Every federal chief information officer is being asked to deliver more secure digital services, accelerate artificial intelligence adoption, modernize decades-old infrastructure, comply with increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity mandates and improve the citizen experience — all while operating with fewer skilled technology professionals.
The Trump administration slashed IT spending across civilian federal agencies from $75.1 billion in 2025 to $67.9 billion for the current fiscal year. While the newly proposed federal IT budget calls for a return to 2025 levels, there’s no guarantee of increase as it gets negotiated through Congress. Although it is tempting to conclude that automation and additional hiring will solve the immediate challenge, I see a broader opportunity for outcome-based contracting focused on experience-level agreement metrics and realized taxpayer savings.
Even if agencies had unlimited recruiting authority, the specialized expertise needed to operate today’s cloud-native, automated and secure environments simply isn’t available in sufficient numbers. The federal technology workforce is now competing with every higher-paying Fortune 500 company, hyperscale cloud provider and AI startup for the same engineers, architects and cybersecurity professionals. The result is a structural skills shortage that is reshaping how government acquires technology services.
The skills gap is no longer a future problem
The Government Accountability Office continues to identify cybersecurity workforce shortages as a governmentwide challenge. In a January 2025 report, GAO found that while agencies recognize recruiting and retaining cyber talent as a critical issue, many have implemented fewer than half of the key workforce planning practices needed to address those shortages, recommending 23 improvements to strengthen workforce planning and evaluation.
The skills gap problem is not unique to government. According to the 2024 ISC² Cybersecurity Workforce Study, 67% of organizations report cybersecurity staffing shortages, 90% report at least one significant skills gap on their security teams, and the global cybersecurity workforce gap has grown to 4.76 million professionals.
The 2024 Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute Talent Study cite a 75% increase in demand for simulation software skill sets over the last five years, along with digital and cloud computing skill sets. CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce 2025 notes that technology positions will grow to over two times overall employment over the next 10 years.
These findings reinforce uncomfortable questions: Are there enough people with expertise in rapidly evolving technologies like cloud engineering, zero trust architecture, identity management, development, security and operations (DevSecOps), AI, automation and continuous compliance?
The procurement model is changing
Federal acquisition is quietly undergoing an important philosophical shift. Historically, agencies purchased technology and hired people to operate it. Increasingly, agencies are buying outcomes like system availability, incident response times, security performance, compliance readiness, user experience and operational resilience.
This mirrors private-sector procurement, where organizations increasingly favor experience-level agreements (XLAs) over service-level agreements (SLAs), automation and consumption-based pricing over traditional time-and-materials contracts. The market is signaling that operational accountability matters more than labor hours.
Keep the shifting procurement model a value-add for taxpayers
For federal agencies responsible for critical infrastructure, national security, healthcare, public safety or financial systems, the trend is more pronounced as they deliver mission-critical services. This is not a decision that agencies should take lightly as outsourcing IT functions raises legitimate questions about contractor oversight, maintaining institutional knowledge and re-examining inherently governmental functions. Rather than supplement IT staff or request budget increases to help them scale, agencies are addressing this by filling IT staffing holes through increased partnership with, and oversight of, the vendor community.
A federal agency — or a private company, for that matter — needs to recruit and retain its own full bench of niche specialists to run its own environment. A dedicated IT services provider recruits that same bench once, then deploys it across dozens of clients through shared, cross-trained teams. That’s a fundamentally different model: It turns a scarce, finite pool of talent into a resource that gets spread further, rather than one that must be duplicated inside every organization. It’s the same logic that leads private companies to use managed security operations centers or cloud consultancies instead of building every specialty in-house. The talent shortage is real for everyone. Pooling scarce expertise across many customers is simply a more efficient way to deploy it than every employer competing to build an identical team from scratch.
Because providers support multiple agencies, they spread investments in automation platforms, security operations, certifications, AI capabilities and compliance expertise across many customers. Taxpayers benefit from economies of scale that individual agencies cannot easily achieve on their own. Government’s role will shift toward overseeing and demanding vendor outcomes through performance outcome metrics, accountability measures and tracking realized savings.
The path forward
The federal government will always need talented public servants leading technology strategies, governance, policy, architecture and mission delivery. Those functions should remain inherently governmental. The day-to-day operation of increasingly sophisticated IT environments is becoming too specialized, dynamic and resource-intensive for many agencies to sustain themselves.
The agencies that succeed over the next decade will be the ones that build the smartest partnerships — not as a stopgap measure, but as a long-term strategy for delivering secure, resilient, cost-effective government technology that keeps pace with innovation while safeguarding taxpayer investments.
Erika Dinnie is the vice president of federal strategy and planning at MetTel.
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