Yesterday, OMB released an Updated Report on Information Technology (IT) Spending for the Federal Government for fiscal 2009. This updates the February release of this data and restates the overall federal IT budget request for fiscal 2009 down slightly by $198 million (-0.3%) to $70.7 billion from $70.9 billion in February.

Key Changes in the April Update

Defense: This April update includes line-item investment data for the Defense agencies and service branches whereas the February release provided only top-line numbers for each branch. This additional data give us much more insight into where the Pentagon is going with their specific IT initiatives.

Second, the sheer number of investment lines for each branch in the April update dwarfs the number of investment lines in the February release. A quick look at the DoD Agencies breakout revealed over 500 investment lines (with corresponding investment data) in April where February contained in the twenties (and without detailed investment data.)

Defense Highlights

• Overall down 0.1%, or -$39 million
• USAF down 3%, or -$215 million
• Army down 0.3%, or -$22 million
• Navy up 0.8%, or +$59 million
• DoD Agencies up 1.3%, or +$139 million

Civilian: By contrast, the February release had much more complete data for Civilian than for Defense and the April update "delta" is much less dramatic. Both releases contain detailed line-item initiative investment dollar data and of the 27 Executive-level Civilian agencies included in the Ex. 53 just over half of those agencies had no change in their FY09 request between the February and April releases.

Civilian Highlights

• Overall down 0.4%, or -$159 million
• USDA up 0.7%, or +$16 million
• Commerce up 1.4%, or +$31 million
• HHS down 1.3%, or -$76 million
• DHS down 1.7%, or -$90 million
• Justice up 3%, or +$81 million

My fellow federal analysts and I are pouring over this updated data as we prepare for our 6th Annual Federal MarketView Conference where we will discuss our five-year IT forecast for the federal government as well as explore what we see within the various Defense/Civilian segments, agencies and technology sectors.