Despite Congress recently rescinding $100 million in funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), a top TMF official today shared that none of the fund’s current projects are at risk from that move, and that the TMF Board plans to soon announce awards for several additional AI-driven projects.
Jessie Posilkin, TMF’s customer experience portfolio director, explained that she isn’t thrilled about the funding cut, but her team plans to move forward to solicit more proposals because “agencies really need money, and they need to capitalize on this now.”
“Americans are frustrated that lots of our government systems are not working the way that other systems in the private sector do. That problem is not going away, regardless of that rescission, and I think it’s really important that we are staying focused on that,” Posilkin said today at the Zscaler Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C.
“Congress, while they’re making that choice, also did not design our program by accident,” she added. “This is a really clever and important way to get targeted money to agencies where it ought to be, and we’re going to keep doing that. We are not only remaining open for business, [but] none of our current projects are at risk.”
The TMF, which is administered by the General Services Administration (GSA), was created in 2017 under the Modernizing Government Technology Act to provide money to Federal civilian agencies to undertake tech modernization projects.
The $100 million TMF rescission is substantially less than the $290 million clawback approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee in July 2023 when it was working on the fiscal year (FY) 2024 Financial Services and General Government (FSGG) funding bill.
The Biden administration’s FY2025 budget request unveiled last month proposes $75 million of new funding for TMF.
Posilkin pointed to the TMF’s recent call for proposals centered around AI, which she said “won’t be the last.”
“We are continuing to actively solicit more proposals,” she said. “We are still a revolving fund and we have been working on continuing to make ourselves a revolving fund over time. So, we fully expect to be making more investments in the coming years.”
The TMF official added that she’s “excited” about “a number of things in the pipeline right now” related to AI, and teased that the TMF Board will make some AI-related announcements “over the spring and summer.”
FedRAMP Prioritizing Automation
During the same conversation at the Zscaler Public Sector Summit, another GSA official shared how the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is also prioritizing AI.
Eric Mill, the executive director for cloud strategy in GSA’s Technology Transformation Services organization, shared that automation is a key focus of FedRAMP’s newly released roadmap for 2024-2025.
“FedRAMP has talked about automation for some time, we really want to make some concrete strides on that in the near future,” Mill said. “We felt it was very important for us to start showing some of the direction that we know we need to take, that people have been asking for … for years and to start trying to make it concrete.”
The program is still in search of a new director after Brian Conrad stepped down from his position as acting director of FedRAMP on March 22. Conrad started at Zscaler today as its new head of global compliance, authorizing authority liaison.
Nevertheless, Mill said that GSA felt it was important to get “some traction early so we can understand how to keep calibrating that roadmap.”
“Certainly, when a new director comes in, they’re going to have a lot of opportunity to understand what’s working and where to go and shape that,” Mill said.
GSA held information sessions on April 1 and April 3 about the upcoming FedRAMP director role, which will open for applications on USAJobs later this month.
