Draft fiscal year 2023 spending legislation released by the House Appropriations Committee today contains $100 million of new money for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) – far below the $300 million asked for by President Biden earlier this year in his FY2023 budget request.
The House Financial Services Appropriations Subcommittee is due to mark up the FY2023 Financial Services and General Government funding bill – which contains the proposed TMF funding – on June 16.
In addition to TMF funding, the measure includes tech modernization funding for the Internal Revenue Service, election security grants, cybersecurity funding for the Treasury Department, and a 12 percent increase in total budget for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
TMF Details
The TMF – which exists to provide money to Federal civilian agencies to help them undertake IT modernization projects – currently has more than $700 million in its coffers after having received a $1 billion infusion last year from Congress.
The fund was created in 2017, and except for last year’s big funding bump, has been funded annually by Congress to the tune of $25 million to $100 million per year. TMF was created with the idea that agencies will repay the fund with savings they achieve through funded projects, but repayment terms have been relaxed to some degree over the past year.
The fund, which is administered by the General Services Administration (GSA), has near-term plans to make several hundred million dollars in new funding awards.
TMF Executive Director Raylene Yung said earlier this month that the fund is well on its way to committing most of the $1 billion it received last year to Federal agency projects. She said the fund has before it proposals that are nearing the final stages of development, and could total a “few hundred million” of awards.
Asked about the fund’s progress in working its way through the $1 billion in fusion from 2021, Yung reckoned that the TMF Board has already allocated nearly $400 million of that amount in awards to agencies.
Beyond those awards already announced, Yung said “we have a few hundred million in what I would call active proposals … they are proposals that are kind of near the final stages and are just putting on their finishing touches” that are “going to be brought before the board in the coming months.”
“So that alone you can see already takes up the majority of the billion,” she said. “Then I would say given the demand we’ve already seen, I highly anticipate we will receive more than enough new proposals that will easily allocate the remainder” of the billion-dollar infusion, Yung said.
Since the big infusion, she said the fund has received more than 130 proposals from 60 agencies and components that total over $2.5 billion. “We have more proposals … arriving every week and every month,” she added.
