IT spend is flat in White House budget

The White House is proposing a very slight dip in overall IT spend while pressing on modernization priorities and workforce development.

Discounting the Department of Defense's classified spending, the White House requests spending just under $87.8 billion on IT in fiscal year 2020 -- with civilian agencies accounting for about $51 billion. The Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services take up the highest percentages by agency of federal IT spend.

The Office of Management and Budget highlights a priority IT areas in a detailed section on spending plans for fiscal year 2020, including modernization, cloud adoption, the workforce, cybersecurity and United States Digital Service expansion.

In addition to its request of $150 million in funding for the Technology Modernization Fund, the budget builds off its cloud adoption policy for agencies to continue their modernization. As of November 2018, the White House estimates, 66 percent of civilian CFO Act agencies email inboxes are now hosted by cloud services.

The budget notes OMB and the General Services Administration "are evaluating the best mechanisms for normalizing federal security requirements" so FedRAMP-approved providers can be reused across agencies.

The White House also gives the United States Digital Service team a specific shout out for its modernization, customer experience and information security work. The budget notes login.gov, government-wide bug bounties and vulnerability disclosures, as well as IT procurement. The budget also notes that USDS will continue its Digital IT Acquisition Professional Program, a certification program for digital services contracting for civilian agencies, and work with the Office of Federal Procurement Policy to scale it across government.