U.S. Department of Transportation Fiscal 2023 IT Budget Request Highlights

Key Takeaways

• The USDOT requested 1.8% more for IT in FY 2023 than it received in FY 2021.
• Small increases at the Office of the Secretary and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration account for the growth.
• More than 90% of new money requested for Development, Modernization, and Enhancement will go to NextGen programs at the Federal Aviation Administration.

The recent publication of the administration’s Fiscal Year 2023 budget request updated the information we have concerning plans for Information Technology spending at U.S. federal agencies. Once agency on the civilian side that hopes to see an increase in it’s IT funding is the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).

Requesting $3.8B for IT in FY 2023, the DOT is looking to secure a 1.8% increase over the funding it received in FY 2021. The comparison to FY 2021 is necessary thanks to the late passage of final FY 2022 appropriations, making it unclear what final IT budgets will be at the DOT when the current fiscal year is over.

Per usual, the bulk of DOT’s request is related to investment in the ongoing Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) modernization effort. Some increases elsewhere in the department, however, indicate IT-related activity there as well.

The increase at the Office of the Secretary of Transportation (OST) is almost entirely related to its DOT Common Operating Environment (DOT COE) investments. The department requested $69M for its DOT COE Data Center and Cloud program, an increase of $18M vs. FY 2021, and $69M for its DOT COE Network program, an $8M increase vs. the enacted level in FY 2021.

As for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), its increase is attributable to two programs. The first of these is NHTSA’s Commodity IT Shared Services, which requested $22M for FY 2023, an increase of $10M vs. the $12M it received in FY 2021. The second program is called Artemis, which is a cloud-related system development effort that requested $16M for FY 2023. The Artemis request is $4M higher than the $12M received by the program in FY 2021.

Concerning the $2.2B in steady state funding requested, otherwise known as Operations & Maintenance (O&M), the DOT’s numbers show the year-to-year stability the department is known for. The new money requested in FY 2023 falls in the Development, Modernization, and Enhancement (DME) category. This totals $1.6B with $1.5B of that going to the Federal Aviation Administration’s NextGen efforts.

The following table outlines the programs that will see the highest DME funding grow with the first percentage listed in each box in parentheses being the change in funding anticipated vs. the funding received in FY 2021.

Summing up, the funding for IT investment at DOT tends to be very stable and FY 2023 will prove to be no different in that regard. Small increases at OST and the NHTSA should provide some business opportunity, particularly for the winner of the Artemis contract competition.