The much ballyhooed position of CTO for the United States which President Obama included among his campaign promises looks to be going the same direction as most campaign promises, which is to say, by the wayside.

Nextgov is reporting that Washington DC CTO Vivek Kundra, once rumored to be in the running for the federal CTO position, is now poised to be appointed "Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology" at the Office of Management and Budget. Perhaps more interesting, though, is the implication in the article that this relatively obscure position in the OMB will be ultimately a more powerful one than that of the still-to-be-named CTO. The CTO position, it turns out, will not report directly to Obama as had been discussed, but instead to the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, an even more obscure department than OMB.

I won't get into the politics of the decision, which may make a certain sort of sense in light of other pressing matters facing the Administration, but it's disappointing that as visionary and capable an individual as Kundra looks to be getting shuffled away into a dusty file drawer somewhere in the depths of the bureaucracy rather than shining brightly at the forefront of a movement to upgrade the government to use technology on par with the highest capabilities of the private sector.