From Federal News Network
OPM revives defunct gov tech efforts with Tech Force hires
By Terry Gerton
| Guest: | Lauren Chambers |
| Title: | Ph.D. candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information |
| Summary: | A remnant of DOGE is about to get a new life under the Trump administration. OPM plans to issue its first Tech Force job offers this week, as the agency wraps up reviews for software engineers and data scientists who would serve two‑ to four‑year tours on modernization projects. How this effort will work — and how does it differ from past attempts to bring more technologists into government? |
Interview transcript:
Eric White: What is the big tech takeover? I guess they’re calling it the Tech Force initiative to bring tech talent to the government. We’ve seen things like this before, particularly, you know, we’ve been covering those kinds of initiatives over the past decade. What exactly do they have in store here?
Lauren Chambers: I think you said some of the kind of top trivia about this initiative already. It’s going to be a temporary way to bring in new tech talent into the government. They’re talking about bringing in around 1,000 temporary workers for temporary stints of two to four years. What’s really new about this Tech Force initiative is its relationship with big tech and other sorts of tech companies. So in particular, the launch of Tech Force was announced alongside almost 30 different tech companies ranging from Apple and Microsoft to NVIDIA and OpenAI. And the idea is that at the end of these temporary stints, these new Tech Force workers will be given the opportunity to be hired by these companies. When Business Insider was reporting on it, actually, they said, “Young tech talent hoping to land a job in the private sector has a new way in: the public sector,” which is a really different kind of divergence from some of the prior sorts of federal tech initiatives that we had seen under prior administrations.
Eric White: Not to belabor that point, but as I mentioned, this is not a new idea. We’ve seen this before, whether it’s the 18F or U.S. Digital Service. The Trump administration put the kibosh on those and wanted to create its own thing. Is that the only main difference though, that you’ve heard of so far — just the fact that finally the tech world had one of its own in Elon Musk creating it? What other differences are there?
Eric White: Talking here with Lauren Chambers. She’s a Ph.D. candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Let’s get into some of those questions that have kind of remained unanswered. And I guess I’ll pick your brain to see if you could fill in the blanks as much as possible. Obviously, the Trump administration took a pretty big hatchet to a lot of these workforce initiatives. You had mentioned the ones that they got rid of, but there have been layoffs in just about every other agency, including a lot of the tech workers that worked in said agencies. Is this going to be able to fill in the gaps when you have layoffs like this? Is that going to really be an attractive avenue for young tech workers to go in? If it already has a predicted length, maybe that may be a bit more attractive just because there’s a guarantee there, so to speak. But where is the attraction for young workers to actually do this?
Lauren Chambers is a Ph.D. Candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information
