TMF will have $200M to spend next year without appropriations, official says

The Technology Modernization Fund will have $200 million to spend on projects without congressional appropriations next fiscal year because of repayments from agencies that have already received funding, according to Jessie Posilkin, the program’s acting executive director.

“We are now at the point that we get to say that dollars have come into the TMF through appropriations, gone out to agencies, come back and been reinvested, which was really the dream,” Posilkin said at the GovExec Infrastructure and Modernization Forum Thursday. 

The pre-appropriations funding figure comes as the authorization for TMF is set to expire after Sept. 30 unless Congress acts. A Senate continuing resolution, which the House is expected to take up next week, would extend the program through Dec. 11. TMF has historically enjoyed support from both political parties and procurement trade groups, though some lawmakers have in the past been hesitant to appropriate more money for the fund with savings slow to trickle in.

Amid the uncertainty, TMF expects to announce a fresh slate of projects it will be funding at the end of September, Posilkin said. She declined to name specific projects but said “they’re pretty consistent with the work we’ve done before.”

“Some of it may be extending or expanding past work. Some of it may be bringing in AI coding. I'm excited that I think at least one agency is very seriously looking at how they use agentic AI and how we can potentially expand that safely across government,” she added. 

In June, TMF announced a call for proposals encouraging agencies to pitch projects around two Trump administration priorities: permitting technology and artificial intelligence adoption. The call did not bar agencies from proposing projects outside of the two priority areas.

In the next month or two, TMF will release fiscal year 2025 data on time savings and cost avoidance, according to Posilkin. Fiscal year 2024 data showed agencies saved an estimated 378 million hours, which equates to a return on investment of over $12 billion, due to TMF investments, she said.

The data points contextualize a Government Accountability Office report released last month that concluded TMF has realized little savings for the federal government so far but will yield significant savings later. The head of the General Services Administration, which administers TMF, criticized the report for not accounting for cost avoidance, time savings, security enhancements and operational improvements.

TMF will also announce a refresh to its board in the next month or so, Posilkin said. She expects four new people to be added to the board, but added that she is unsure if the next acting federal CIO will serve as the acting board chair for TMF. Greg Barbaccia, the current federal CIO, is leaving government at the end of the month for a position at Palantir.