White House wants $75M for Technology Modernization Fund in fiscal 2025 — down from $200M in 2024 request

After years of seeing Congress walk back budget requests for the Technology Modernization Fund during the annual appropriations process, the Biden administration on Monday made its latest ask to appropriators of $75 million to support federal tech modernization projects through the TMF.

The $75 million request is a significant decrease from prior budget requests: $200 million for fiscal 2024 — a figure that House appropriators have tried to zero out — and $300 million in fiscal 2023.

In total, the Biden administration requested $75.1 billion for IT spending across civilian agencies in fiscal 2025, a small uptick from the $74.4 billion it asked for in 2024.

“To support IT modernization efforts, the Budget also includes an additional $75 million for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), an innovative investment program that gives agencies additional ways to deliver services to the American public quickly,” the budget request reads.

It also highlights the “more than $750 million” the fund has invested in federal IT projects since its inception across 48 investments and 27 agencies (though those numbers are a bit higher as listed on the TMF’s website).

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration, with Congress’ support, in 2021 issued a $1 billion injection through the American Rescue Plan to drive rapid modernization and close some of the most pressing digital service and cybersecurity gaps across the federal government.

But since then, the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget — the two agencies that lead the administration of the fund with its board — have fought an uphill battle to convince lawmakers to meet the Biden administration’s requested levels of funding for the TMF.

Last summer, for instance, the House Appropriations Committee said in a summary of the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill that issues funding for the TMF that it wants to eliminate funding for the program in fiscal 2024 as part of its efforts to “cut wasteful spending” across the federal government. Congress has yet to pass a Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill for fiscal 2024. On the other side of Congress, the Senate Committee on Appropriations approved language in an earlier version of the appropriations bill for fiscal 2024 that would rescind $290 million allocated to the TMF through the American Rescue Plan.

The TMF’s hang-ups with Congress have largely centered on its repayment mechanism. When created in 2017 under the Modernizing Government Technology Act, recipients of TMF money were required by law to repay those funds within five years. But with the issuance of the $1 billion to the TMF in 2021, the Biden administration also created a “flexible” repayment policy for certain high-priority projects.

House lawmakers wrote a bill late last year to reform the TMF, requiring agencies to adhere to the original intent of the Modernizing Government Technology Act and to extend the fund through 2030, beyond its original sunset of 2025. Though that bill hasn’t been passed, GSA and OMB went ahead and updated the TMF’s repayment policy to reflect a new “consistent repayment floor with a minimum of 50% repayment,” with “rare exceptions” decided by the GSA administrator and OMB director.