduced their version of the bill in January 2024, and it quickly passed out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. However, the bill has yet to be acted upon by the full Senate.
