The Biden Administration's proposed budget for fiscal year 2025 includes a provision to modernize the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.

As part of that, the service would shift the US government's financial systems from mainframes over to the cloud. The service is in charge of providing citizens options on how to pay taxes, offering Treasury securities to investors, funding agencies, and providing financial reporting on government spend.

"The Budget provides $396 million for the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, $24 million above the 2023 level," the budget states.

"This includes funding to enhance the security posture of core Government financial systems by modernizing and transitioning all mainframe applications to the secure cloud."

While the budget provides no further details, 2023 procurement documents reveal that the "Fiscal Service currently utilizes IBM’s on-premises physical mainframe to host over thirty critical applications that are vital to the operation of Fiscal Service."

Those mainframes appear to primarily be the z15, an IBM system that was launched in 2019.

That procurement notice was already focused on moving some of those applications to the cloud - albeit a cloud mainframe. IBM was awarded the project in March last year and will receive $84 million to shift some applications to the cloud over a five-year period.

The new proposed federal budget would likely expand that project to include all remaining applications, although no timeline is shared. A 2022 Fiscal Service capital investment plan document reveals that the bureau also uses Oracle Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce cloud, and colocation data centers.

The 2025 fiscal year budget will still need to be approved by the House and Senate, and may change before it is passed.