Cloud Exchange 2026: GSA’s Jessie Posilkin on how TMF investments help accelerate modernization

In the coming weeks, the Technology Modernization Fund will make a new push for proposals. With about $200 million in potential investment funding available, agencies have an opportunity to accelerate modernization initiatives.

“We’ve been working with some of our current agency partners to cultivate proposals. We see some real opportunity there. We’re also working with General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget leadership to develop some calls for proposals. We have always been and continue to be really eager to invest in shared services, and figuring out what that looks like is really important because there are not always the perfect, magic shared service,” said Jessie Posilkin, acting TMF executive director during Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange 2026.

“I don’t think there’s one to rule them all, but there are lots of ways in which agency data sharing continues to be — and is — a massive priority for this administration, and we want to be really sure that we can enable that. That’s been a consistent issue. Also, if you want to deprecate legacy systems, you need to get data out of them, and so meeting this administration priority is also a way to meet our mission of deprecating legacy systems and enabling future shared services — whether that’s human resources, whether that’s permitting, whether that’s anything around fraud management, procurement data, any of these priorities.”

Looking to dole out around $200M

This call for new proposals almost didn’t happen as Congress let TMF expire in the fall of 2025. Lawmakers reauthorized TMF through Sept. 30 as part of the omnibus appropriations bill passed in January.

The short timeline makes agency submissions even more critical, Posilkin said.

“I expect us to invest a bit, just a bit less than [the $200 million], but we’re trying to navigate precisely how much would make sense right now, so that’s one of the things that feels really important,” she said.

“Typically, the TMF board has only approved about 15% of the proposals that we’ve gotten. Frankly, I hope that number tips up just a teeny bit because we’re doing more work on the front end to make sure what we’re getting is high quality. I expect it to remain similarly competitive. And I want to be sure, especially in this environment, that we are demonstrating very clear return on investment and have very clear users and value proposition. These aren’t wild things to ask for, but they are not always framing things in that way and are not always typical in government of how we pitch technology projects.”

While the final details of the investments priorities still are being worked out, it’s clear the administration is focused on advancing artificial intelligence capabilities, improving data and compute infrastructures so agencies can be successful in using AI tools, and making federal services meet citizens’ needs more easily.

Posilkin said the overarching idea for TMF is simple: “If we’re not making it work better, then we shouldn’t be investing in it all.”

Over the last almost decade since Congress passed and President Trump signed the Modernizing Government Technology Act into law that created TMF, the board has invested over $1 billion across more than 60 investments and more than 34 agencies.

Posilkin said service delivery remains the driving factor across almost all of the TMF investments.

“We had one with the Department of Labor where they needed to do some form digitizing work. The first thing they did was they took a 25-page form and they made it two pages because they did not need to be collecting the information and had they just come to us and said we’d like to digitize lots of forms and we have no interest in thinking about why or what’s underneath, then we’re not actually improving service delivery,” she said.

“When we’re rethinking what is going into that form — and in my mind, watching DOL stay focused on what information were they getting from members of the public and why, and how could that ultimately significantly speed up their adjudication timelines and make them more accurate and compelling — that to me is why it was worth investing in that kind of project. The agency staying focused on that, which then means that they’re spending less time bickering about which particular technical tool is the right one and a lot more time focused on actually improving services.”

New funding model proposed

It is stories like this one from Labor and from so many other agencies that Posilkin hopes resonates with Capitol Hill lawmakers and leads them to extend the fund for several more years.

She said the fact that TMF is expiring on Sept. 30 is hanging over the program’s proverbial head.

“I think that the real priority for the TMF is being reauthorized without any additional funding mechanism because we’ve committed to having a strong revolving fund. We will continue to have funding to invest, and if we do not get reauthorized, all of these other conversations become moot,” Posilkin said. “If we are unable to make any sort of new investments as new problems surface, then we are unable to address the very significant technical debt that already exists.”

The administration proposed a new funding model as part of its fiscal 2026 and 2027 budget requests and didn’t ask for any new appropriations.

The White House included a governmentwide general provision that would allow GSA, with the approval of OMB, to collect up to $100 million in funding that would otherwise be unavailable for obligation from other agencies and bring that funding into TMF.

Congressional support for TMF has been mixed. After zeroing it out the last three years, lawmakers appropriated $5 million for 2026.

“It is very clear that even with $200 million this year, the scale and scope of government technology challenges are only going up. We are only seeing that the way that AI tooling is changing how people code is actually increasing some of the governance concerns and ability to manage information across a large enterprise. You’re seeing code produced faster, which also increases some of the demands on the actual technical infrastructure you have. We are a country that continues to have really significant service delivery challenges, which is what the government should ultimately be providing,” Posilkin said.

“When you have it set up that way, $200 million is actually quite a drop in the bucket, and so the question has always been — knowing that we are working really hard to revolve money through the program rather than having it go out and never come back and get reinvested — what are the ways in which we could increase our budget without needing more congressional appropriations? The answer, frankly, is in one of these buckets, which is where is money not getting spent at the end of a year? How do we make sure that it’s not just spent on things that aren’t necessarily needed, but in fact invested, reinvested in, the kinds of programs and projects that that need to happen, and this reinvestment matters the most because technology is improving delivery.”

Educating agencies through cohorts

Over the next few months, the TMF Program Office will educate and train agencies to submit proposals before the program potentially expires. Posilkin said TMF has created cohorts of agencies so they can talk to each other about challenges and successes of similar IT modernization efforts.

Additionally, agencies that have finished their projects aren’t just developing a playbook to share across the government but are briefing current, and potentially new, agency teams that are part of TMF.

“The cohorts are meeting monthly. We also have some quarterly reporting that happens, so we’ve got a number of cadences going on. They’ve been organized in a few different ways that we’ve been playing with. Some were originally around where they were in their investment, so we knew that it would be helpful for agencies that were early in their project and were likely to be encountering some similar difficulties, knowing it would be useful to chat,” Posilkin said.

“We then also realized there’s some value in age diversity of the project, so a project that’s further along can talk about the other side of their customer relationship management implementation in a way that someone at the front end maybe needs to hear some of those lessons learned. We’ve been playing with the precise mechanisms that have made sense for our portfolio to be coordinated on.”

Additionally, the TMF Program Office will hold some workshops for agencies considering submitting proposals for additional funding for IT modernization projects.

Posilkin said the goal is to help leaders better articulate the value proposition of the investment.

“Some agencies don’t need that, especially ones that are frequent flyers now. They’ve built that muscle internally. Some of those teams know that they need to describe a strong value proposition, and they know how to do that. Other agencies struggle a bit more. And in terms again of it being an open book test, we are happy to walk an agency through that process,” she said.

“One thing to keep in mind is we actually flip that [technology] success metric on its head. Typically, one of the numbers that gets talked about is that about 80% of government technology projects fail, which means about 20% succeed. If you look at our numbers, looking at failure as things that we decided to conclude or end early or otherwise didn’t deliver, we’re the opposite. Eighty percent of our projects have succeeded, and 20% were concluded. So not to make it a competition with Congress, but we’re doing pretty well by comparison because we have these guardrails in place.”

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