A new report from MeriTalk – issued in partnership with Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. – reveals that cybersecurity is the top priority for Federal chief information officers (CIOs) in fiscal year (FY) 2025.
However, the congressman reminded Federal CIOs that security cannot be achieved without modern IT infrastructure.
At MeriTalk’s Tech Tonic event on Sept. 19, Rep. Connolly led a discussion surrounding the “Tech Tonic: FY25 Federal CIO Forecast” report, which officially launched today.
The inaugural report features a survey of 12 CFO Act agency CIOs – dubbed the “Digital Dozen” – followed by in-depth interviews to examine CIOs’ top technology priorities for FY2025. Notably, 67 percent of Federal CIOs say cybersecurity is a top priority for the coming year.
“If you want to have effective cybersecurity, you have to have the right IT platforms in place,” Rep. Connolly said. “If they’re vulnerable, you can do whatever you want in cybersecurity, but you’ve still got an underlying vulnerability that has to be addressed.”
“We got to get the basics right. We’ve got to get the architecture and the platforms right in the Federal government in order to protect the assets, in order to make sure we’re cyber secure,” the congressman emphasized.
Rep. Connolly – who is ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, IT, and Government Innovation and an author of the 2014 Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) – pointed to the FITARA Scorecard for helping agencies to modernize their IT platforms.
“Paying attention to every one of these agencies and sub-agencies is really important, and so we set about to try to modernize IT in the Federal government [through] FITARA,” Rep. Connolly said. “The good news is we’ve made a lot of progress.”
The latest edition of the FITARA Scorecard published on Friday featured the highest number of ‘A’ grades on a single scorecard. Notably, as of Friday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said implementation of FITARA has resulted in $31.4 billion in cost savings across the Federal government.
However, as Federal agencies look to make more progress in their IT modernization journeys, Federal CIOs said that budget constraints and consistent funding are some of their biggest roadblocks.
Rep. Connolly said that one thing Congress needs to address is providing more funding for the General Services Administration’s Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). The fund was created in 2017 under the Modernizing Government Technology Act to provide money to Federal civilian agencies to undertake tech modernization projects.
“The last time I looked, the appropriators have appropriated $25 million [for TMF]. Now, no one’s going to be incentivized by $25 million – the scope of what we’re talking about is just too huge, and that tells you a lot about where Congress is,” Rep. Connolly said. “There is a lot of education that has to happen with my colleagues. They have to be seized with this mission. They have to understand its criticality.”
For those looking to gain more insights from the Digital Dozen on their priorities for FY2025, please check out the full report here.
