The White House has proposed a revolving fund controlled through GSA starting with $3.1 billion that would be used to retire, replace or upgrade hard-to-secure legacy IT systems and transition to new, more secure, efficient, modern IT systems.
According to the Administration’s 2017 budget proposal, a project review board would review agency business cases and select projects for funding, prioritizing those with the highest risk profiles, government-wide impact, and probability of success.
The idea is to continue spending less on legacy systems (the budget assumes 71 percent of its $51 billion civilian IT funding request would go toward maintaining existing systems) and more on newer ones.
The board would help identify ways to consolidate multiple legacy systems into a smaller number of common platforms as well as provide additional oversight and development capabilities for making such major changes in an organization.
The fund is envisioned to be self-sustaining by “requiring agencies to repay the initial investments through efficiencies gained from modernization” so it remains to be seen exactly how funding would take place. One possibility is a combination of direct funding and mandatory spending on the part of agencies.
