Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Minor · Needs Congress

Maintain HUD's requested budget authority for IT modernization

Partially done

510 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development

“HUD should maintain its requested budget authority for modernization initiatives that are applicable to the Office of the Chief Information Officer and program offices across the department.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    Congress funded HUD's IT modernization in the FY2026 appropriation and attached a modernization-reporting condition to it. Title II of Division D of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 appropriates $345,000,000 to HUD's Information Technology Fund "For Department-wide and program-specific information technology systems and infrastructure", available until 2028, and requires the Secretary to brief the Appropriations Committees quarterly "on all information technology modernization efforts"; $55,000,000 goes to the Office of the Chief Information Officer under Administrative Support Offices, and § 231 lets the Secretary move up to $5,000,000 into the IT Fund for unforeseen development, modernization and enhancement. `partial` rather than `done`, and now for a measured reason rather than an unreadable record: HUD's Congressional Justifications were opened on 2026-09-06 and the request is $20 million above what Congress enacted. The FY2026 Congressional Justification for the Information Technology Fund states that "The 2026 President's Budget requests $365 million for the Information Technology Fund, which is $18 million less than the 2025 Enacted level"; Congress appropriated $345 million, so 94.5 percent of the request was maintained and $20 million was not. What *was* maintained is the modernization authority the Quote is actually about: HUD asked for appropriations language giving it "the flexibility to use prior year unobligated balances, including recaptures, to support either O&M or DME activities", and that flexibility was enacted — the FY2027 justification records HUD acting "[c]onsistent with the flexibility provided in the 2026 appropriation" and reproposing it. HUD has also kept asking: the FY2027 Budget requests $361 million for the IT Fund, $16 million above the 2026 enacted level, and $60.5 million for the Office of the Chief Information Officer within Administrative Support Offices against the $55 million enacted for 2026.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • The Quote reads two ways: that Congress should fund what HUD asked for, or that HUD should keep asking. The first is measurable and is what is leveled here; the second needs HUD’s own Congressional Justification, read below.
  • Corrected 2026-09-06. “There is no machine route to HUD’s budget justifications” was wrong: the route is hud.gov/stat, whose CFO block links hud.gov/stat/cfo/cj-fy26 and hud.gov/stat/cfo/cj-fy27. Each is an index of about forty per-account PDFs under hud.gov/sites/dfiles/CFO/documents/ (2027 files also appear under hud.gov/sites/default/files/CFO/documents/). hud.gov/stat/cfo/app-fy26 carries the Annual Performance Plan. The addresses hud.gov/budget, hud.gov/about/budget and hud.gov/program_offices/cfo/reports/fy26_CJs remain dead ends, and hud.gov still has no sitemap; the earlier search stopped at the wrong addresses rather than at a wall.
  • The Congressional Justification PDFs carry no printed date, so each is dated at the creation date recorded in the PDF file: 2025-05-30 for the FY2026 IT Fund chapter, 2026-03-31 for the two FY2027 chapters, three days before the FY2027 Budget was transmitted on 2026-04-03. The Evidence titles say so.
  • Both readings of the Quote are now on the record. Congress did not fund the request in full ($345 million enacted against $365 million requested, −5.5 percent), while HUD did keep requesting and raised its ask for FY2027 ($361 million, and $60.5 million for OCIO salaries and expenses). Neither limb is clean, which is what keeps this at partial; a reading that treated only the enacted number would have to move it down, and a reading that treated only HUD’s own requesting behavior would have to move it up.
Action
other
Object
HUD modernization budget authority for the Office of the Chief Information Officer
ID
1433