TTS American Rescue Plan initiatives

TTS American Rescue Plan initiatives are empowering agencies to reimagine how the government delivers services to the public. We are using technology as a catalyst to build communities, simplify and improve the public’s experience with government, serve the underserved, and share expertise across agencies along the way.

ARP investments are accelerating modernization. While all ARP funding has been obligated, many of our programs will continue to make digital services work better for the public. Learn more about our high-impact ARP initiatives below.

We invest in research and development that redelivers public value

Spurring innovation through 10x investments

• Challenge: Since 2015, our 10x program has delivered innovative products and platforms for users in both the federal workforce and the general public, all inspired by ideas crowdsourced from federal employees.
• Opportunity/impact: 10x is investigating and testing new ideas, aligned with TTS ARP’s priority focus areas, with the potential to transform government digital service delivery. Initial explorations include platforms for notifications, and investigation of problems related to climate change, reimagining public engagement, and equity in delivery.

Investing in cloud adoption and reuse

• Challenge: Agency demand for cloud services dramatically increased during the COVID-19 pandemic due to staff working remotely. This increased demand made authorizing cloud services by FedRAMP critical to helping both agencies and the public recover from the pandemic.
• Opportunity/impact: FedRAMP is accelerating its review of new cloud service offerings to address the high demand of requests by agencies for new services and reuse of FedRAMP-authorized cloud offerings. Additionally, FedRAMP is automating its system to make the FedRAMP process faster, cheaper, simpler, and more secure.

Working with public solvers to innovate government services

• Challenge: Government agencies constantly work to address issues that affect people, communities, and industries throughout the country and even the world. Since 2010, the U.S. government has run over 2,000 prize competitions — engaging public solvers ranging from students and hobbyists to small business owners and academic researchers.
• Opportunity/impact: Challenge.gov’s mission is to empower the federal government and the public to participate together in equitable forms of innovation through prize competitions. Specifically, Challenge.gov provides programming, customer support, resources, and content development to bring the federal community and public solvers together. Investing in the Challenge.gov platform will advance open innovation. Specifically, the platform is being optimized with a new feature that provides a secure innovation evaluation capability for federal agencies.

Understanding long COVID and its impact on the public

• Challenge: With between five and 30 percent of people developing long COVID after a COVID-19 infection, there is increasing urgency to understand how long COVID affects patients, its potential to impact on health disparities in communities, and what those living with long COVID need to improve their wellbeing.
• Opportunity/impact: A USDC design fellow contributed to the Health+ long COVID Report. The Report highlights experiences and defines solutions based on interviews with people affected by long COVID, practitioners, and caregivers. The Health+ long COVID work enhances interagency efforts on long COVID and builds on research related to chronic illnesses associated with prior infectious disease.

We empower agencies to serve the underserved

Putting the user at the forefront of COVID rental relief

• Challenge: State, local, and tribal governments have faced the challenge of building new and local-level infrastructures to provide rental assistance to tenants and landlords, and avoid financial distress and evictions due to public health measures taken during the pandemic. Mitigation of housing instability during the pandemic was critical in the effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and support economic recovery from the national emergency.
• Opportunity/impact: The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program and TTS focused on the needs of tenants and landlords to develop data-driven solutions to reduce the prevalence of complex application processes and help grantees create more impactful, accessible, and equitable ERA programs. As a result, the team published guidelines and tools for ERA Grantees, including program and service design, Guidelines for ERA program online applications and Eviction Diversion.

Assisting families eligible for the Child Tax Credit

• Challenge: The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 increased the Child Tax Credit and expanded it to include monthly payments. Government and community outreach is critical to ensure eligible families know it is available.
• Opportunity/impact: In collaboration with the White House and the Department of the Treasury, TTS helped deliver a CTC Navigator Training program that reached over 5,000 people in community groups or government agencies that work with and serve eligible families. The expanded Child Tax Credit reached the families of roughly 60 million children.

Verifying income for public benefits

• Challenge: Income verification is key to the eligibility determination process for many public benefits programs, but agencies often perform it independently and in different ways across states.
• Opportunity/impact: This project explored how states and programs verify earned income to identify available data sources and seek opportunities where cross-agency services may be able to reduce costs and increase the accuracy and timeliness of determinations.

We share technical expertise across agencies to make a difference

Launching the U.S. Digital Corps

• Challenge: The government identified the need to bring in a more diverse, entry-level technology workforce as the government faces a talent pool that is increasingly eligible for retirement and contains a lower percentage of women in federal IT positions.
• Opportunity/impact: To bring skilled, diverse, and mission-driven early-career technologists to the federal government, TTS launched and scaled the U.S. Digital Corps, a two-year fellowship with agencies across government and a pathway to career service. ARP funding supported the program’s initial launch.

Deploying AI talent across government

• Challenge: Artificial intelligence represents an opportunity to improve how the government delivers digital services to the public; however, implementing solutions using responsible AI practices requires technical and programmatic expertise.
• Opportunity/impact: TTS Fellowships are working closely with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to place AI talent on projects across government that directly contribute to developing safe, secure, and trustworthy AI solutions that responsibly serve the public interest.

Expanding technology support to improve the public’s experience

• Challenge: Executive Office of the President staff have limited capacity to address service demand surges. The EOP is expanding existing government-wide technology capabilities and services to implement accessible, user-centered experience programs. The EOP drives the development and implementation of the President’s domestic policy agenda in the White House and across the federal government.
• Opportunity/impact: EOP is partnering with the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to create a cross-disciplinary technology team to provide timely, effective, and equitable EOP service delivery across government.

Sharing best practices to modernize government

• Challenge: With public demand for digital services and capabilities (including AI) on the rise, agencies will have to work in new ways for successful and sustainable digital transformation.
• Opportunity/impact: The Centers of Excellence hosted government wide training events and workshops to share and develop best practices from across government. This included directing ARP funds for additional support to the AI Community of Practice and AI trainings to meet the growing interest of over 12,000 members. Using these resources, government agencies can take the first steps in their modernization journey.

Modernizing the Federal Audit Clearinghouse user experience

• Challenge: We were tasked to modernize the Federal Audit Clearinghouse which provides oversight for $1.4T in grants annually.
• Opportunity/impact: We rewrote the FAC, significantly reducing the lines of code in the system, making it easier to maintain, while retaining all critical performance. Following its launch, the new FAC website rapidly reached approximately 1000 audit submissions per week. Built on free and open source tools, the new modernized FAC uses U.S. Web Design System for greater accessibility and is scalable with improved search functionality. It provides a way for the public and federal programmers to query and access FAC data via an application programming interface built on api.data.gov.

Migrating to the cloud to connect the public with rulemaking

• Challenge: The public needs a reliable, user-friendly interface to comment on proposed federal regulatory actions. As technology evolves, digital services may outgrow their legacy systems.
• Opportunity/impact: To address performance issues and ensure continuity of service, Regulations.gov and FDMS.gov are being upgraded and migrated to the cloud. The transition and modernization of these eRulemaking sites are funded in part by ARP.

Building capacity to scale digital services

• Challenge: With over 40 ARP initiatives, TTS needed to fortify its infrastructure to deliver value to the public.
• Opportunity/Impact: ARP investments in Cloud.gov and other backend support allow new and existing digital services to meet growing user demand, improve efficiencies, and manage performance.

Increasing outreach and access to health-saving resources

• Challenge: The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program, for Women, Infants and Children supports roughly 6.2 million women and children a month, including half of all infants born in the U.S. Yet only 57% of eligible WIC participants are enrolled, and participation has been declining. Participants include low-income women that are pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding, infants up to the infant’s first birthday and children up to the child’s fifth birthday that are at nutritional risk.
• Opportunity/impact: To reach more eligible women and children and meet the Administration’s goals for the program, WIC focused on modernizing consumer communications and improving digital products and services. Working with a Presidential Innovation Fellow, the WIC team made resources more accessible to eligible recipients.

Connecting small businesses in need with resources to recover from the pandemic

• Challenge: There is a gap in technical assistance to underrepresented community business owners across the U.S. Many minority-owned businesses and mom-and-pop shops found themselves at the end of the line to access economic relief.
• Opportunity/impact: The Small Business Administration used a community navigator model to reach businesses owned by women, veterans, and socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. ARP funding provided a Presidential Innovation Fellow to the Community Navigators program to aid leadership and offer data analytics expertise to more effectively identify those businesses in greatest need and connect them to training, counseling, and resources.

Using technical experts to inform consumer protection policies

• Challenge: Technology often evolves faster than policy can keep up. Developing policy that serves its intended effect requires a deep understanding of the technology landscape.
• Opportunity/impact: 18F partnered with the Federal Trade Commissions Bureau of Competition and Bureau of Consumer Protection to provide critical technology expertise. This collaboration enhanced the FTC’s investigative capabilities and policy development process to protect consumers. This included expanding the government’s understanding of technology-related issues, establishing interagency collaborations to improve public access to regulatory commenting systems, and laying the groundwork to attract more technologists to participate in policy making.

We improve accessibility and equity for greater access to government services

Increasing voter information and access

• Challenge: Citizens seek critical information about voter registration and the voting process in the lead up to elections. Today, Vote.gov helps people understand how to register to vote in their state and be aware of important registration deadlines. The site offers this information in multiple languages, while providing a simple, easy-to-use interface, and an easy-to-remember URL.
• Opportunity/impact: The next step for Vote.gov is to become the primary, trustworthy, and authoritative source for voter information. ARP investments are helping Vote.gov provide resources to help break down barriers for voters of all backgrounds, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, national origin, and age.

Studying equity in remote identity proofing methods

• Challenge: The 2021 President’s Management Agenda outlines a call-to-action for the government to provide simple, secure, and equitable solutions to every person and entity interacting with federal agencies. The Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government also challenges agencies to find ways to deliver government services equitably to all Americans.
• Opportunity/impact: We are assessing the impact of ethnicity, race, gender, income, and other demographic factors on identity proofing methods, which is the process of verifying that a person is who they say they are. More information on the study is available at Equity Study on Remote Identity Proofing.

Making government services more equitable

• Challenge: The ARP was designed with equity as a through line, with the intent to address historically disparate outcomes across race, class, and geography that were further exacerbated by the pandemic. Federal programs are innovating and finding new ways to achieve these goals, and need support to measure whether these efforts are working as intended.
• Opportunity/impact: Meeting this challenge requires rigorously testing and evaluating program changes to identify practices that are working and could be replicated. Our evidence-building efforts have two core elements: First, our Office of Evaluation Sciences is working with agencies to evaluate their ARP programs and resources and make recommendations to improve equity by increasing awareness, access, and allocation. Second, OES is conducting a multi-year national evaluation of a cross-section of priority ARP-funded programs.

Building shared tools for public benefits

• Challenge: Families with young children often struggle with getting the right information at the right time when trying to access the federal programs designed to support their health and development. Case workers reported that families who moved more frequently were harder to reach through postal mail. And, of course, many working families continue to say that they simply do not have time to wait on hold for hours trying to reach the correct person on the other end of the phone.
• Opportunity/impact: The Public Benefits Studio collaborates with benefits programs to build shared tools that reduce burden for low-income individuals and families and the program staff that serve them. With ARP funding, the Studio built Notify.gov — a text messaging service built to help agencies more effectively communicate with the people they serve. Notify.gov’s trustworthy, easy-to-use platform enables federal and federally-funded programs to send customized, bulk text messages to reach people where they are, improve program outcomes, and lower administrative costs.

Creating inclusive design patterns

• Challenge: While government digital teams are serious about improving the experience of their websites and services, no single team can do it all, talk with every individual, or test with every audience. As digital teams actively seek to understand and address usability, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion in their digital services, they shouldn’t have to go it alone.
• Opportunity/impact: The U.S. Web Design System developed inclusive design patterns to make it easier to create accessible, mobile-friendly government websites for the diverse American public. USWDS identifies best practices for common digital service interactions and guides teams through the process of building with those practices using the design system.

We enhance the user experience overall

Improving access to housing counseling services and mortgage relief for FHA loan recipients by modernizing call center technology and self-service tools

• Challenge: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recognized the need to update technology and call handling systems, which help people access critical counseling, loan servicing, and local support services.
• Opportunity/impact: Our Centers of Excellence supported the HUD Federal Housing Administration Resource Center in implementing new technologies to improve the user experience. This includes:
  • Modernizing the Housing Counseling Locator website and Interactive Voice Response and integrating the National Servicing Center and Housing Counseling operations with HUD’s modern customer relationship management tool.
  • Building web-based self-service tools and implementing software as a service Digital Bot (ChatBot and VoiceBot) capability to provide 24/7/365 support for customers seeking information and assistance with FHA/HUD products.

Reimagining USAGov as the front door to government

• Challenge: Accessing government services should not require deep knowledge of the intricacies of the Executive Branch.
• Opportunity/impact: USA.gov and USAGov en Español are expanding their existing services and experience to provide additional trusted access to government information and services, by centralizing government services in one place. USA.gov and USAGov en Español plan to work with agency partners to expand beyond providing information. This will enable the public to fully complete their task from start to finish on one site by better understanding all possibilities for a common customer experience.

Modernizing the public search experience

• Challenge: Search.gov is a shared service available across government that aims to simplify and empower the government website search experience for the public. Providing industry standard search experiences across government websites reduces friction as people interact with agencies for benefits and services.
• Opportunity/impact: Search.gov improvements are providing a consistent and trustworthy interface to the public, tailoring results through additional filtering options, working with more websites, and helping agencies use analytics to improve the public experience.

Locating child care services

• Challenge: The COVID-19 crisis shined a spotlight on the challenges that working families face while trying to locate and pay for child care. Childcare.gov today provides information to parents about child care and finding subsidies. It links parents to state and territory websites for child care services available in their community.
• Opportunity/impact: We worked with the U.S. Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families Office of Child Care to make recommendations for the priority of improvements to the experience on Childcare.gov, assisting families in their search and making the platform responsive to evolving needs.

Contact us

• TTS ARP-related inquiries: tts-info@gsa.gov
• Press requests: press@gsa.gov