Financing the Computer Plan for All (1985)

This article offers a detailed analysis, based on archives, testimonies and reports, of the set-up that enabled the Socialist government, in 1985, to finance the plan Informatique Pour Tous (IPT). This vast plan to equip schools with microcomputers had not been foreseen in the initial finance law and for political reasons, the government did not want to amend this law. It was therefore necessary, in a period of budgetary rigor, with a budget already strictly negotiated, to release 2 billion, of which 1.5 for computer equipment. Completely atypical from the point of view of the budgetary habits and customs imposed on the National Education system, this IPT plan loses its singularity if one considers it as a variant of aid to industry, an expenditure item whose opacity was regularly pointed out. These irregularities were almost immediately known and denounced in the political arena, and later documented by the Cour des comptes, without much consequence for the administration or the politicians. The approval by the Constitutional Council of the transfer of a number of expenditures from the general budget to the Telecommunication annex budget had already paved the way for the mechanisms used to finance the IPT plan. Finally, the episode shows the Budget Directorate in the dual role of guardian and director of a budgetary order, the appearance of which it must, politically, preserve when it has been unable to safeguard its substance.