AI can save veterans’ time, but TMF head says reauthorization needed for more investments

One Technology Modernization Fund investment using artificial intelligence at the Veterans Affairs Department is going to save over 2,000 years of veteran time, the fund’s acting director said in a Wednesday webinar.

During Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange 2026, Jessie Posilkin said the $7.4 million investment to digitize and centralize VA forms using AI is the type of project the TMF is gunning to get more congressional funding for.

“The idea that you could save thousands of years of people’s time, and specifically veterans who are entitled to benefits that they could not access, in my mind, is precisely the kind of thing that I want to see,” she said.

Though they’ve concluded active work on this project, Posilkin said there is more to come for the VA and other agencies as the fund decides how to spend the more than $200 million they have left, pending potential reauthorization for fiscal 2027. 

“Last year was really a period of contraction in the federal government,” she said. “It was not a time that folks were, appropriately, interested in launching new projects or thinking about taking out long-term loans without fully understanding what the shape of their agency would look like a year from then.”

But that $200 million might not stretch as far as it would have in the past, even with 100% of agencies repaying TMF loans, as the “scale and scope of government technology challenges are only going up” because of artificial intelligence, Posilkin said. 

“We are only seeing that the way that AI tooling is changing how people code is actually increasing some of the governance concerns and ability to manage information,” she said. “We are a country that continues to have really significant service delivery challenges, which is what the government should ultimately be providing. And when you have it set up that way, $200 million is actually quite the drop in the bucket.”

TMF “ideally” wants to see agencies using AI in the future, Posilkin said.

“While we’re not the earliest of adopters, we are eager to make sure that we are helping agencies meet the moment as much as possible,” she said. “Now meeting the moment actually means being quite ahead from where things were even six months ago, and I’m eager to keep doing that.”

In order to do so, however, Posilkin wants to ensure “quality” proposals also include the infrastructure and personnel needs associated with procuring new tools.

“I actually love when teams are candid about what those needs are, because we know they’re serious. We know that they’ve thought the problem all the way through, and they are not just sold by the idea that if they just buy this one magic thing, everything will be better,” she said.

Investments into government modernization are paying off, Posilkin said, saying she had a recent meeting with a venture capital firm that “shared how much faster agencies are hitting revenue targets that previously took decades [or] a decade to get to.”

“If the government wants to serve constituents well, we need to make an investment in the tools that make that possible,” she said.

The current version of the fiscal 2027 Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill authorizes $5 million for the fund, but has not yet received a floor vote in either chamber.