White House 2024 budget requests $200M for TMF
In its budget request for fiscal 2024 released Thursday, the Biden administration has called for an additional $200 million to support federal IT modernization via the Technology Modernization Fund.
The request comes as the General Services Administration-managed TMF is still spending but coming to the end of the $1 billion injection it received as part of the American Rescue Plan in 2021.
Per the budget documents released by the Office of Management and Budget, the TMF has invested more than $700 million across 38 IT modernization projects at 22 federal agencies.
But demand for the funding remains high, as the TMF board has received more than 220 proposals worth north of $3.5 billion total.
“The Administration is focused on understanding where agencies are on their IT modernization journeys and making intentional investments at the right time to enable secure technology and innovation to advance from year to year,” the budget request explains.
It adds: “The TMF has proven to be a catalyst to show what is possible across Government—and to scale lessons learned.”
The $200 million is a slightly scaled-back request compared to the $300 million the Biden administration called for in last year’s proposal.
It hasn’t been easy historically for the White House to convince appropriators to fund the TMF at request levels. For instance, last year’s $300 million TMF supplement request resulted in just $50 million of additional funding, despite the urging of some top lawmakers to fund the program at the requested levels.
The most recent investments under the TMF came last month totaling $41 million with a $23.3 million award to the Social Security Administration to accelerate the implementation of multi-factor authentication, an $11.1 million investment to improve the reliability and security of the Treasury Department’s Treasury Foreign Intelligence Network system, and a $6.2 million injection to speed the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s adoption of a zero-trust cybersecurity architecture.
