Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post

When you read that Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post, you might think of partisan gridlock, shutdown threats. Or last-minute continuing resolutions. But as someone who has spent years building software for federal agencies, I see something deeper: a failure of technical governance. The budget process, once a lever for accountability, has become a wrecking ball for federal IT modernization. Every missed deadline, every short-term CR, every unfunded mandate compounds technical debt across the entire government. The result? Systems that crash, data that leaks. And taxpayer dollars wasted on decade-old COBOL code.

In this article, we'll explore how Congress's dysfunction directly impacts software engineering, cybersecurity. And AI adoption, and we'll look at real cases-like Healthcaregov's launch and the OPM data breach-that trace their roots to broken funding mechanisms. And we'll ask whether a government built on annual appropriations can ever keep pace with technology that moves at sprint speed.

The Constitutional Purse and the Legacy of Pork-Barrel Procurement

The U. S. Constitution vests the power of the purse in Congress. Article I, Section 9 states that "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury. But in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law. " For two centuries, this created a predictable funding cycle: agencies submitted budgets, committees held hearings. And appropriations bills were passed before the fiscal year began. But that predictability has eroded. In the last 20 years, Congress has failed to pass all appropriations bills on time in 19 of them. The average delay has grown from a few days to over four months.

This chronic uncertainty is poison for long-term tech investments. Most federal IT projects require multi-year planning-modernizing legacy systems, migrating to the cloud, building zero-trust architectures. Yet agencies operate under continuing resolutions (CRs) that freeze spending at previous levels, often forbidding new starts. A 2021 GAO report found that CRs delayed 78% of major IT acquisitions and added between 0. 5% and 1. 0% in cost growth for every month of delay. In engineering terms, that's technical debt with an interest rate no private company would accept.

The problem is compounded by earmarked pork. Even when bills pass, they're often stuffed with funding for pet projects that have no relation to modern needs. A 2023 study by the Citizens Against Government Waste found $23 billion in earmarks, including $1. 2 million for "amphibious vehicle research" and $4 million for "historic ship restoration. " Meanwhile, the Department of Defense's software factories struggle to get bridge funding. Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post isn't just a headline; it's a technical reality.

How Continuing Resolutions Cripple Federal IT Modernization

A continuing resolution (CR) is Congress's default mechanism when it can't agree on a budget. It extends previous funding levels, often with a "no new starts" clause. For federal IT, this is a nightmare. Imagine being a product manager who can't start any new features for months, can't hire new engineers, and must keep paying for old servers that should have been decommissioned. That's the life of a Chief Information Officer in any agency subject to a CR.

Consider the Social Security Administration. Its core system still runs on COBOL, a language created in 1959. For years, the SSA has requested funding to migrate to modern platforms. Each CR blocks that new start. In 2022, the agency spent $800 million simply maintaining the old system-more than it would have cost to replace it over a five-year period. The irony? The CRs were meant to "save" money by avoiding new spending. And instead, they cost billions in wasted maintenance

The impact on agile development is even worse. Most federal IT projects now use some version of the TechFAR framework, which emphasizes incremental delivery. But CRs treat each budget cycle as a reset button. Teams that deliver working software in three months can't get funding for the next increment because Congress hasn't passed the budget. By the time funding arrives, the team has disbanded. This churn is why the federal government's average IT project takes 7. And 3 years to complete, per OMB data

Case Study: Healthcare gov and the Pre-ACA Procurement Nightmare

The Healthcare gov launch in October 2013 is the most famous example of government IT failure. But what many forget is that the underlying system was built under an outdated, rigid procurement process that Congress had failed to reform for decades. The contract was awarded to CGI Federal in 2011 under a monolithic, fixed-price model. No agile ceremonies, no iterative testing, no user research. The result was a system that crashed on day one because it couldn't handle 1% of expected traffic.

When the Obama administration scrambled to fix it, they brought in a "tech surge" team from the private sector. That team used modern engineering practices-continuous integration, automated testing, cloud infrastructure, and they rebuilt the system in weeksBut the fix was only possible because the White House used a temporary funding workaround, not a new appropriation. Congress had lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post's coverage of the debacle explicitly noted that "lawmakers were blindsided by the scale of the failure, having never asked for technical oversight. "

The Healthcare gov disaster led to the creation of the U. And sDigital Service (USDS) and 18F, two tech teams embedded in government. Both have done excellent work, but both remain underfunded and periodically threatened by CRs. In 2023, USDS had only 180 engineers, compared to the 10,000+ Google dedicates to search alone. Congress hasn't passed a dedicated budget for USDS since its creation; it lives on transfers from other agencies. That instability makes long-term recruitment impossible.

The GAO's High-Risk List: A Chronicle of Failed Oversight

Every two years, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) publishes a "High-Risk List" of federal programs most vulnerable to waste, fraud. And mismanagement. For decades, IT acquisitions have occupied a permanent spot. In the 2023 edition, the GAO identified 25 high-risk areas, including "DOD Weapon Systems Acquisition," "U. S. IT Modernization," and "Managing Cybersecurity Risks. " The GAO has made over 4,000 recommendations on IT since 2010; only 38% have been fully implemented.

Why so few? Because implementation requires dedicated funding that Congress rarely provides. The GAO can identify a technical fix-like adopting an NIST Cybersecurity Framework-but can't appropriate the money to execute it. Meanwhile, the agencies that do want to modernize are stuck in the procurement hamster wheel. The DoD's JEDI cloud contract, for example, was contested in court for over two years because the RFP was flawed. By the time it was awarded, the technology was already outdated.

The pattern is clear: Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post's coverage of high-risk IT projects shows that oversight without funding is just theater. The GAO can point out problems, but without the power to release funds tied to milestones, its recommendations become dust on a shelf.

AI and Cybersecurity: Funding Gaps in an Era of Rapid Threat Evolution

Cybersecurity and artificial intelligence are two domains where speed matters above all. A zero-day vulnerability is exploited within hours. An adversarial AI model can be deployed overnight. Yet Congress's funding process treats these threats as if they follow a fiscal-year schedule. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has pleaded for multi-year funding authority since its creation in 2018. Congress has denied it every time.

The result is that CISA operates on short-term CRs, preventing it from hiring top talent or signing multi-year contracts for threat-intelligence platforms. In 2021, the SolarWinds breach-the worst cyberattack in U. S history-exploited a system that had been on CISA's priority list for years but was never fully funded. The GAO reported that CISA had identified 73 critical systems needing protection; only 12 had received the necessary upgrades by the time of the attack.

AI is even more sensitive. The National AI Initiative Act of 2020 authorized $6 billion over five years for AI research. But about 80% of those funds were subject to annual appropriations. Every year, Congress underfunds it. And in FY2023, it received only $13 billion. Meanwhile, China invested $15 billion in AI in the same period. Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post's AI coverage highlights how this gap threatens national security. But the articles rarely mention the root cause: a budget process that treats AI like a road repair project.

The Technical Debt of the Federal Government: A Debt We Can't Discharge

Every engineer knows that technical debt accumulates when you take shortcuts. For the federal government, the shortcuts are systemic: using CRs instead of proper budgets, hiring contractors instead of building internal teams, and never refactoring legacy code. The result is a federal technology portfolio that runs on an estimated 5,000+ different legacy systems, many using languages that have no active maintainers (COBOL, FORTRAN, PL/I). The oldest system, the Department of Energy's nuclear weapon simulation code, was written in 1978.

A 2022 report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that federal technical debt-the cost of replacing or modernizing these systems-exceeds $337 billion. That's larger than the entire federal IT budget for the next decade. And it grows every year Congress fails to appropriate money for modernization. The law of compounding applies: a system that costs $1 million to maintain today will cost $1. 2 million next year, and $1. 44 million the year after. Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post's analysis often mentions "waste," but they rarely frame it as a technical debt problem.

The government can't declare bankruptcy on technical debt. It can't sunset a system and walk away. These systems process Social Security checks, manage Medicare claims, and control air traffic. The only way out is sustained, predictable investment-exactly what Congress no longer provides.

What Agile Government Could Learn from Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley didn't get efficient by accident. It adopted agile methodologies - continuous delivery, and a culture of iterative improvement. The federal government has tried to follow-the U, and sDigital Service Playbook has 13 key plays, including "understanding what users need" and "using iterative development. " But these playbooks were designed for organizations with fixed engineering teams and stable funding. When your budget is uncertain, you can't invest in a DevOps pipeline. When your contract is only for one fiscal year, you can't build a real CI/CD system.

What Congress needs is to adopt a "portfolio management" mindset, treating federal IT as a set of investments rather than annual expenses. That means multi-year appropriations, performance-based budgets. And a willingness to kill failing projects early. The private sector does this through venture capital and stage-gate funding. The government could do it with "modernization funds" that are replenished as old systems are retired. A few pilot programs exist-the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) has awarded $500 million since 2018-but it's a drop in the bucket.

Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post's editorial board has called for "a new budget process that rewards results, not history. " They're right. But until that happens, every federal tech project will continue to be built on a foundation of sand.

The Role of Tech Talent in Congressional Budget Committees

One of the most overlooked aspects of this dysfunction is the lack of technical expertise among the people writing the laws. The House Appropriations Committee has 53 members. How many have a background in software engineering, cybersecurity, or computer science? Zero. The Senate subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government has 13 members, and how manyZero.

When you don't understand the technology you're funding, you default to what you know: processes, forms, compliance checklists. That's why we still have Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) compliance that measures paperwork rather than actual security posture. That's why agencies are required to file 47 separate IT investment reports per year. But no one reads them. The oversight is busywork, not engineering.

Several non-profits have proposed a "Congressional Office of Technology Assessment" (like the one that was defunded in 1995). Others suggest a "Tech Corps" that places engineers directly on committee staff. Both ideas make sense, but they require Congress to admit that it has lost its grip. The Washington Post article I referenced earlier mentioned that "lawmakers no longer understand the programs they fund. " That's the core of the problem.

Political Realities vs. Engineering Realities: The Gap Widens

At its heart, the funding crisis is a clash between two cultures: politics and engineering. Politics rewards short-term wins, messaging, and re-election. Engineering rewards long-term investment, testing, and failure cycles. When you put the two in the same room without a translator, you get the status quo: $10 billion wasted on the Veterans Affairs' scheduling system, then a hero story about the startup that fixed it in six months.

The gap is widening because technology is accelerating while Congress decelerates. AI models double in capability every 18 months, and cloud costs drop 15% per yearBut the federal procurement process still takes an average of 18 months from RFP to award. By the time the contract is signed, the technology is two generations old. Congress has lost its grip on funding the government - The Washington Post's coverage often focuses on the stalemate in the House. But the real casualty is the ability of the United States to compete in the 21st century.

We need a new fiscal architecture: multi-year appropriations for IT, a dedicated modernization fund indexed to inflation. And a requirement that 5% of every IT budget be spent on retiring legacy systems. Without that, the technical debt will keep compounding until the government is simply too fragile to run. That's not a political opinion; it's an engineering fact.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How does a continuing resolution (CR) affect federal IT projects? A CR freezes spending at previous levels and usually prohibits new starts, and this delays modernization - prevents hiring,And forces agencies to keep paying for legacy systems, increasing technical debt.
2. What is the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF)? The TMF is a $500 million fund established in 2018 to provide incremental, performance-based funding for federal IT projects. It has supported over 30 projects. But its total size is far too small to address the $337 billion in legacy technical debt.
3. Why can't Congress pass a budget on time, Political polarization, filibuster rules,