The White House has submitted a budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 requesting more than $500 million in additional funding to hire personnel and support various CX programs across federal agencies. The proposal, which is in line with the executive order issued by President Biden in December 2021 calling on the government to transform CX and service delivery to the people, also seeks to modernize services, reduce administrative burdens, pilot new online tools and technologies, and improve agency capacity to improve service delivery, according to the CX initiatives fact sheet on the budget request.

The spending plan calls for the hiring of 120 new, full-time CX experts with CX and digital product delivery experience to staff 10 departments and agencies that have been designated by the Biden administration as High-Impact Service Providers (HISPs). These include the departments of Agriculture (USDA), Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration (SSA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and Census Bureau.

Another component of the plan calls for nine agencies to create or to greatly expand their CX offices. The offices are from all the departments and agencies mentioned above with the addition of the Department of Commerce, but excluding FEMA and the Census Bureau.

The budget request includes $119 million for the General Services Administration (GSA) to continue developing digital CX tools with a governmentwide impact. “These programs provide the foundational tools for federal agencies to shape customer experience, especially where government websites are not user-friendly and must better comply with the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act—making them more accessible to all Americans,” the White House wrote.

The Biden administration is also calling on the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) to help six agencies on “priority” service improvement projects, working with the highest-volume and highest-web-traffic federal service providers to improve their website content, ensuring that information is clear and that services such as text messaging and virtual chat agents are more widely available. “The highly specialized customer experience and digital delivery talents at TTS provide flexible surge capacity for federal agencies in their customer experience transformation,” the White House says.

Also, part of the budget proposal is a call for funding to support seven new Voice of Customer (VoC) programs across government. These programs will “collect and report experience performance data on key drivers of customer experience from a broad representation of Americans—which would drive meaningful service improvements,” the budget request summary explains.

With more than $500 million requested, the White House hopes to also make individual investments in a variety of agencies to enhance important public services, such as airport security, federal retirement, passport delivery, tax payments, and a number of other key life experiences for which the Biden administration recently created projects to transform.

Other items in the budget proposal include the following:

• $200 million in additional funding for the Technology Modernization Fund to support IT modernization projects that have the potential to improve CX across government
• $6.6 million for the Office of Personnel Management to modernize federal employee retirement services
• $2.7 million for the Transportation Security Administration to pilot a CX Manager model at four airports, focused on streamlining passenger screening, easy-to-understand signage, and better collection of customer feedback
• $642 million for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to improve taxpayer experience and expand customer service outreach
• $163 million for the State Department to continue making online passport renewal accessible to the public
• $11 million for the Department of Health and Human Services and partner agencies, including the SSA, USDA, Housing and Urban Development, and GSA to streamline access to data needed to verify eligibility for federal programs
• $9 million to the SSA and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to work together on a pilot program to improve the experience of individuals applying for Medicare benefits
• $40 million to the Health Resources and Services Administration to help low-income families access federal benefits

The budget request supports the Office of Personnel Management’s recent launch of its Hiring Experience Office as it looks to streamline the federal hiring process. The budget plan also supports paid federal internships. “Federal agencies are focused on attracting more people to federal service over the long term, while also addressing immediate agency hiring needs to rebuild capacity,” the White House states.