Legislation that would require the Office of Management and Budget to tap a Federal Government Service Delivery Lead to coordinate government-wide CX work is awaiting Biden’s signature after the Senate passed the bill on Dec. 21. Dubbed the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act, the House passed the proposal back in May.
One of its backers, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said in a statement at the time that the measure “will make it easier for Americans to access essential federal services from Social Security to Medicare to veterans’ benefits.” Reps. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., and William Timmons, R-S.C., also backed the proposal.
The bill also taps agency heads as responsible for the service delivery of their entities, and also requires agencies to designate a senior official to coordinate service delivery.
President Joe Biden has already signed two other bills that Congress passed late last year.
The Source Code Harmonization and Reuse in Information Technology Act, or the SHARE IT Act — which requires agencies to determine whether they own custom code and share it with other agencies across the government with an eye towards cost savings — is now law.
Then-ranking member of the Commerce Committee — Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s then-Chairman — Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich. — are behind the new law.
Agencies are already supposed to be taking such actions under a 2016 policy, but lawmakers say that implementation of that law has been poor.
Biden also recently signed the GSA Technology Accountability Act into law.
Reps. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, introduced the proposal in a reaction to problems surrounding the General Services Administration’s Login.gov service. A bombshell report in 2023 found that the agency misrepresented the standards met by the service to other agencies, and the House Oversight and Accountability Committee subsequently opened up an investigation into the shared service.
The law will require GSA to annually report to Congress on projects funded by the Federal Citizen Services Fund and the Acquisition Services Fund.
“This legislation will allow the Oversight Committee to conduct appropriate oversight, rein in what for too long has been an unaccountable organization that seemingly thought it could play by its own rules and protect both GSA agency customers and American taxpayers,” Sessions said when he introduced the bill.
Many other tech proposals introduced over the last two years, however, died with the end of the 118th Congress.
Among them was the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets — or SAMOSA — Act, which was cosponsored by over 20 lawmakers.
The House of Representatives passed the bipartisan bill in early December, but the Senate ultimately did not approve the proposal. It would have required agencies to inventory their software and use that information to consolidate licenses and adopt enterprise license agreements. A similar bill also failed to make it into law in the 117th Congress.
Some lawmakers also resurrected failed pushes to have agencies retire their legacy tech or modernize the government’s primary cybersecurity law, but those also didn’t make it into law.
While there were many proposals related to artificial intelligence and the government’s use of it in the 118th Congress, lawmakers may have to pick back up on those efforts, as many of the bills focused on the government-AI intersection did not pass into law.
The Senate also failed to pass a bipartisan House proposal to reauthorize the Technology Modernization Fund through fiscal 2030 and tinker with the fund’s legislative foundations. That measure passed the House in May.
The revolving fund’s authorization is set to end in December of this year, although what a lapse would mean for the fund isn’t necessarily clear. The TMF wouldn’t necessarily disappear as long as it gets appropriations, said Mike Hettinger, a former senior congressional staffer who lobbies on behalf of technology companies.
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