Congress tees up spending package to extend TMF authorization through September

A new congressional spending bill could offer a lifeline to reauthorize the Technology Modernization Fund, which expired last month and froze nearly $200 million in unused funds. Congressional appropriators released the final slew of fiscal 2026 spending bills Tuesday, allocating more than $1 trillion to federal agencies and extending various laws or programs. Among the extensions is the reauthorization of the TMF through FY2026, or Sept. 30. It comes just over a month after authorization of the innovation funding vehicle expired Dec. 12. TMF was created in 2017 to fund technology projects across the government, but the bill that made it also set an expiration date that only Congress can extend. Lawmakers failed to move forward with standalone legislation to reauthorize the fund last month, and efforts to include it in larger spending packages also fell flat. Trade groups and IT industry experts were disappointed at the time, telling FedScoop in previous interviews that the expiration was not representative of the issue’s typical bipartisan support. Some pinned the blame on procedural hurdles in Congress, including the 43-day-long government shutdown that pushed various nonfunding priorities toward the end of the year. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced bills in the last three Congresses to reauthorize TMF beyond 2025, but they did not make it out of the Senate, where they have at times faced pushback from congressional appropriators. Members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency embedded in the Social Security Administration potentially exposed personally identifiable information via a third-party server, the Department of Justice said in a court filing that also revealed coordination between DOGE and an advocacy group seeking “evidence of voter fraud.” A lawsuit filed last February by the AFL-CIO and other labor groups against the SSA sought to cut off DOGE’s access to sensitive data housed in agency systems. In March, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a temporary restraining order to limit that access. But after an SSA records review of the agency’s “former DOGE Team for audit and litigation purposes,” the DOJ said in a filing dated Friday that “communications, use of data, and other actions” were found to be “potentially outside of SSA policy and/or noncompliant” with the court’s order. One of those instances involved DOGE’s sharing of data via a third-party Cloudflare server — a system that is “not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” the DOJ wrote. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.