US president Barack Obama's proposed government budget for fiscal year 2015 would cut the government's IT spending by about 3%. This includes a 6% cut from the IT budget of the Department of Defense and a 0.2% cut from the total IT budget of major civilian agencies.

Under the proposal, sent to Congress earlier this week, the government would spend about US$79bn on IT in fiscal 2015. This year's IT budget was about $81.4bn.

Not all agencies would see their technology budgets shrink under the proposal. In fact, more agencies would see slight increases instead of cuts.

The biggest IT budget reductions are proposed for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which would see its technology spend shrink by nearly $100m, and Social Security Administration, whose IT budget would be cut by about $139m.

HHS has the largest IT budget of all civilian agencies ($8.6bn in 2013 and $9.6bn in 2014). Obama's proposal would see it shrink further by another $1bn, or another 10%.

Other departments whose IT budgets would get cut are Personnel Management, Homeland Security, Transportation, Justice, Interior, Energy, the General Services Administration and Housing and Urban Development.

The largest IT spend increase proposed by Obama is for the Treasury Department, which would see its technology infrastructure purse grow from $3.5bn to nearly $4bn.

The largest proportional increase is proposed for the US Army Corps of Engineers, which would get a 43% IT budget increase: from $445m to $634m. Other proposed major increases are for Commerce and Veteran Affairs departments, which would get additional $100m and $180m, respectively.

IT budgets across the government have been relatively flat over the past few years. The White House has been pushing agencies to rationalize and consolidate IT infrastructure and use savings realized from these initiatives to pay for infrastructure modernization.

These consolidation initiatives emphasize use of cloud based services. The government has devised a certification process cloud service providers have to go through to qualify for providing services to federal agencies.

The program is called FedRAMP, which stands for Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. The deadline for interested vendors to qualify is 5 June.

So far, 12 service offerings have gone through the authorization process. The providers include Akamai, Amazon Web Services, AT&T, GCI Federal, Concurrent Technologies, Microsoft, IBM and HP, among a few others.

The authorization is issued for specific offerings. Microsoft's Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings, for example, have already received FedRAMP authorization, while its Software-as-a-Service offering is still going through the process.

Responding to Obama's proposal, the Cloud Computing Caucus Advisory Group, a non-profit coalition of IT vendors, issued a statement supporting the pressure to ramp up use of cloud services by the government.

“The President’s FY15 federal budget emphasizes a need for innovation from federal chief information officers as agency IT budgets remain relatively flat,” the statement read. “Widespread adoption of cloud technologies helps speed innovation across Federal agencies and achieves greater spending efficiencies.”

The organization's board includes representatives from Microsoft, EMC, Dell and Amazon, as well as government and academic institutions.