F you wanted to find out how much money the federal government was spending to clean up toxic waste, you might run into difficulty. The question is simple enough, but the answer could take months to find.

For one thing, half a dozen agencies handle toxic cleanup. But the greatest problem is that those agencies' computers cannot communicate with one another. Their reports cannot be scanned in a single search.

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The problem is magnified by decades of uncoordinated computer purchases by the government. Federal agencies have historically bought computers and software on their own, producing a rat's nest of technology, from mainframes to I.B.M. clones to Wang computers.

In an attempt to address the issue, the Senate passed a bill recently that would require federal agencies to learn to speak the same language. The E-Government Act, introduced by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, would require the federal government to make information easy for citizens to use.

"It's really a way of busting bureaucracy, which makes it very appealing," said Patricia McGinnis, president and chief executive of the Council for Excellence in Government, a nonprofit group in Washington. "Basically, we don't have a seamless system of data collection, analysis and use."

The bill would allocate $345 million over four years to establish a fund to help federal agencies work together on projects to improve their online services. It would also establish an Office of Electronic Government, which would be part of the Office of Management and Budget, and its top administrator would be appointed by the president.

Among other things, the bill would require federal agencies to set standards for the use of electronic signatures, to seek public comment on what information to post on the Internet and to assess how to protect citizens' personal information from abuse.

The bill stretches the definition of e-government. Typically, the term has referred to the practice of government agencies' placing information and services within easy reach of the public on the Internet. The E-Government Act would expand that definition to include how well agencies use technology to improve the efficiency of government.

Kevin Landy, counsel on Senator Lieberman's staff, says that federal agencies spend more than $1 billion a year on such e-government efforts and that the new office would help them spend that money more efficiently.

Though the problem of diverse computer systems may never be solved completely, government technologists see a partial solution in extensible markup language, known as XML, a method of coding information so that it can be transmitted on the Internet and read by different computer systems. In theory, if agencies could translate their data into the same language, they could read one another's documents.

"XML is a theoretical answer," said John de Ferrari, assistant director of the information technology team at the General Accounting Office. "It serves as an overlay that should allow you to get really precise searches."

As the accounting office pointed out in a report in April, however, XML presents inherent problems as well. The language sets standards for tagging information but does not dictate which commands should be used. For example, agencies could choose to tag purchase orders in several ways: , , or .

As the agencies independently create tags for their documents, they could make a bigger data mess.

"We could end up creating a Tower of Babel," Mr. de Ferrari said.

Though individual agencies are already working to develop standards for XML codes, the E-Government Act would require that agencies centrally coordinate the development of standards for XML.

But the very idea of developing standards creates its own issues. In the past, the government's haphazard approach to computer purchasing may have benefited a number of technology companies, but now that agencies have started establishing standards to allow their systems to communicate, the companies are worried that government programmers might create proprietary software instead of using commercial products.

Jeanne Foust, director of governmental affairs for ESRI, a company in Redlands, Calif., that makes computer mapping software, said it was pleased that the E-Government Act was giving this area of computing a higher status in Washington. But she said the company would like some clarification in the bill on whether federal agencies would use commercial software to share information among systems or create their own.

"The best way to go down that path is to let the commercial marketplace develop those tools," Ms. Foust said. "We don't need the federal government to develop interoperability."

David LeDuc, director of public policy for the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington, added that although new standards can present opportunities for software companies, they can also inadvertently limit the advancement of technology. "Standards can inhibit growth in the industry," he said. "The standards the government sets are big enough to affect the industry."

Mr. de Ferrari of the General Accounting Office said that adhering to XML, a nonproprietary technology, would open the market to many software vendors.

"That's the beauty of XML," he said. "It is an open standard. It's really just saying, `We want software that has these capabilities.' It's not locking into any particular product."

The plan to create common codes among federal agencies is a cost-cutting move, he said.

"A concern that was raised when we did our study was, if the government didn't get its act together, we would be playing up to the middleware vendors when all these systems can't talk to each other," he said. "In terms of translation, that could become very expensive."

Of course, the process of translation could take years.

Information officers at the Defense Department, Mr. de Ferrari said, are now sorting out how to handle a single piece of information: the format for names. The format is not consistent even within the department, and information officers are deliberating over whether to spell names out, use a middle initial or just list the first and last names. The process is tedious, he said.

In the end, federal information officers hope to create a system that will allow feats that sound simple but are now impractical. The Office of Management and Budget wants, for example, to extract data from all federal agencies to compare their budgets.

Such a system could leave agencies feeling exposed, of course.

"In general," Mr. de Ferrari said, "the idea of sharing your data is threatening."