Agency & project fit


Are you an agency considering competing for funding? Welcome.

What to expect

We can fund most federal agencies.

We can fund agencies that meet the definition of “federal agency” according to 5 U.S. Code § 551. Unsure? Check with your legal counsel.

Groups we know we cannot fund include agencies under the legislative branch, the courts, the Smithsonian Institution, and the American Red Cross.

Agencies must repay at least 50% of their investment.

Proposals with a higher repayment rate are considered more competitive.

Repayment ensures our fund remains sustainable and can continue making investments long into the future.

Your first funds can arrive 7-8 months after your initial proposal submission.

After you share your project idea, we’ll explore a possible fit. Next, you’ll submit an initial proposal, then a full proposal, which includes a pitch to the Board.

If awarded, our agreement will lay out milestones that, when complete, unlock funding transfers. Learn about our process and timing.

Investment focus areas

Advancing
agency mission


Refresh and enhance technology and practices directly powering public-facing components of an agency’s mission. Projects could:

  • Streamline interactions: adopting modern technology that upgrades an agency’s touchpoints with the American public.
  • Accelerate delivery: adopting modern practices which reduce time for system updates and deployment cycles, resulting in faster delivery of secure, mission-critical applications.
  • Enable responsiveness: implementing modern, modular, and scalable architecture and infrastructure, resulting in improved ability to respond to policy change.

Increasing operational efficiency


Leverage modern technology to boost internal agency operations, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. Projects could:

  • Elevate operations: providing tools that support staff to work more effectively.
  • Automate processes: using technology to enable agencies to perform more efficiently.
  • Mitigate risk: preventing fraud, improving cybersecurity posture, and reducing the opportunities for and costs of bad players impacting agency mission.

Reducing government-wide costs with shared services & reuse


Develop or leverage shared solutions, providing better tools, reducing duplicative efforts, and improving consistency across government. Projects could:

  • Promote reuse: building new technology solutions specifically in service of new or pre-existing partnerships solving for similar use cases or needs across agencies.
  • Leverage services: focusing on the adoption of pre-existing patterns, services, and solutions to minimize the re-creation of shared operational and technological building blocks.

What makes a proposal competitive

The following factors are carefully weighed during project selection.
The more closely your proposal aligns with these factors, the more competitive it is.

Competitive repayment

  • We expect at least 50% repayment, but 100% repayment is more competitive.
  • Full repayment demonstrates your agency’s support for modernization while also ensuring that our fund is sustainable. Under extremely rare circumstances, repayment exemptions are possible and require OMB and GSA senior leadership support.

Aligned with TMF & government priorities


As outlined in the Modernizing Government Technology Act, proposals must improve, retire, or replace existing federal IT systems to enhance cybersecurity and privacy, and improve long-term efficiency and effectiveness.

  • Show how your project aligns with TMF’s mission to improve your agency’s ability to deliver its mission and services to the American public, while also serving as a possible solution that can be leveraged by other agencies.
  • Show how your project aligns with current government-wide priorities like zero trust security posture, delivering effective digital experiences that are simple, seamless, and secure, and ensuring responsible use of emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI).

Value proposition &
return on investment

  • Include quantifiable impact outcomes like enhancing customer experience, reducing administrative burdens, and cost savings or cost avoidance.
  • Highlight if your project’s value benefits other agencies or is an inter-agency collaboration.

Resource & project planning

  • Provide detailed financial planning. Competitive projects are less than $25M and take no more than three years to implement. Most of our investments don’t exceed $40M and use a five year repayment timeline, though the Board may consider outliers.
  • Include realistic procurement schedules and hiring plans, demonstrating good resource management that clearly shows your agency’s ability to meet project timelines.

Capacity to deliver

  • Demonstrate strong cross-organization executive sponsorship (CFO, CIO, and program leadership) and an empowered project lead, who can effectively own and guide the effort. Proposals from an agency component must also include department-level executive sponsorship.
  • Show that it is agency employees who drive and manage your TMF project, not contractors such as industry partners or other staff outside of your agency.
  • Demonstrate in-house availability of skills or technologies needed to achieve project goals.
  • Demonstrate a robust procurement and hiring strategy, including leveraging existing contracts.

Iterative & evidence-driven

  • Provide data-driven evidence that supports your approach, such as user research, market research, and cost analysis.
  • Show a commitment to an agile approach that breaks your projects into shorter, manageable cycles, allowing you to easily adapt and apply learnings.

Partnership in proposal process

  • Commit to participating in TMF workshops and briefings. Commit to sharing project artifacts publicly when feasible (like requirements statements, ROI calculations, solicitation language, industry engagement approaches) and collaborating with TMF to share lessons learned.
  • Be responsive to our requests and proactively engage with TMF and our investment management staff.