Highlights from the Air Force FY 2025 Unclassified IT Budget Request

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its fiscal year (FY) 2025 budget request last month, along with corresponding Information Technology (IT) budget data for the Civilian departments and agencies. However, in typical fashion, there has been a multi-week delay in OMB and the Department of Defense (DoD) releasing Defense-sector IT budget details for fiscal year 2025.

At the beginning of April, details of DoD’s FY 2025 IT budget plans began to trickle out, beginning with the unclassified portion of their yearly budget request.

Total Air Force Information Technology Budget

Details of the Air Force’s unclassified IT budget are published on OMB’s IT Dashboard, giving select insight into their planned IT investments, initiatives and priorities on the non-classified side. The Air Force’s FY 2025 unclassified IT budget request is over $3.5B, which is $141M (-3.8%) below the FY 2024 estimated amount. Further, the Air Force unclassified IT budget has shown some cyclicality over the last several years, with FY 2025 projected to be on the downward slope of the cycle.

Operations and Maintenance vs. New Development Funding

Looking at the breakdown of Air Force IT budgets between Operations and Maintenance (O&M) activities and funding for new development activities, Development, Modernization and Enhancement (DME), we see that the main driver behind the yearly top-line fluctuation falls within the O&M portion of the budget, although not entirely. Over the last five years, Air Force DME budgets have hovered between the mid-$600M and upper-$700M range. The O&M portion has fluctuated more significantly by comparison. For FY 2025, O&M is slated to decrease $179M (-5.9%) while DME gets a $38M (+5.8%) increase from the FY 2024 level, slightly moderating the overall decrease.

Request by Mission Support Category

Considering the Air Force IT budget by mission support category over the last five years shows that most of its IT budget does not fall into clearly established enterprise IT categories, which is also true across the DoD components, as activities around base modernization and weapons systems tend to be identified outside of traditional IT categories.

When looking across the more than 500 budget lines in the Air Force unclassified IT budget portfolio, many of the budget lines that are designated as Not Applicable under the mission support category tend to address IT management, infrastructure and communications efforts. This explains why this N/A category accounts for nearly 60% of the aggregate Air Force IT budget over the last five years.

 

Top Ten FY 2025 IT Programs

The details of the Air Force’s unclassified IT investment priorities and initiatives provide some perspective on where they are planning to invest in FY 2025. Listed below are the ten largest unclassified IT initiatives across the Air Force for FY 2025, including observations about budget growth and their proportion of new development spending.

• Enterprise Information Technology as a Service - 1: $1,145M (+$106M, 6.3% DME)
• Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System-Increment 1: $173M (+$12M, 42% DME)
• B-52 Defense Research and Engineering Network - Tinker: $135M (-$756K, 100% DME)
• Cloud One - Air Force: $101M (+$3M, 2.3% DME)
• Department of Defense Air Force 365: $94M (-$11M, 100% DME)
• Joint Reliability Availability Management System: $91M (-$68M, 0% DME)
• EIEMA COM/Info Transport_Net Sig and Data Trans Services: $90M (+$5M, 0% DME)
• Maintenance Repair and Overhaul: $81M (+$11M, 100% DME)
• Air Force Integrated Personnel and Pay System: $58M (+$9M, 100% DME)
• Contracting Information Technology: $55M (-$158K, 58% DME)

Taken together, these largest ten budget line items account for more than $2B (57%) of the Air Force’s total $3.5B in unclassified IT budget requested for FY 2025.

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For more insights into the Department of the Air Force FY 2025 Budget, see our webinar: Understanding the $262 Billion Air Force and Space Force Budget Landscape for FY 2025.