Treasury Releases New Strategic Plan

External stakeholders and Treasury customers, including the American public and other federal agencies, can use the plan to understand Treasury’s priorities, methods of measuring success, and potential areas of partnership.

The 60-page plan specifies five strategic goals supported by 19 objectives. For each objective, the plan presents which departmental offices are involved in implementing and achieving the objective, why the objective matters, the desired outcomes, measures and indicators of success, along with critical management initiatives.

Treasury’s high-level strategic goals over the next five years are as follows:

• Promote Equitable Economic Growth and Recovery
• Enhance National Security
• Protect Financial Stability and Resiliency
• Combat Climate Change
• Modernize Treasury Operations

The strategy aligns the goals with four cross-cutting themes which impact multiple goals and objectives:

• Re-engaging Allies
• Climate Change
• Equity
• Customer Experience

Below are the specific objectives of the plan:

Goal #1: Promote Equitable Economic Growth and Recovery

• Tax Administration and Policy - Enhance tax compliance and service; and improve tax policy design.
• Global Economic Leadership - Generate sustainable and inclusive global economic growth.
• Economically Resilient Communities - Promote equitable financial recovery and growth through support and flow of capital to small businesses, households, and underserved communities.
• Resilient Housing Market - Together with HUD and other federal agencies, promote a stable and resilient housing market that expands fair and equitable access to homeownership and affordable rental opportunities and protects taxpayers.

Goal #2: Enhance National Security

• Cyber Resiliency of Financial Systems and Institutions - Harden assets and systems of Treasury and the broader financial system to promote financial system resiliency.
• Economic Measures to Advance National Security - Enhance and protect national security through the application of targeted financial measures and review of certain foreign investments.
• Modernize Sanctions Regime - Modernize the development, implementation, enforcement, and maintenance of U.S. sanctions to ensure that sanctions remain a streamlined and effective foreign policy and national security tool.
• Transparency in the Financial System - Increase transparency in the domestic and international financial system.

Goal #3: Protect Financial Stability and Resiliency

• Financial System Vulnerabilities - Identify and address current and emerging vulnerabilities to the stability of the U.S. and global financial systems to support more sustainable and equitable growth.
• Resilient Treasury and Municipal Securities Markets - Improve the resilience of critical government securities markets to minimize borrowing costs over time and to support the critical roles that these safe assets play in the global financial system.
• Financial Innovation - Encourage responsible financial sector innovation.

Goal #4: Combat Climate Change

• Global Climate Commitment and Leadership - Use U.S leadership and commitment to significantly enhance global action, and mobilize and align financial flows to combat climate change and enhance resilience within the new climate environment.
• Climate Incentives and Investment - Create and promote incentives and policies for the private sector to invest in climate-friendly and resilient projects and activities.
• Climate-Related Financial Risks - Identify and mitigate key sources of climate-related financial risks to the macroeconomy, financial system, investors, governments including federal and subnational exposures, and households, understanding that risks may have disparate impacts on disadvantaged communities.
• Sustainable Treasury Operations - Improve Treasury’s overall environmental and energy sustainability and invest in Treasury Bureaus’ adaptation and resiliency efforts to address climate change impacts on operations and services.

Goal #5: Modernize Treasury Operations

• Recruit and Retain a Diverse and Inclusive Workforce - Recruit and retain a diverse workforce that represents communities that Treasury serves.
• Future Work Routines - Transform the department’s work routines to support changing mission and workforce needs.
• Better Use of Data - Increase timely access to and use of quality data and other types of evidence to inform decision-making.
• Customer Experience Practices - Mature and embed strong customer experience practices across the department, establishing Treasury’s reputation for consistently positive experiences.

Treasury’s plan is riddled with IT needs and requirements. Critical management initiatives listed with each objective indicate areas most likely to require IT products and services from the contracting community. These include:

Tax Administration and Policy

• Modernize tax information technology systems while continuing to strengthen cybersecurity protections and build the critical infrastructure needed to enhance taxpayer service and enforcement activities.
• Modernize tax policy analytic tools to better inform tax policy decision-making.
• Improve the ability for the Office of Tax Policy and the IRS to collaborate through technology.
• Enhance employee skills sets through systems and processes training.

Global Economic Leadership

• Enable a broader suite of secure collaboration and communication tools for use with interagency, international, and financial institutions to successfully engage counterparts and key stakeholders.
• Mature Treasury’s data acquisition strategy to access and consolidate the use of business data from commercially provided business sources.

Economically Resilient Communities

• Modernize IT infrastructure to improve direct services to businesses through online systems, including federal alcohol and tobacco permitting and alcohol beverage labeling approvals.
• Implement IT capability to proactively review data for compliance and ability to compare to publicly available data sets.
• Coordinate data and information sharing with agencies and external partners.
• Enhance employee skills sets through systems and processes training and review hiring authorities to strengthen the talent pool and improve retention in high demand skills, including IT and analytics.

Cyber Resiliency of Financial Systems and Institutions

• Enable and improve real-time and near real-time data reporting to strengthen Treasury’s incident coordination and expedient response to threat actors.
• Develop strategies specific to zero-trust, cloud migration, and multi-factor authentication.
• Implement Executive Order 14028: Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity.
• Consolidate enterprise-level commercial data products.
• Conduct studies of the Treasury workforce that support cyber and Financial Institution Reform and Recovery Enforcement Act (FIRREA) work to mitigate areas of risk (e.g., pay and skills development).

Economic Measures to Advance National Security

• Ensure that standard, common cybersecurity platforms are effectively upgraded, secured and scaled for Department-wide use inclusive of Treasury’s current role in national security matters.
• Improve the use of data and data technologies (AI/ML) to conduct monitoring of the U.S. and international financial systems, quickly identify illicit actors, and mitigate their risk to the financial infrastructure.

Transparency in the Financial System

• Modernize secure collaboration, conferencing, and facilities/space resource management leveraging commodity IT and shared services applications.
• Improve data sharing and enhanced data infrastructure to more effectively identify threat actors and detect, disrupt, and deter abuse of the U.S. and international financial systems.

Financial System Vulnerabilities

• Expand the use of data and modern data technologies by the Office of Domestic Finance, International Affairs, and the Office of Financial Research to improve monitoring of the U.S. and global financial systems, promote timely identification and mitigation of risks.
• Recruit additional staff and target training to develop additional expertise related to monitoring potential risks to financial stability, including emerging areas such as digital assets and cyber.

Resilient Treasury and Municipal Securities Markets

• Fill gaps in access to commercial data and increase data collection by the Office of Financial Research.
• Modernize and make more resilient the systems used to finance the U.S. government.

Financial Innovation

• Refine the current knowledge management tools and templates, and implement knowledge management processes for prioritized Mission Critical Occupations.
• Promote and expand the use of data and modern analytic technologies (e.g., Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) for modeling, monitoring, and assessing risk.
• Expand Treasury’s capabilities for secure collaboration with academic institutions and other non-federal entities.

Global Climate Commitment and Leadership

• Increase access to Treasury data assets and leverage the use of analytics to improve quantification and mitigation of climate-related financial risks.
• Enable a broader suite of secure collaboration and communication tools with interagency, international, and financial institutions to successfully engage counterparts and key stakeholders.

Climate Incentives and Investment

• Improve accessibility, quality, and use of data and analytics by leveraging shared enterprise data management platform services to enable investor-informed, climate-aligned investment decisions.

Climate-Related Financial Risks

• Establish a plan to identify, assess, improve, and use data to build metrics that track climate-related financial risks and measure impacts of those risks on low-income households and disadvantaged communities.
• Apply the United States Digital Service standards/Integrated Digital Experience Act requirements to Treasury.gov to promote transparency around climate-related financial risks.

Sustainable Treasury Operations

• Improve and use secure enterprise-wide data collection systems and analyses, coupled with performance measures, to aid in transparency and data/performance-based decision-making.

Recruit and Retain a Diverse and Inclusive Workforce

• Enhance adoption of enterprise-wide IT platforms and shared service applications to provide a consistent employee experience across the department.
• Expand and improve the use of data and data technologies to assess employee perception more regularly, and model impacts of policy and organizational changes on equity, inclusion, and diversity efforts.

Future Work Routines

• Enhance adoption of enterprise-wide commodity IT platforms and shared service applications to provide a consistent employee experience.
• Expand the use of existing data and data collection systems to assess impacts of future work routines on employee sentiment, and gauge strategies to enhance collaboration amongst employees and between the customers and communities they serve.

Better Use of Data

• Develop an integrated data and analytics workforce plan to strategically attract, train, and retain individuals with data and analytical skills.
• Mature and enforce the adoption of enterprise-wide commodity IT platforms, shared service applications, and integration tools.
• Implement an enterprise metadata catalog solution to provide a searchable inventory of Treasury’s available data.
• Mature Treasury’s data sharing and acquisition strategy to reduce cost and improve access through the consolidated use of data between Treasury components, with other federal agencies, and from commercially available sources.

Customer Experience Practices

• Adopt human-centered design practices into agile development processes, including IT, across the department.
• Apply United States Digital Service standards/Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA) requirements to all public-facing websites.

Contractors can look to the above initiatives for potential opportunities to assist Treasury with strategic plan objectives by implementing specified IT solutions.