Management
Where does the TMF Board go from here?
What would you do with a billion dollars?
The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) used to be one small way the federal government could help a few agencies push along their modernization projects with some extra support. But the fund has now taken on an new significance following a $1 billion investment in the American Rescue Plan, along with relaxed repayment guidelines and an aggressive cybersecurity agenda put forth by the White House.
With the new money and an unprecedented surge in proposals, questions arise about whether the board overseeing the TMF has been adequately organized and scaled to efficiently identify and implement projects capable of revolutionizing government technology.
Lane Becker, a former General Services Administration (GSA) official who helped stand up the TMF during its initial launch, said "the missing opportunity here is to think about how we spend money on technology in a new way."
The TMF board "could use the money to thoughtfully architect a structure that transforms the way we spend money on technology," Becker, who now leads the education non-profit Wikimedia, told FCW in a recent interview. "Or, we can take the billion dollars and do what we always do: Try to get rid of as much of it as possible, as fast as we possibly can, and shove projects through the door."
"My frustration is that the latter one is what appears to be happening," he added.
TMF proposals surge following $1 billion cash infusion
Prior to the $1 billion investment, the TMF funded 12 medium- and small-scale IT projects across seven agencies. Federal CIO Clare Martorana said at a May event that she expected to receive less than 100 "pretty robust" proposals ahead of a June deadline to begin priority reviews.
By July, Martorana told Congress the board had received 108 proposals from 43 agencies, totaling $2.1 billion in requests for funding. The board has continued to receive additional proposals since then, while accepting projects on a rolling basis and releasing key guidance for agencies hoping to gain more clarity around the process.
To cope with the surge in proposals, Martorana and other top board members began meeting multiple days a week to review projects ranging across four main priorities: modernizing high-priority systems, cybersecurity, public-facing digital services and cross-government services. The board also announced it was adding several alternative members after an influx in proposals following the relaxed repayment guidelines.
"The board and the [program management office] are adjusting, and we're scaling very quickly to meet the demand of proposals as they're coming in," Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat said at MITRE's Center for Data-Driven Policy event in June. "We need to make sure that we maintain the quality, the governance and the rigor that made all of the prior awarded projects successful."
In an April letter sent to GSA and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the House Oversight and Reform Committee pressed both agencies to develop a plan to address how the program management office (PMO) supporting the TMF "will be scaled appropriately to handle the volume of project proposals from agencies."
Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), who signed onto the letter along with four of his colleagues, told FCW he wanted to learn how the Biden administration was planning to "increase the capacity of both the TMF Board and program management office in order to accommodate the influx of agency proposals for TMF funds."
Board operations continue to scale as funding and interest boom
GSA did not answer questions about how many staffers worked within the PMO, but a spokesperson told FCW the office was "actively adding additional staff members from within the agency" and "looking at options including detailees from across the government for surge and expertise support."
"The Technology Modernization Fund Program Management Office continues to scale to meet the needs of the TMF including the $1 billion provided in the American Rescue Plan," a GSA spokesperson told FCW in an emailed statement. "During the budget formulation process, budget requests are developed with information known at that time. GSA will continue to scale the PMO to support the full needs of the TMF."
Congress first allocated $100 million to the revolving fund in fiscal year 2018, followed by annual investments of $25 million over the next two years. Officials said the initial approach to building the fund allowed the board to begin putting in place efficient and rigorous oversight procedures, all while ensuring the several modernization projects it supported were successful and that loans were being repaid on time.
However, strict repayment requirements made applying to the TMF less enticing for many agencies, as lawmakers called for relaxed repayment guidelines and increased funding to help move along government-wide cybersecurity and modernization efforts.
Those calls were answered earlier this year when the new administration included a $1 billion investment for the TMF in the American Rescue Plan, and relaxed repayment guidelines were announced for projects addressing critical cybersecurity and modernization issues. After decades of underinvestment in IT across government agencies, the TMF became a symbol of hope for a consistent and increased cybersecurity investment -- and even a federal cloud modernization moonshot.
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September 01, 2021 at 05:01AM
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Where does the TMF Board go from here? - FCW.com
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