SSA taps TMF to upgrade online services

The Social Security Administration is getting about $30 million from the Technology Modernization Fund across three projects, the General Services Administration announced Tuesday. 

The government’s revolving fund for federal IT also announced a nearly $20 million investment in the Department of Housing and Urban Development on Tuesday. 

The funding announcement comes as the TMF stares down potential problems with cash flow now that it’s spent the $1 billion Congress gave it in a pandemic relief package.

For SSA, the announcement may help the agency with its tech goals, even as it begs lawmakers for more funding.

The agency is getting $19.5 million to rid itself of paper and transition to electronic signatures and an online document upload platform it says could save the public 1.3 million hours in travel time — by filling out paperwork online rather than in an SSA office — by 2028. 

A second, $9 million investment from the TMF will fund an effort to simplify notices and move them online. 

Many of the millions of notices the agency sends out currently are complicated and poorly designed, the GSA announcement notes, meaning that SSA has to field more calls to explain itself. 

The agency plans to use the money to create guidance on user-centered design, build new digital tools and modernize backend systems to improve how beneficiaries experience the agency.

“We’re eliminating as many pain points as possible across forms that Americans use most often, and the TMF funds will help us accelerate that work,” said Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley in a statement. “This means faster and more error-free processing and better service to our customers, which Americans deserve.”

SSA is also getting $1.9 million to use artificial intelligence for disability claims processing. 

That includes enhancing existing tools at the agency including the Intelligent Medical Language Analysis Generation, or IMAGEN, which helps employees find and organize evidence used to make disability determinations. 

TMF also awarded HUD $19.8 million for an enterprise identity and access management solution — a followup to a $14.8 million TMF investment in HUD’s identity credential and access management from 2022. That included moving the agency’s Federal Housing Administration Connection to Login.gov.

The latest HUD funding will take the “smaller scale TMF investment” and bring it agency-wide, per the announcement. The agency has over 230 system applications with about 10,000 internal users, in addition to over 500,000 external ones. 

“These TMF investments will enable both agencies to drive secure digital transformation forward, demonstrating a new way of modernizing government services and providing interactions that meet today’s expectations,” Clare Martorana, federal chief information officer and chair of the TMF board, said in a statement. 

The funding announcements come as supporters advocate for lawmakers to put more capital into the TMF. GSA has committed all of the $1 billion it received from a pandemic relief bill — accounting for 52 of the 67 current project investments — meaning that without additional funding from Congress, its repayment structure will be put to the test in its ability to sustain the fund.

A GSA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW that the fund's current balance is $157 million, and with incoming repayments from agencies the fund will have between $180 million and $200 million to spend in the next few years.

“Despite significantly higher repayment amounts, the fund will be spent down over the coming decade without additional investment," the spokesperson said. "Additional investment in TMF is crucial for the continued modernization of federal IT infrastructure and further supporting agency missions and national security objectives.”