House bill wants CIOs, agency heads to hit the gas on legacy IT phase-outs
Agencies would be pushed to pick up the pace on the elimination of legacy IT systems under a new bill from a bipartisan group of House lawmakers.
The Legacy IT Reduction Act of 2026 (H.R.8408) from Reps. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., William Timmons, R-S.C., Eric Burlison, R-Mo., and Byron Donalds, R-Fla., would require agency chief information officers to lead the charge on lessening the federal government’s reliance on and expenditures for aging systems.
The first step in that reduction would be a CIO-led initiative to inventory every piece of legacy technology still in use or maintained by their respective agencies within a year of the legislation becoming law, according to the bill text.
With that information in hand, the director of the Office of Management and Budget would then issue guidance that takes into account how an office uses the outdated tech, whether it’s connected to a non-legacy system, the costs involved in keeping it maintained, and the expected date of retirement, among other details.
Within two years of the bill’s enactment, each agency head would be tasked with developing an “information resource management strategic plan” that lays out the steps the department intends to take on either updating, modernizing, retiring or disposing of the legacy IT systems. The entire process would be repeated every five years.
That plan would include cost estimates for each action, an assessment of the agency’s capacity to operate with or without it, and the downstream effect those actions could have on non-legacy technology.
The House and Senate Homeland Security and Oversight Committees, as well as each agency’s specific congressional oversight committee, would receive a copy of those plans from the agency leaders. The OMB director and the U.S. comptroller general would also have implementation roles to play.
Modernizing agency IT operations and retiring archaic systems has been a goal for lawmakers and watchdogs alike for years. A July 2025 report from the Government Accountability Office found that six years after the GAO identified the 10 most critical federal legacy systems in need of modernization, only three of those projects had been completed.
