Round two of TMF awards doles $23.5 million to three agencies

The Technology Modernization Board announced the second round of projects to be supported with revolving-fund money under the Modernizing Government Technology Act. The winners are the Department of Labor, the General Services Administration and, for the second time, the Department of Agriculture.

The second-round awards totaled $23.5 million. The first round, awarded in June 2018, hit $45 million. That leaves $31.5 million from the original $100 million appropriation made by Congress. Funding for 2019 is still up in the air, although key lawmakers said that once a general government appropriations bill is passed later this year, it will include TMF funding.

The TMF board, chaired by Federal CIO Suzette Kent, approved $3.5 million for Labor's plan to transition its paper-based labor certification process to digital. The goal of the project is to achieve cost savings, increase efficiency and improve citizen-facing processes.

USDA was awarded $5 million to migrate from outdated applications to the cloud departmentwide. The agency said it hopes the move will result in higher customer satisfaction, stronger cybersecurity and decreased operations costs.

The largest round-two award went to GSA to continue modernizing legacy applications, including hardware, database and application layers, to separate its applications and systems from proprietary technologies. GSA said it hopes the move will improve business operations insight through the expansion of open-source technologies.

"Technology is a key enabler for government and we must make sure our technology capabilities are modern, secure and resilient," Kent said. "Awards today will drive specific citizen and agency benefits, but also create roadmaps and learnings that will be leveraged across other agencies with similar challenges."

At a recent event hosted by GSA, Liz Cain, executive director of GSA's TMF Program Management Office, said the board was weighing about three dozen proposals from 12 different agencies.

Details on the projects awarded to date are posted on the TMF website.