The Technology Modernization Fund—a central pot of money to provide loans to agencies for IT upgrades—is a useful tool but the ongoing push to establish internal agency working capital funds will be the real success, administration officials said Wednesday.
While the TMF gets a lot of attention, the fund is only half of the modernization effort enacted as part of the Modernizing Government Technology, or MGT, Act passed in late 2017. The law also called for individual working capital funds in which agencies could deposit leftover funding from other areas to be put toward IT modernization efforts.
“The real staying power is in the working capital fund. That is the thing that is going to last. That is the thing that helps us create a more modern and nimble government going forward,” Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent said during an event Wednesday hosted by ATARC and the General Services Administration.
Kent said the main benefit of working capital funds is that it allows agencies to hold on to funding over multiple years, even if the money was originally appropriated for use within a single fiscal year. Due to long lead times with appropriations and acquisitions, the germ of an idea can take several years to come to fruition, Kent said, which flies in the face of the government’s customer-focused modernization efforts.
“If we wait two years to deliver that, that’s not being customer responsive. And we lose the trust of the citizen when we ask, ‘What should we be doing?’ then say, ‘OK, I’ll see you in four years,’” she said. “Agencies that have established the fund or are working to establish the fund are moving in the direction of supporting lasting change.”
But creating those funds was not a ..
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