Pennsylvania Bill Would Rein in Statehouse IT Spending

(TNS) — Two local state representatives are tackling redundant waste in Harrisburg with a new bill.

State Reps. Paul Friel, D-26th Dist., and Joe Ciresi, D-146th Dist., are introducing the UNITE Act, which stands for Unify Network Information Technology Efficiency.

The bill would cut unnecessary information technology spending across the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s four legislative caucuses by requiring state House and Senate Democrats — and House and Senate Republicans — to work with the same information technology providers, saving money and streamlining cybersecurity in Pennsylvania’s Capitol, according to a press release announcing the bill’s introduction.

Currently, each caucus has its own independent system, and they do not always communicate well with each other. The reason, according to Friel, is mistrust.

The bill proposal comes just days after PennLive ran an article pointing out that running four different, redundant systems costs Pennsylvania taxpayers $34 million. It was part of an investigative series on government spending in Harrisburg.

In a PennLive Facebook video, reporter Tirzah Christopher, who wrote the series, noted that “Pennsylvania has the largest, professional full-time legislature in America, and you’re paying for it.”

The legislature, she said, “has more than 2,600 employees and spends $62 million every year” and consistently budget themselves more money than they spend. In 2025, the legislators budgeted $415 million for their operations despite having $307 million in reserves, Christopher reported.

“Your tax dollars are paying for four different Wi-Fi networks, at least six different IT departments, and three print shops here at the capital. Why? Because the House Republicans, House Democrats, Senate Republicans, and Senate Democrats don’t trust each other enough to share their resources. So they each built their own separate tech infrastructure,” Christopher said on a separate Facebook video.

“The four groups each work with at least 104 vendors,” she reported. “Here’s the thing, almost half these vendors have multiple separate contracts with all four groups. House Democrats spent less than $1 million from their special leadership account,” she reported. But House Republicans “spent over $25 million from their special leadership account.”

“Having multiple expensive IT systems and Wi-Fi networks because of partisan mistrust is not a sustainable solution,” Friel said in the press release. “However, there is an opportunity here — I believe we can save tax dollars and build a better working relationship with our colleagues across the aisle and in the other chamber. We need to make sure that state government works efficiently for the people, and this is a good first step.”

“In order to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars, we need to look for efficiencies and remove redundancies. The cost savings that would be achieved by combining the IT functions of all four caucuses in the House and Senate is something we should not pass up,” Ciresi said in the press release.

As proposed, the bill would:

Require the General Assembly to consolidate the House and Senate caucuses’ IT infrastructure, including hardware procurement, software licensing, network administration and cybersecurity services, under a single nonpartisan office within five years.
Direct the nonpartisan office to conduct a comprehensive inventory and needs assessment of systems, contracts and vendor relationships during the first year.
Require the office to report annually on its operations to the General Assembly and the public.
Preserve appropriate safeguards so that caucus staff retain access controls consistent with their legislative duties.
Eliminate unnecessary duplications of infrastructure, licensing and vendor contracts.

Friel and Ciresi said security experts who have reviewed the General Assembly’s IT arrangement agree that the four to six disparate systems increase — rather than reduce — security risk. Other states, including Maryland, Iowa, and Mississippi, already operate centralized, bipartisan IT offices that serve members of both parties without regard to which party holds the majority.

Further, this is not a new issue, and it has been brought to the legislature’s attention twice before, the sponsors said.

A 2010 statewide investigating grand jury, convened after the Bonusgate corruption scandal, recommended streamlining the legislature’s IT and purchasing operations and found that no witness could offer a credible justification for why each caucus needed its own IT budget and staff.

Then, 11 years later, a bipartisan group of House members raised the same concern in a 2021 letter to leadership. Neither effort produced reform, leading Friel and Ciresi to propose legislation to require the legislature to streamline IT operations within five years of enactment.

“The topic of redundancies and inefficiencies in the legislature, including in our IT systems, is something that has been percolating for a while and has been a topic in our office and with Paul among his colleagues,” said Laura Johnson, policy and communications manager at Friel’s North Coventry office.

However, with the legislative session ending on Nov. 30, the question of whether this bill can be passed and implemented by then is relevant.

“While there admittedly isn’t a ton of time left in this session, there is really no telling what bills might gain momentum,” Johnson replied. “So we never want to consider the time between the second budget of the session and the end of the session as lost time. We keep working on ideas and bills during that stretch of time.”