Frank Konkel

President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget request seeks $150 million in new funding for the Technology Modernization Fund, which provides seed money to governmentwide IT projects that agencies are ultimately expected to pay back. So far, TMF has funded seven projects totaling close to $90 million of the total $125 million Congress authorized for the program. The president’s request for more TMF funding is far from a certainty. Appropriations for TMF were only authorized through the 2018 and 2019 budgets through the Modernizing Government Technology Act.

Microsoft is making moves to target a growing multibillion market: hosting, storing and running the US government’s most sensitive classified secrets and data. The company announced it will join rival Amazon as the only commercial cloud providers with the security capabilities to host secret classified data by the end of the first quarter of 2019. Microsoft’s announcement comes days before the Pentagon will accept bids on its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, which it will award to a single cloud service provider.

Under a new reorganization plan from the Trump administration, federal agencies would have less than four years to digitize all their paper processes. The White House released its overarching plan to reorganize the federal government, and, as with most of the administration’s management plans, it emphasizes technology’s role in the future of government. The plan calls for digitizing all of the federal government’s recordkeeping by Dec. 31, 2022, at which time the National Archives and Records Administration would stop accepting paper records from agencies.

Next stop for Rep. Will Hurd’s Modernizing Government Technology Act: the Senate. The bill passed the House in a floor vote, highlighting the bipartisan concern lawmakers share regarding the nation’s aging federal technology, which includes at least 10 critical systems more than four decades old.

The MGT Act’s journey through the House was swift, sailing through the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee only days after its April 28 introduction. Companion legislation in the Senate, however, is moving slower. The bill, a bipartisan effort that included input from the White House, the Government Accountability Office and top Democrats, would create two new ways for agencies to modernize their IT systems. First, it would allow CFO Act agencies to create working IT capital funds. Hurd has referred to these funds as “the meat” of the bill, and it would allow agencies to recoup savings from existing modernization efforts rather than give cash back to the Treasury Department. Hypothetically, an agency that realizes savings from moving to the cloud could hold on to the savings for up to three years, so long as it uses those savings for further modernization efforts. In addition to agency-specific working capital funds, the MGT Act creates a central modernization fund and authorized appropriators to fund it up to $250 million per year for two years. Agencies strapped for cash could then make their cases to borrow against the fund to modernize certain systems. The final say for what agencies get money will come down to the commissioner of the Technology Transformation Service, an office within the General Services Administration.

In recent years, legacy IT has shaped up to be one of the government’s biggest tech challenges. There’s a reason the legacy tech challenge is so widespread across government: Modernizing is hard and can be expensive. Yet, some agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, have done just that. In 2013, the year CIO David Bray took over as the agency’s top tech official, FCC was spending 85 percent of its $64 million IT budget on legacy systems. Less than four years later, FCC has reduced its legacy spend by 35 percent on the back of an ambitious modernization plan heavy on achieving small wins, moving to cloud computing and ultimately reducing contracted personnel.

The tech group 18F took some heat when a General Administration Services inspector general audit found it skirting compliance rules and security procedures, but the department’s leader says the Obama-era tech unit is still committed to hacking bureaucracy. “Our job is transforming technology in government, and our job is to push against policies and regulations that are in the way of government being effective and delivering good services,” saidTechnology Transformation Service Commissioner Rob Cook. “We’ve realized we need to do that, and we’re emphasizing changing what the compliance is rather than going around it.”

Cook said 18F was alerted to the aforementioned IG report in the summer and has spent the past six months “addressing most everything” in it. Those issues included failing to get chief information officer approval on $24.8 million worth of contracts and foregoing approval on 100 of 116 software tools the tech unit used.

Mikey Dickerson, the first administrator for the US Digital Service, will leave his post Jan 20, along with a slew of other political appointees as President-elect Trump is inaugurated. The leadership for USDS—President Barack Obama’s original tech team, with its 200 recruits—will now fall to director of engineering, Matt Cutts, who will step up to acting administrator on Inauguration Day.

Cutts broke the news on his blog Jan 18, and also elaborated on his decision to resign from Google—his last day at the tech giant was Dec 31—and instead take the reins at USDS. The impact of public service, Cutts said, tops a fatter paycheck in Silicon Valley. “The work that USDS does is critical to the American people, and I’m honored to continue that tradition,” he wrote. “Working for the government doesn’t pay as well as a big company in Silicon Valley. We don’t get any free lunches. Many days are incredibly frustrating. All I can tell you is that the work is deeply important and inspiring, and you have a chance to work on things that genuinely make people's lives better. A friend who started working in this space several years ago told me, ‘these last five years have been the hardest and worst and best and most rewarding I think I will ever have.’”

Forrester Research expects the US tech sector will grow less under President-elect Donald Trump than it would have under Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Forrester reworked its 2017 US tech market projections after Trump’s November victory because it anticipated a Clinton victory with more predictable policies similar to the last eight years under President Barack Obama. Forrester still expects the US tech sector to grow under Trump by 4.3 percent up to $1.49 trillion in 2017, compared to $1.44 trillion spent on goods, services and staff in 2016. Forrester’s pre-election forecast anticipated a 5.1 percent jump under an incoming Clinton administration, up to $1.51 trillion.

“Our pre-election forecast for the US tech market assumed the election of Hillary Clinton as president and the continuation of the Obama administration's policies,” said Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Andrew Bartels, the author of the report. “The election of Donald Trump as president introduces significant but still undefined shifts in the US economy's direction.”

Since President Barack Obama was elected eight years ago, a great deal about technology has changed inside and outside the federal government.

“I think if I were to summarize [Obama’s legacy], it would be a seat at the table,” said Aneesh Chopra, whom Obama appointed as the first U.S. chief technology officer in 2009. As an assistant to the president, Chopra reported directly to President Obama, ensuring ideas from the CTO—often focused on innovation—are heard. “In prior administrations, the notion of the role of technology was largely relegated to back-office procurement activity,” Chopra added. “It was largely an operational conversation around how governments perform.” Instead, President Obama sought innovation from tech gurus and others because, as Chopra said, “policymaking has to take into account how technology will advance” complex and important issues like health care and economic growth.

In other words, President Obama helped take technology out of the back office and into the forefront of government. “Kudos to this administration for dragging the government into the digital era,” said Trey Hodgkins, senior vice president of the Information Technology Alliance for Public Sector.

The Hillary Clinton e-mail saga continues. On Sept 23, the House Oversight and Government Reform committee voted 19-15 to hold Bryan Pagliano, formerly a tech aide for Clinton while she served as Secretary of State, for failing to testify about Clinton’s private e-mail server that he maintained. “Mr. Pagliano is a crucial fact witness in this committee’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business,” said Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT).

Pagliano, through his attorney, previously warned that were he to testify publicly, he would simply invoke his Fifth Amendment rights. Nonetheless, the resolution passed along party lines. “Mr. Pagliano’s attorney asserts because his client took the Fifth before the Select Committee on Benghazi, he shouldn’t be required to provide testimony to this committee. This is not a good faith argument,” Chairman Chaffetz said. Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-MD) accused Republican counterparts of seeking a “photo op” and “ready-made campaign commercial.” “No matter what anyone says, that is not a legitimate legislation purpose,” Ranking Member Cummings said.