The Government has a Rare Chance to Modernize its Outdated Tech Systems. They Can’t Afford to Waste it.

Tucked away in the $1.9 trillion recovery package that President Biden signed into law in March is a line item that could revolutionize how Americans interact with their government. The provision allocates $1 billion to the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), which previously received smaller infusions of $25 million and $100 million, respectively. The fund’s purpose is to help federal agencies upgrade their cybersecurity and modernize their technology. As has been well-reported, much of the federal technology that our agencies run on is outdated, relies on near-obsolete languages like COBOL, and was designed in an era when people interacted with government primarily by mail, via phone or in person. In practical terms, the government technology we use today isn’t able to support the kinds of policies that agency heads and lawmakers want to enact, or provide the service that Americans have come to expect from their interactions with private sector services.

The TMF is a chance for federal agencies to at least begin the process moving toward a responsive model of government, where people can move effortlessly through forms, check the status of their application, and feel more confident and secure that the government will be able to quickly provide the help or resources they need. But we’re not there yet. At this moment, the way the TMF will be used is up for debate. In the past, agencies were required to repay the funds given by the TMF, which posed an enormous barrier to modernization.

The government technology we use today isn’t able to support the kinds of policies that agency heads and lawmakers want to enact.

“We considered using TMF to support modernization work at CMS [Center for Medicare and Medicaid] but ultimately, it was easier for us to make the case to get funding internally,” said Shannon West, the former digital service director for CMS, and senior advisor to the CMS administrator. “Between a requirement to establish a revolving fund and the need for eventual reimbursement, it made more sense for us to identify funding through traditional budget processes or not at all.”

The agency chief information officers (CIOs) I spoke with for this article strongly agreed with this sentiment. One noted that if I interviewed 20 agency CIOs they would all say that the reimbursement process is prohibitive for applying in the first place.

The issue of who pays isn’t the only barrier. The other reason the fund has gone unused in the past is likely that agencies don’t know what to ask for. While it is obvious to anyone who has applied for anything from the state or federal government in the past year that the government needs a major tech upgrade, where and how to start is not. These are systems that serve millions upon millions of people, all of whom have different needs and ways of accessing help. Any national technology must be accessible to all people and account for all use cases. As a result, many agencies keep using whatever they’ve got in place. So the bulk of the projects that have used the TMF in the past are for internal systems, such as consolidating multiple email systems into one cloud-based system, or migrating mainframe databases to the cloud.

The modern approach to this upgrade challenge would be to bite off a small piece of a large system, run pilots and iterate until that piece works well, and then move on to the next piece. But there are two hurdles agencies must overcome to even be able to know where to start. The first is understanding which problems a modernization will solve. Upgrading technology just because it is old is a sure way for agencies to unintentionally find themselves mired in a years-long project without clear end goals. As Marianne Belotti notes in her book Kill It With Fire, “We struggle to modernize legacy systems because we fail to pay the proper attention and respect to the real challenge of legacy systems: the context has been lost. We have forgotten the web of compromises that created the final design and are blind to the years of modifications that increased its complexity.” Agencies must first have a very clear set of goals they are looking to achieve with a tech modernization, but accurately defining the root problem can be time consuming or require skills that agencies don’t have in-house, like conducting design research or deciphering large data sets.

The second hurdle to using the TMF for a modular modernization is simply the effort required to apply for small TMF funding every time the agency is ready to take the next step in a project. It is not surprising then that in the past agencies have used the TMF for multi-million dollar, multi-year projects. But these enormous tech projects typically serve only two purposes: line the pockets of the small handful of companies who have the resources to bid on enormous government contracts, and set agencies up to fail by encouraging massive monolithic tech builds.

In order to get agencies to use the fund in a small, modular way, it must not only exist as a pile of money, but also as a human resource. Agencies that express interest in the fund should be assigned a TMF facilitator—these could be people already working inside government tech shops like 18F or the United States Digital Service—who will work with them on correctly defining the most pressing agency needs, determining whether those needs merit a technical solution, and then structuring a modular proposal that incorporates testing, piloting, and iterating.

In an ideal scenario, this facilitator could be someone who comes from inside the very agency that is seeking modernization funds. In speaking with León Rodriguez, the former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services about the technology struggles the department has wrestled with over the years, he noted that he wished he’d had a technology translator. That person could have weighed in on the technical implications of policy decisions, or advised the agency on technical decisions that have policy implications. And yet this role still doesn’t exist at agencies. Until there is one—without someone to connect the dots between a federal agency’s mission to serve the nation and the actual serving of the nation—we will likely see a lot more email modernization efforts while case management and user-facing services languish, outdated and inaccessible.

The TMF has the possibility to revolutionize government tech systems. However, we must account for the wide-ranging tech fluency of agencies within the federal government, ranging from CIOs with tech sector experience to career government workers in departments where tech expertise has lagged for decades. For those agencies who don’t know where to begin and what to ask for, the TMF must provide a voice. Otherwise, the $1 billion allocation will all be for naught.

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