The federal government’s long road to cloud computing owes its beginnings in part to the ill-fated “Cash for Clunkers” program and the failure of the IT systems that were were supposed to support it, said Vivek Kundra in his first published reflections about his time as the nation’s first formally appointed federal chief information officer.

Kundra, who retired from the White House Office of Management and Budget on Aug. 12 to begin a fellowship at Harvard University, recalled his impressions arriving in America as an 11-year old son of immigrants, his career in public service, and much of the government’s dysfunctional IT programs he inherited and tried to fix over the past two and half years.

The Cash for Clunkers program proved to be a seminal moment for the young CIO:

“With the economy facing the worst recession since the Great Depression, one program – Cash for Clunkers – provided rebates to people who traded in older cars for new, more fuel-efficient ones. But just three days after its launch, the system for processing these rebates collapsed under the weight of an unexpectedly large wave of applications.

“That’s what drove home my belief that we had to move the government to the cloud.”

That decision ultimately led to Kundra’s office instituting a “Cloud First” policy, intended to prod federal agencies to accelerate “the safe and secure adoption of cloud computing” as well as take advantage of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reduce the government’s costly reliance on legacy computing systems. His office later calculated that up to $20 billion worth of federal IT spending could be shifted to cloud-based solutions.

Kundra also restated his astonishment in discovering how many data centers the federal government operated:

“When I was Director of Infrastructure Technology in Arlington County, I knew down to the street address where each of our data center facilities was located and what was in them. Yet when I asked how many data centers the Federal Government had, nobody could give me the answer.

“It took agencies eight months to produce an initial inventory of their data centers. All told, the number of Federal data centers has more than quadrupled since 1998, from 432 to more than 2000. Yet on average, they are only 27 percent utilized. This means that 73 percent of our computing power is doing nothing for the American people. That’s why the Federal Government is actively shutting down 800 data centers by 2015. Already, 81 have been shut down and a total of 373 will be closed by the end of next year.

“A great example is right here in our backyard – the Department of Health and Human Services operates 175 data centers. They recently shut down one in Rockville, Maryland, that was approximately 15,000 square feet and cost taxpayers $1.2 million annually in electricity costs alone. It’s one of 12 they’re shutting down this year.”

Kundra also recalled his personal road to public service. Born in New Delhi, India, he lived in Tanzania until he was eleven, before his parents moved to the U.S. when Kundra was 11.

“I couldn’t speak English when I first arrived. I recall my first days at school in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and seeing a couple of African American kids around my age. They reminded me of my friends in Tanzania, so I walked up to them and starting speaking in Swahili. I was promptly met by strange looks, so I started speaking even louder to make sure the beaten up. Not the warm welcome I was expecting!”

Prior to taking the U.S. CIO post, Kundra served as the chief technology officer in Mayor Fenty’s cabinet in Washington, DC; as the assistant secretary of Commerce and Technology in Governor Kaine’s cabinet in Virginia, and as the director of infrastructure in Arlington County.