Protocol (January 20, 2021)

The Biden administration wants to give the Technology Modernization Fund a $9 billion payday. In doing so, they could change what the fund actually does.

Matthew T. Cornelius, now the Alliance for Digital Innovation’s executive director, was instrumental in getting the fund off the ground back in 2018. As a senior adviser for technology and cybersecurity policy at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, he helped make some of the fund’s first investments in government IT modernization. At the time, though, there was only about $100 million in the fund.

Now, as a part of the sweeping $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan laid out last week, the Biden administration has shared its plan to increase that total almost 90-fold to $9 billion. For Cornelius, that kind of investment could give the TMF the power to effect change across the government’s IT infrastructure instead of solving agency-specific challenges, as it has done to date.