FY 2017 Defense Cyberspace Funding in the Consolidated Appropriations Act

Congress recently passed legislation called the Consolidated Appropriations Act that will fund the federal government through the remainder of fiscal 2017. Featured prominently within the “Division C” text of the legislation is a section called “Cyberspace Activities,” which summarizes the budgetary resources that are provided to the military departments and defense agencies for cyber activities. The data provided in this section is expected to become increasingly granular as Congress struggles to get a handle on exactly what the Department of Defense is spending on efforts to harden its information technology environment.

To quote the legislation directly, “Beginning in fiscal year 2018, the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer is directed to modify the cyberspace activities exhibit in order to provide increased visibility and clarity into cyberspace activities funding requirements.” The reporting format for this data will be left to the new DoD CIO (still to be named), who is required to submit a proposal for the report to Congress by September 1, 2017. The proposed format will then be used for the budget request of fiscal 2019, not for FY 2018’s request, which is pending.

Lastly, Congress suggests in the legislation that  the DoD “consider establishing a unique cyber sub-activity group for operation and maintenance accounts and individual cost codes, projects, or program elements for procurement and research, development, test and evaluation accounts as part of this review.” Industry would certainly welcome such granularity on all levels of DoD IT funding. We here at Deltek would be especially grateful as it would ease our efforts to provide clients with accurate analysis of spending and technology trends in DoD cyber.

For the moment, however, we will analyze what we have, and what the legislation shows is that the DoD’s base budget for cyberspace activities in FY 2017 is $6.73B. This figure represents a 17.3%, or $992M increase, over the level of $5.74B enacted in fiscal 2016. In a generally flat IT market, this is good news.

As for the distribution of funding by military department/defense agency across funding categories, here are the figures:

Wrapping up, to provide a little color, here are a few cyber-related line items from summary of the legislation for each military department/defense agency. If a reason for a funding total change from the original FY 2017 request submitted by the Obama administration was provided, I’ve included it.