Sonny Bhagowalia has returned to the federal government.

After spending the last three years working as a technology executive for the Hawaii state government, Bhagowalia started Oct. 20 as the Treasury Department’s chief information officer. A Treasury official confirmed Bhagowalia replaced Robyn East, who retired in June after three years on the job. Raghav Vajjhala had been acting CIO since East left.

This is Bhagowalia’s second stint in government. He served from July 1999 as a program management executive for the FBI to July 2011, when he left for Hawaii after spending the final year plus as the deputy associate administrator in the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.

He also served almost three years in the Interior Department. He was CIO of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then rose to be CIO for the entire department.

Bhagowalia picks up from where East left off for Treasury around shared services and improving cybersecurity.

According to the IT Dashboard, Treasury has 56 major investments worth $2.5 billion and a total IT budget of $3.5 billion. Bhagowalia must deal with a host of programs struggling to meet cost metrics. The dashboard shows that while 83 percent of all projects are meeting project schedule and 88 percent are considered green by the CIO, only 68 percent of the major investments are meeting their cost goals.

Treasury’s biggest program is the IRS mainframe and server services and support contract with $411 million in fiscal 2014. The IRS runs the top six largest by dollar amount programs across the department.

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