The 43-day partial government shutdown left us all bereft of information technology news and updates on program progress. Now that agencies are funded at least through Jan. 31, the conference circuit is in its end-of-the-year sprint and lawmakers are working on the final touches of the defense authorization bill, there are some interesting IT news items that have emerged over the last week or so. Here are three of them that deserve highlighting.
TMF Board beats deadline
The Technology Modernization Fund officially expires on Friday, meaning the board can only continue to oversee and fund existing awards.
While the House was attempting to add a provision to the fiscal 2026 defense authorization bill to extend the TMF, the board quietly made at least one new award before the impending deadline.
The National Nuclear Security Administration earned an investment of $28.3 million for three separate, but interrelated modernization projects.
The agency will use the funding “to modernize the foundational technology infrastructure supporting its nuclear security missions through an integrated cloud and artificial intelligence transformation. Current systems have critical vulnerabilities: the FireGuard wildfire monitoring activity requires intensive manual analysis across classification barriers; the Turbo Federal Radiological Monitoring and Assessment Center (FRMAC) radiological assessment tool cannot communicate with other emergency response applications; and limited AI development infrastructure prevents rapid evaluation of models for nuclear security threats. These vulnerabilities hamper data aggregation, slow emergency response, and leave gaps in the agency’s ability to assess evolving technological risks.”
A government source with knowledge of the TMF award said most of the funding — about $23 million — will go to modernizing the AI infrastructure for NNSA’s classified environment.
NNSA has been building out its classified environment in the cloud for much of the last two years and the influx of funding will accelerate that effort.
For example, NNSA recently implemented AskSage’s platform to access secure AI tools through the Army’s tenet.
The source said through the TMF investment, NNSA can more quickly implement its own version of AWS, Microsoft and Google clouds with AI tools built in.
NNSA expects to create a centralized AI infrastructure for its classified users to make it easier for them to access these tools more quickly.
This was NNSA’s second TMF award. It won $3.8 million in July 2024 to modernize its Radiological Response Data Portal.
The source said the other two projects, for which NNSA will receive about $3 million for FRMAC and $2 million for FireGuard, were grouped together as part of the overall modernization initiative because they will rely on AI and machine learning tools.
“Through the TMF, FireGuard aims to use machine learning to automatically track fire boundaries and move data between computing systems. This automation would allow analysts to spend their time verifying maps instead of drawing them from scratch, which is particularly critical as wildfires pose growing risks to nuclear sites,” the TMF states on its website. “Through the TMF, NNSA plans to shift the Turbo FRMAC radiological assessment tool from its legacy desktop software to a cloud‑based platform, providing emergency teams with the speed, accuracy, and collaborative capability they need to protect the public and critical infrastructure during radiological crises.”
The source said while much of the work to modernize the systems and to develop the AI infrastructure was already underway, the TMF money certainly will help NNSA move faster.
And that idea of moving faster brings us back to Congress failing to extend the program’s authorization. While plenty of programs operate without authorization, it seems like this type of investment, at least for the short term, is on hold.
There still is some hope, as the Senate did allocate $5 million for the TMF in fiscal 2026 in its version of the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill. This is the first time in three years lawmakers didn’t zero out new funding for the TMF.
Commerce, USDA race for AI
The departments of Commerce and Agriculture are in a friendly race to see who can implement the new USAi platform first.
Brian Epley, Commerce’s chief information officer, said at ACT-IAC’s Executive Leadership Conference last week that, hopefully within the next few weeks, employees at all bureaus will be able to begin using the different large language models for their use cases.
Meanwhile, Tony Brannum, the chief information security officer at Agriculture, said deployment of the AI shared service across the agency is imminent as well.
These would be the first agencies to take advantage of the USAi platform, which GSA launched in March and expanded this summer to provide generative AI chatbot tools for other agencies.
“The code base is the same as GSAi. It is just a copy for our agency partners to use so that they can do that deep exploration across a broad portfolio of generative AI technologies and large language models, but most importantly, capture the observability telemetry data so that they can make informed decisions about how they’re going to buy well into this disruptive space in the future,” GSA CIO Dave Shive said at the ELC conference.
GSA says the USAi platform is part of how it’s providing agencies the opportunity to try out AI tools that previously would’ve either been cost prohibitive to roll out across the agency or included too much risk.
Zach Whitman, GSA’s chief AI officer, said USAi has become an interagency project in terms of developing and learning from its use.
“With a tool like USAi, you can really get practical, hands-on data to suggest these are the ways in which we’re seeing this adoption curve today. And the telemetry that we’re gathering in terms of how frequently do people use the thing is an important step for the program development,” Whitman said. “But then also, what are they asking of this tool? What kinds of mission functions are they using this tool for? That true fidelity on how the thing is being used is, I would argue that the real value proposition of a tool like USAi is to be able to see inside how the workforce is truly adopting this new technology to such granularity, and then shape policy and workflows to maximize that utility has been an eye opener for us, as well as our partners.”
As for Commerce, Epley said it will use the chat prompt tools to answer specific questions that arise in each bureau based on their individual use cases.
“We have an AI use case inventory of more than 300. USAi will bring Commerce to life when it comes to AI tools,” he said. “We looked at what we were doing on our own when it came to AI and decided it was best to partner with GSA. The majority of our workforce doesn’t have a working knowledge of AI, so now they will have tools at their fingertips. We expect USAi to increase our productivity for our employees and for the mission.”
Epley added that Commerce will use its lessons from implementing USAi and create a playbook for other agencies to ease their move to the shared service.
This is a multi-year effort for Commerce, as Epley expects they will have to optimize the value of the LLMs and figure out which tools are best for which mission area.
As for USDA, the implementation of USAi is the culmination of a decade-long journey to improve its data tagging.
Brannum said knowing what data the agency has, where it’s located, and who has access to it will make the application of AI tools easier.
“There is a lot of interest in AI across the agency. We are asked why something is blocked, or once they see something out there from GSA, they ask to use it,” he said.
JWCC-Next, JOE and more from DISA
The Defense Information Systems Agency will continue to run its own multiple award contracts for the foreseeable future. DISA’s Procurement Services Executive Doug Packard, who will retire in January after more than 35 years in government, said the agency has no immediate plans to consolidate acquisition programs into GSA.
That means the Joint Warfighting Cloud Computing Contract-Next (JWCC-Next) and several other high profile programs will remain in play for 2026.
At DISA’s annual industry day on Monday, executives said JWCC-Next, Olympus, the Joint Operational Environment (JOE) and several other major IT programs are positioned for significant progress over the next year.
Byron Stephenson, the J-9 vice director for the Host and Compute Center at DISA, said DISA has been working with the DoD CIO’s office to collect requirements for the new contract.
“We are still looking at all the requirements that were collected across the department to ensure we bring the best cloud capable contract for the future,” Stephenson said.
He expects DISA to issue the JWCC-Next solicitation during the third quarter of fiscal 2026 and make an award about a year later.
Additionally, DISA will issue a solicitation in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 for technical support for the JWCC engineering program office.
As for the current iteration of the contract, which DoD awarded in November 2021, Stephenson said the use by the services continues to grow.
“In 2025, had over $3.9 billion in total orders. We are actively seeing increases as the Air Force onboards to the contract now,” he said. “We had large Army orders last year, so it is continuing to see progress.”
Aside from JWCC-Next, DISA J-9 is busy implementing several large scale technology programs. Stephenson said the joint operational environment is operational in multiple theaters with active workloads, including the Indo-Pacific Command. Through JOE, DISA is bringing commercial cloud services to commands located outside the continental United States.
Meanwhile, DISA’s Olympus, which is its infrastructure-as-code initiative, is active in two environments, AWS and Microsoft, and military services and agencies can take advantage of the tools through DISA’s working capital fund.
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