TMF funds being spent slowly

Although the Technology Modernization Fund has awarded almost $90 million to five federal agencies for a total of seven projects, agencies so far are slow in spending it.

In a Feb. 11 post to TMF's Awarded Projects webpage, the TMF board listed all seven projects, with their accompanying awards, as well as the "spend to date" since they were named.

Of the $89 million in total allocations noted on the page for the projects, the page shows two agencies have spent $5.9 million to date. Those projects include the Department of Housing and Urban Development's spend of $4,568,028 of its $20 million award for mainframe migration. The Agriculture Department has spent $1,356,688 of its $10 million award for the Farmers.gov portal.

The remainder of the projects -- including the Energy Department's cloud email, the Labor Department's visa application transformation, the General Services Administration's NewPay and application modernization integrating flexible architectures projects and UDSA's infrastructure optimization and cloud adoption effort -- all show zeros in the "TMF Spend to Date" listing.

The TMF board began awarding funds to agencies last summer when it announced the DOE, HUD and USDA winners. The latest award went to GSA’s NewPay service.

The TMF got another $25 million in funding in the budget deal that President Donald Trump signed on Feb. 15 to avoid another government shutdown.

The number falls well short of the $100 million appropriated for the fund in fiscal year 2018 and of the $150 million the House approved last year. The fund is intended to be revolving, with agencies paying back their awards with savings the funded projects produce.