President Obama's proposed 2011 budget, sent to Congress Monday, contains changes in the way government spends our taxpayer dollars.

With the biggest deficit in history and plenty of demands to go around, Obama has called for a freeze on discretionary spending. Just how that will affect the annual $76 billion federal IT budget remains to be seen. But we already have a number of hints about the way Obama wants to change Washington, including in the technology arena.

The president wants to bring many outsourced projects back into the government. That likely will have a big impact on the federal IT world, which has been tapping outside help to get its basic work done.

But as technology becomes the engine for more efficient government and better services, Obama is in a quandary about whether spending less money will produce the results he needs. The biggest demand is security and how to increase protection against a growing number of hack attacks and employee mistakes that have caused a several breaches. Government cannot afford to be cheap on this critical issue.

In several other areas, government is already moving ahead to tighten its IT belt. Vivek Kundra, Obama's federal chief information officer, is developing consolidation plans to make IT work more efficiently. His IT dashboard is showing how federal money is spent on technology, giving the public a view of where investments go. His soon-to-be released cybersecurity dashboard will do the same thing.

Obama's CIOs already are on the lookout for projects that should be revisited or abandoned entirely. Over at the Department of Veterans Affairs, a series of projects have been halted as a result of intense scrutiny over their effectiveness. And you can be sure that other agencies are putting IT projects under a glaring light, too.

One important issue to remember about the president's budget: It is simply a wish list. The final spending plan must be approved by Congress in the coming months.

Don't expect Obama to get everything he wants. At the end of the day, we are likely to see some changes and some improvements. Funding for a few projects will shrink or be pulled entirely. A few will get bigger and better, too.

The federal IT world will not come to a halt in what has often been described as a messy, sausage-making process. IT will simply go through a painful evaluation, just like it does in every budget cycle, and given its importance to this administration, probably will do fairly well. - Judi