Department of Homeland Security FY 2025 Budget Request Highlights

Recently, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its fiscal year (FY) 2025 budget request with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) placing among the highest-funded civilian departments.

Total Discretionary Funding and Priorities

DHS’s proposed FY 2025 budget provides $60.8B in total discretionary budget for DHS, 2.2% above the FY 2024 annualized Continuing Resolution (CR) level of 59.5B. An additional $22.7B for the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) is provided for disaster response, recovery and resilience. The budget proposes an additional $4.7B for a Southwest Border Contingency Fund (SWBCF) to respond to migration surges.

Funding highlights include:

• Includes $2.5B for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) for additional personnel and technology enhancements for investigative capabilities.
• Supplies $127M for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for border security technology and assets between ports of entry and $86M for air and marine operational support.
• Allocates $138M for the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) Office to develop, acquire, test and deploy Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) detection technologies and equipment.
• Gives the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) $116M to implement provisions in the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA).
• Allots $90M for TSA’s Checkpoint Property Screening System (CPSS) program to address capability gaps to detect new and evolving threats reliably and efficiently, and $136M to safeguard critical infrastructure in the surface and aviation sectors against cyber threats.
• Provides $5.0M to open an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Office in the DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer to advance the responsible use of across DHS.

DHS Information Technology Budget

The FY 2025 IT budget request for DHS is $11.1B in total IT funding, which is distributed across its component agencies, directorates and offices. After a nominal 1% increase from FY 2023 to 2024, the FY 2025 aggregate IT budget request represents an 8.7% increase from the FY 2024 annualized CR level. This budget data does not include spending on classified programs or those categorized as National Security Systems, which OMB has excluded from their IT budget data since the FY 2019 budget cycle.

Within this total IT request, the new budget allocates just over $1.0B to new Development/Modernization/Enhancement (DME) spending for FY 2025, which amounts to 9.2% of the total $11.1B IT budget. This DME proportion is significantly less than the FY 2024 portion (14.5%) and FY 2023 proportion (13%). (See table below.)

Noteworthy IT Programs

Looking at the details of DHS’s IT budget uploaded to OMB’s IT Dashboard provides a view into their IT investments, initiatives and underlying priorities. Here are the five largest IT initiatives across DHS for FY 2025, including observations about budget growth and their proportion of new development funding.

• DHS - Manage Information Technology: This budget line provides for CIO staff across DHS not associated with any IT Investment. The $544M requested for this investment is $491M (+919%) above the FY 2024 enacted level and is 100% Operations and Maintenance (O&M) funding.
• CISA - Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM): CDM provides continuous monitoring, diagnosis and mitigation capabilities to strengthen the security posture of the federal civilian networks. The $467M requested for this investment is $42M (+10%) above the FY 2024 enacted level and consists of 83% Development, Modernization and Enhancement (DME) funding.
• CISA - Cyber Analytic and Data System (CADS): CADS will allow CISA cyber operators to analyze massive volumes of data to identify and protect against cyber threats. At $422M for FY 2025, CADS receives $275M (+165%) more than the FY 2024 enacted level. The investment consists of 30% DME funding.
• CISA - National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS): NCPS provides intrusion detection and prevention; advanced cyber analytics and visualization; incident management; and information sharing to protect federal networks. The $239M requested for this investment is $172M (-42%) below the FY 2024 enacted level and is 100% O&M funding.
• CISA - Vulnerability Management (VM): VM Assessments services identifies the critical and high vulnerabilities in stakeholder networks and systems for mitigation. For FY 2025 this program receives $209M, which is a $8.6M (-4%) reduction from FY 2024. This investment is 100% O&M funding.

DHS IT Budget “Winners and Losers”

As is to be expected with each new yearly budget proposal, the DHS component IT budgets are a mix of winners and losers. For FY 2025, the mix is weighted toward the winner column with nine of the fourteen components receiving budget increases from FY 2024. Six of these - CISA, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), the United States Secret Service (USSS), the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD) office, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Departmental Management and Operations (DMO) – are slated for double-digit IT funding increases if the FY 2024 estimates remain static.

Of the components that are seeing reductions, only Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is seeing trimming of more than a few percentage points. CBP is slated for a 9% year-to-year reduction of $216M on a $2B+ budget. However, that level still puts CBP above where they were in FY 2022 at $1.9B.

Looking at the DME side of the table shows that nearly every component is shifting roughly 20% or more of their DME dollars to O&M, with a couple of notable exceptions. The U.S. Coast Guard’s Sea Commander program is their IT budget line responsible for $64M of the $84M in CG-wide DME for FY 2025, and the major reason for the huge DME percentage increase from FY 2024.

In contrast, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center’s (FLETC) $13M in DME – a whopping 5416% increase over the $236K in DME in FY 2024 – is spread across 10 of its 15 IT budget lines, with only three receiving more than $1M in DME dollars – FLETC – Delivery ($3.6M), FLETC - IT Management ($2.2M) and FLETC - IT Security and Compliance ($1.9M).

As Congress continues debate on DHS funding for the remainder of FY 2024 and then begins consideration of appropriations for FY 2025, the relative growth proportions among DHS components will likely morph. Nonetheless, the details of DHS’s FY 2025 budget proposal provide us with a sense of priorities and potential opportunities as we look to prospective contractor opportunities in the coming fiscal year.

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For more analysis on the FY 2025 Federal Budget check out our report, FY 2025 Federal Budget Request: Priorities and Opportunities.