GSA Blog

Recognizing National Armed Forces Day: How The TMF Is Putting Money and Momentum Towards Service Members

In recognition of National Armed Forces Day on May 16, GSA’s Technology Modernization Fund honors the service members who have sacrificed for this country by supporting investments that strengthen the digital services military members, veterans, and their families rely on every day.

From securing benefits access for military families to ensuring critical systems remain reliable for service members around the clock, these technology upgrades help agencies deliver faster, safer, and more effective support to the people who serve our nation and their families.

Removing the Barriers Between Veterans and Their Benefits

Millions of veterans use the Department of Veterans Affairs digital services every month. A $10.5 million TMF investment helped VA remove multiple legacy credential options in favor of two modern, federally certified credential providers. 

Retiring the legacy credentials eliminated the ongoing licensing costs and fraud risks associated with maintaining proprietary sign-in infrastructure, putting those resources back into VA’s mission of delivering healthcare and benefits to the service members who earned them.

A $7.4 million TMF investment is digitizing the forms veterans fill out to access healthcare, disability, education, and pension benefits — services that see more than two million interactions every month. 

So far, 10 forms have been completed, with 53 more underway. The 350,000 veterans who have used those 10 forms have saved a combined 2,385 years of time compared to the old paper process. Satisfaction scores have increased 8.6 percent, and the investment is on track to eliminate 305,000 lines of custom code by completion. 

As the remaining forms are finished, those savings will multiply across the full two million monthly interactions. The approach is built to be reused, so other federal agencies can apply the same framework without starting from scratch, meaning the efficiency gains reach well beyond VA.

Investing in National Readiness Infrastructure

Readiness infrastructure by definition has to exist before it is needed, and the Selective Service System (SSS) is one of the more important examples of that principle in the federal government. 

SSS manages more than two million annual registrations and six million enrollment verification checks. It maintains the records that serve as the foundation for the registration requirement tied to federal benefits eligibility including student aid, federal employment, and job training.

A $6 million TMF investment is bringing SSS’s core systems onto cloud infrastructure with AI-powered security tools, building the capacity to scale rapidly if Congress and the President call for it. 

A complementary $5.9 million investment is  migrating SSS’s registration, compliance, and verification software to a cloud-first architecture designed for continuous availability and rapid operational scaling when called upon. 

The cloud migration has already generated nearly $200,000 in early-stage cost savings through reduced IT infrastructure spending and improved system management, with significantly more expected as both investments reach completion. Together, these investments are hardening data protections for every man registered in the system. 

Protecting the Department of War Facilities That Equip the Military

Military capability is inseparable from the facilities that produce and maintain the equipment supporting it. The U.S. Army’s Organic Industrial Bases employ 28,000 workers and operate roughly 500,000 connected devices across the manufacturing arsenals, maintenance depots, and ammunition plants that form the Army’s global supply chain. 

A $15.6 million TMF investment funded the prototyping, authority to operate, and hardware installation, thus delivering a first-of-its-kind visibility capability that lets commanders monitor facility conditions, physical security, and cyber status in real time from the facility level to Army Command. 

A scalable template from that work is now deploying across more than 300 facilities worldwide. By structuring the authority to operate to cover multiple installations without individual approvals, the project scaled quickly and generated the cost savings already realized. 

Investing Now, Repaying Over Time

In total, the TMF has committed nearly $40 million to the infrastructure, services, and security systems that America’s military community depends on. 

These investments represent a selection of the TMF’s broader portfolio of 70 projects across the federal government, all built on the same model of providing agencies with upfront capital for high-impact modernization efforts. 

Agencies are required to repay all awarded funds over time and must meet individually established milestones to unlock more funding. This performance-based structure helps ensure accountability while removing the upfront financial barriers that have historically delayed critical technology upgrades. That model has turned $1.05 billion in investments into an estimated $12 billion in savings, cost avoidance, and time returned to agencies and the people they serve, with 378 million hours recovered from outdated processes throughout the full portfolio. 

National Armed Forces Day is the time to pay tribute to those who serve this country, and the TMF honors that commitment by investing in efforts that make veterans’ lives easier, military infrastructure more secure, and the systems supporting armed service worthy of the people who depend on them.