So a proposal for a National GIS "new deal" to save the economy has been making the rounds lately. You can grab a copy of the PDF here.  It came to my attention while reading James Fee's blog and a tidy little flamefest is afoot in the comments to his original post.  I gave it a quick read and had a pretty good chuckle. Haven't we done this at least twice already?  Anybody familiar with the USGS National Map Program? No?  How about the National Spatial Data Infrastructure?  Why don't we just fully fund/fix one of the foundering programs out there already? Lots of tasty funny business with a detailed read of the doc.  Can't you just see this thing fronted by a WebADF nightmare with national geoprocessing tasks? LOL It's sort of disappointing that this didn't involve or come out of an organization like the OGC...or that there's no mention of OGC initiatives that support an effort of this size and scale. Sean Gorman has a good rebuttal over here.  And I poached the following quote by Sean from James' original post...

I don’t think anyone is going to complain about government funding for geospatial technologies - it has the potential to be a very good investment. The question here is how do you get the most benefit for the citizenry out of that investment. I’d argue that perpetuating a proprietary legacy technology at an even more massive scale by tacking on a few buzz words - open standards, SOA etc. etc. is not the answer. Instead invest in making government data open and freely available in standard formats so that companies can innovate around it.

Nuff said!