Spending Bills Provide Clues to NEW Federal Money

By Tom O’Keefe, Consultant

While there’s been political grandstanding around agency funding in the last few years, the current Democratic-led House committee is steadily advancing spending bills so that the full House can vote on them. Hopefully they’ll be sent to the Senate with plenty of time for negotiations, so they are on the President’s desk no later than October 1, 2019 (the start of FY20).

It looks like the House will be pushing several minibuses, or packages of spending bills, to the full floor over the next few weeks. In most cases these bills are significantly higher than the administration’s request, so agencies won’t be as cash strapped as they have the last few years.

While appropriations bills aren’t the best places to go hunting for opportunities, they do sometimes provide us some clues to new programs and initiatives starting up at agencies. Technology vendors might want to keep on top of these:

• Centers for Disease Control: CDC is getting $100 million for the first year of a multi-year effort to support modernization of public health data surveillance and analytics.
• Veterans Affairs: VA is getting up to $1.6 billion to continue electronic health record implementation with a focus on timely and accurate medical data to be transferred between VA, DOD and the private sector.
• Department of Energy: DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response is getting $150 million for efforts to secure the nation’s energy infrastructure against hazards, reduce the risks of and impacts from cybersecurity events and assist with restoration activities.
• Customs & Border Protection: CBP is getting $242 million for new technology to secure the border and ports of entry, as well as for developing analytics technologies to aid trade enforcement.
• Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency: CISA initiatives will get new funding, including $156 million for Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation and $41 million for the National Cybersecurity Protection System.
• Internal Revenue Service: IRS will receive $290 million, an increase of $140 million, for business systems modernization, including ongoing efforts to improve the technology posture of the agency.

Most of this funding represents entirely new sets of dollars or significant increases over prior years. There should be significantly more opportunity for technology vendors who sell into these agencies, providing the House and Senate can come to an agreement. Whether or not the Senate agrees to the House levels of funding we can be confident that funding levels will generally be higher than requested by the administration.

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