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Meta is investing $600 billion in AI infrastructure, bringing jobs to communities across America. Phil a Meta building engineer in Las Lunas, New Mexico, says welcoming Meta into our community is creating more opportunities. Learn more@meta.com BuildingAmerica.
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Hey, welcome back to POLITICO Tech. I'm your host Stephen Overle, and on this show I break down tech politics and policy with the people shaping our digital future. A quick programming note at the start. Politico Tech will be taking a hiatus after this week's episode. For more about that, hang around after the interview. This year we've talked a lot about Silicon Valley figures joining the Trump administration, and people like Elon Musk and David Sacks got most of the attention. But Scott Cooper was right there with them. For years, Scott was a major tech investor at the firm Andreessen Horowitz. And back in July, he was confirmed as director of the Office of Personnel Management, essentially the government's HR department. Now he's trying to bring more techies to Washington. He's spearheading the new US Tech force, which was announced this week and aims to bring a thousand workers with AI, cyber and other tech backgrounds into into the federal government. And in the process, he's looking to change the way agencies pay and recruit tech talent. On the show today, I sat down with Scott at the OPM headquarters to talk about the government's recruitment challenges, the revolving door between Washington and Silicon Valley, and why he thinks AI is worth the hype. Here's our conversation. Scott, welcome to POLITICO Tech. Great.
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Thanks for having me, Steven. Great to be here.
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So you've launched this US Tech force this week?
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Yep.
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What's the challenge you're really looking to solve?
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Yeah, there's really two kind of primary challenges. One is just look, with the role of technology increasingly becoming increasingly important in the private sector but also in government, we need to make sure we have the right skills and the right problems. So thing number one is just making sure we augment our skills with modern software development. You know, AI specialists, data scientists, product managers, you know, things that we have some capabilities of in government today, but certainly we can expand as we kind of reshape the focus of government. The second problem is really also geared towards early career. So you may know this, but about 7% of the workforce in the federal government is early career. So think of that as like, you know, fewer than five or seven years of work experience. That compares with about 20 to 23% in the non federal workforce. So kind of by a factor of three to one, we're not doing a great job of kind of replenishing the pipeline of early career people coming into government. So our Hope is that TechForce allows people the opportunity to solve very great and important problems that we have in government, but also start to kind of redevelop an excitement within kind of the early career folks about what the opportunity set could be for them in government.
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And so what are those opportunities? I mean, if I were to take one of these jobs and let's say I get detailed to the Energy Department or the State Department, what does my job look like? Exactly?
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Yeah. So the program is a two year program. So as we mentioned, we're trying to hire 1,000 people and we'll basically kind of divide those people up depending upon the needs of the different agencies. So as you mentioned, you know, if you go to energy, you might be working on some supercomputing project that they're doing to help ensure that they've got the baseline for quantum computing or fusion or things of that sort. If you go to Department of War, you might be working on drone related technologies or something. That's kind of a field facing opportunity for, you know, the military. Cms, the Medicare group that runs Medicare, they're trying to kind of develop a, you know, portal that basically has all the physicians in it and so kind of increases the flexibility and ability of patients to be able to identify, you know, who the right provider is for them. So across the board, anything like that. So the plan is you apply to the program, we will assign you, we will match as best as we can. Kind of your desire to work in an agency with the agency's needs, you work at that agency and then importantly, we're going to treat it like a single cohort. And what do we mean by that is, you know, we're going to run a speaker series, we're going to run kind of career development opportunities for you. And so even though you might be working at HHS in your day job, hopefully, you know, on nights and weekends, we'll have opportunities for you to come together as a single group and feel like you're actually part of, you know, kind of the whole team essentially.
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Got it. And so this idea is to bring in more early career people to government. And I'm curious, now you came from Silicon Valley before being a government, you spent many years at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm. Why do you think more tech people don't come into government? I mean, is it pay, is it culture, is it something else?
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Look, I think there's no single answer is the honest answer. Look, there's no question that there is a pay disparity. And, and you know, look, we're not going to solve that. I think we can address that though, in a couple of ways. One is if we start with early career, at least the gap between private and public sector pay is not as great as it becomes as people progress through their career. So if you are primarily interested in profit maximization, which is, you know, a fine thing that's, I'm not making a normative statement here. You know, it's easier to kind of deal with that early career than it is later career. Now, one of the ways that we at OPM can address some of the pay challenges is one of the challenges we have in government is pay is often determined based upon the tenure that, that you've been in the job. And also things like college degrees. And so one of the things that we're doing even outside of Tech Force is working to eliminate those things so that if you're 22 years old, but you are really performing at the level of a GS15, you know, which is a very, very senior role, obviously you shouldn't be prohibited from doing that just because you don't meet a 10 year, 10 year requirement, for example. And so those are things that we can do to kind of make sure at least the leveling of the skills is appropriate for kind of what people are doing.
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And is that just specific to this program or you're looking at that?
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We're looking at that. We're looking at that across government. We're going to start with this program because we can hire depending on the way government is very complicated, but depending upon the hiring authority you use, you have the ability to kind of, you know, use some of these bells and whistles. So I think, look, comp is an issue, but I think it's not the prominent issue. My experience at the end of the day is, look, there are some people who are just purely profit maximizing and that's fine. And look, they're never going to be happy in government and that's totally fine. But you know, the vast majority of people, I think come to a job because they feel like they can learn, they work for somebody who cares about them, they can actually develop their career, they can be recognized. When they do well, they're held accountable if they don't. And so the other thing that we're doing again more broadly outside of just Tech Force, is trying to reform the system of government to make it look more like that environment. Right. So we've done a bunch of stuff on performance management this year. We've done a bunch of stuff around merit hiring. And the goal is, in those cases is not to be punitive, but it's to create an environment where really good people feel like I can come to work every day, do a great job, and when I do so, I can be rewarded and progress through the organization. And today we have a lot of kind of rigidity in the system where again, tenure and other things like that often determine kind of promotion opportunities. Our goal is to eliminate those things. And I think if we do that, then it's a type of environment that not just early career people, but kind of people who want to be in a high performance culture, I think will be attracted to.
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And so this idea of bringing tech talent into the government, it's one I've heard before. You know, the government has tried through the U.S. digital Service, U.S. digital Core 18F. You know, there's been various attempts over the years and some of those programs now have gone away or they've been restructured, particularly this year as part of the DOGE activities. What is different about US Tech Force?
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Yeah, so first of all, you're right, which is there's not a whole lot new under the sun and a lot of ideas, many, many things have been tried before. So what we intend to be different is, number one is we're doing this, as I mentioned, as a cohort. So what I want people to feel like is they're part of a class. Right. So that's kind of thing, number one. Thing number two is we're partnering with the private sector here. And this was a really important part of this program for us as we put it together. What I want to try to do is dispel this Myth that at 22 or 25 years old, you have to, you know, kind of go on one of two forks. You got to either be a career, you know, civil service person or you got to be a career private sector person.
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Right.
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I just, look, maybe, you know, I'm 50 plus. Right. So like, look, maybe in my generation people did that. I don't think anybody does that anymore. Nobody's looking to make, you know, 10. I don't think people are making five year commitments, quite frankly.
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Yeah, that's just not how people work anymore.
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Yeah. So we have to create a program that enables that and that's part of what we're doing, doing here. And the private sector engagement is really important because at the end of this two year program, we're going to have a job fair that is both a public job fair and a private sector job fair. And what I hope to demonstrate is that the work that everybody does here in this program will be incredibly valuable to the private sector. The final thing is everything that's happening here is going to be governed by and at the direction of the individual agency. So sometimes these programs are, you know, kind of try to be centralized programs where we're trying to do something that maybe, you know, the agency may not be signed up with. In this case, we just went out to the agencies and we said, you know, what your priorities are. Tell us what your hiring needs are for those priorities, and we're going to facilitate that. And all we at OPM are doing is we are an accelerant to their efforts by giving them hopefully a set of really qualified individuals who can help them with their work.
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Got it? Got it. And so, you know, one question I have to ask, which is we've seen so much change in government this year in personnel agencies, cutting back, for instance, and some of the positions that have been either terminated or where a lot of people left, we're technical roles. You know, I think about the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. I think about General Services Administration, I guess. How do you reconcile people who sort of will look at this and say, okay, the government needs all this tech talent. Just got rid of some of its tech talent.
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Yeah. So I would say two things. One is just to put everything in context, as you have a sense, there were roughly about316,317,000 people who will have left government as of the end of this year. Okay. Through all the different programs and activities that happen in government. Of Those over, about 92 and a half percent of them were people who left because they took the deferred resignation program. They took voluntary retirement and other things. So There were about 7/2% of those people that were definitely kind of part of what are called RIFs. So like, you know, restructurings and, or some probationary employees. So there were some. And I don't mean to make light of any of the numbers. Obviously, anytime there's job changes, it's important. But number one, I think it's important people to understand that the very, very significant majority of people who left the government left because they just decided, whether rightly or wrongly, that like, they weren't prepared to sign up for the types of things obviously that this administration was focused on. There's no question as part of that, you're absolutely right that there were probably some technical and IT people associated with that. The second part of this, though, it's about, you know, what we've always been trying to be clear about, at least, you know, since I've been here in opm, is a lot of this is about reshaping the federal government to make sure that there's no decision like government should be smaller or bigger per se. The question is, are we focused on the right stuff and are we doing it in the most efficient way for the American people? And so my personal bias, again, having spent a lot of time, as you mentioned, in Silicon Valley, is the way we reshape the government is we have to kind of embrace and utilize technology as a way to both deliver a better service, and we will, that will have the ancillary benefit of reducing kind of the need to continue to grow headcount at what I believe are kind of unsustainable rates in government. So part of this program is we've got a dearth in certain areas of talent that I think actually are slowing down our ability to get to that modernization. And, and so, yes, while it is true that, you know, we've kind of, you know, lost some heads and we're adding some heads, part of this is a reshaping of kind of the skills that are needed to make sure the government can deliver on what we think the most important objectives are for this year and hopefully for the next, you know, 10, 15, 20 years.
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I was going to ask you about that because, I mean, the. I know from talking with a lot of tech people when we were going through kind of all the government restructuring, the thing I heard over and over again was this idea, this hope, I think, that the government would modernize tech and use that to automate and just be more efficient. And is that one of the big missions here of the tech force? And can you elaborate on kind of how you'll go about that?
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Yes, I'd say there's two very big technology objectives that the President has said are important. One is kind of consolidation of IT and IT services where it makes sense. So let me just give you one example there. So we put out a RFP fairly recently where we are consolidating all the different HR IT systems that exist across government. There's about 119 of them, at least that's what we've been able to count so far that exists across government. And our goal is to have a single HR IT system that we will run through OPM that will service all of government, that'll save, you know, Billions of dollars. It'll produce better data, it'll be a better experience for employees. So kind of that's kind of tech objective number one is all of us have the charter from the President is look at things we're doing where we are. Decentralization has not led to better results and, or better efficiency. And so this is a good example of that. The second thing is, yes, what I think the tech force represents, and by the way, look, we're not going to solve the world's problems with a thousand people. So like, you know, my hope is this grows very significantly over time. But part of modernization is the ability to kind of build bespoke applications, to use AI, to use modern technology to get there.
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Right.
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What I hope that this program allows us to do is gives the agencies effectively the authority to basically say we got all this stuff that we have to maintain, we have all these integrations we have to do, but, oh, we can run in parallel on bespoke application development, things that actually bring us into the modern era. And then over time, hopefully there are things we can retire that are in that legacy system that may no longer be necessary. That's not an overnight process. That will be a kind of many year process of development, integration and ultimately maybe decommissioning some systems that no longer are relevant for the modern age. Meta's AI infrastructure is bringing jobs to local communities like Las Lunas, New Mexico. Phil, who grew up in Las Lunas, has seen the positive impact that Meta's ongoing $600 billion investment in American jobs and infrastructure will bring. I had to travel for work, missing moments I can't get back. Then Meta opened a data center and brought new jobs. Now I don't worry about missing out anymore. Learn more about Meta's investment@meta.com BuildingAmerica.
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There's a lot of anxiety about AI taking jobs, right? And that's industry cuts across industries, cuts across the economy. If I'm a federal worker, is that something that you think I should worry about?
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I would say more generally, if you look at, if you study this over long periods of time, you look at kind of the impact of technological development, technological innovation on jobs, the short answer is in every major cycle, we've always actually had greater job growth as a result of changes in technology.
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In the longer term.
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In the longer term, yes. In all cases, look, there is the fear of uncertainty and the unknown, which is totally understandable. But I think what we don't know is, look, there will be all kinds of new things that get created. So I was talking to somebody the other day, no kid was a mobile game developer. 20 years ago that idea didn't exist. Now that's a huge industry. Mobile game development is a huge industry. I think what's unnerving for people this time, which I understand is the pace at which changes are happening. And yes, like there is an unknown for sure. What I've told our team here, and I think this is true for everybody, is, you know, the pace of technology is going to continue, you know, at its at its own pace. We're not going to be able to slow down, down. The question is, do we adapt to it as an organization. And so when we've rolled out things like chatgpt here, OpenAI, like my kind of entreaty to the team has been try these things, educate yourself. We're not talking about like, can you change your job by 75%, but look at like take one little process you do, can you increase your efficiency by 3,5% and in doing so, can you learn these technologies? So look, I think we do a disservice, quite frankly to federal workers and to any other employee to say, put your head in the sand, assume technology is not going to kind of be relevant and don't learn these new things. I think what we have to do is say like, learn them, try them. And yes, there is some unknown, but hopefully over time the goal is we can have greater economic growth, greater prosperity, and also new job creation that we just can't anticipate today.
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The US Tech Force Initiative has a lot of backing from industry. Companies like Meta, OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon, all were sort of part of this announcement. What exactly is their role in this?
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Yeah, so a couple things we've asked the private partners to do, private industry partners to do. One is we've asked them, we. One of the things that we could benefit from is additional kind of engineering management talent in the government as part of this program. So that's kind of thing number one we've asked our private partners is offer this as a benefit to employees who are kind of view it as a career development opportunity to spend a year or two years in government learning what it's like to kind of manage that environment. And then, you know, as appropriate, if they want, they can go back then to their employer and obviously continue their, you know, private career development. The second thing is they're going to help us with certifications and training. So a bunch of these programs have, you know, training. So, you know, for example, if you want to be a databricks certified engineer, then you will basically get free access to their training and certification. And that will hopefully help you, obviously, in your career. Third thing finally is in addition to, we're putting a program I mentioned around this. So We've asked the CEOs of these companies to commit once a year to coming and doing a speaker series with the team, helping them think about career development. And then finally, as I mentioned, culminating in this job fair that we're going to do. So somebody asked me this the other day, like, you know, are the companies committed to hiring these employees? The answer is no, because, like, I don't expect any employer to say I'm going to hire somebody I've never met before or never interviewed. But what they are committed is they're going to be part of this program. And if we do our job right, which is we screen people appropriately on the way in, we train them in the two years we're here, I'm highly, highly confident they're going to be very attractive to the private sector.
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The question I have to ask then is around, which is perennial question, this idea of kind of the revolving door, right, and regulatory capture. I mean, which is this concern if bring a lot of people in from industry, you know, do these agencies function for industry or for the American people? I mean, is that a concern you have?
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I don't, to be completely honest, but maybe I have a minority view on this. Look, my experience so far is we worry about a lot of these things. And look, I understand it and there are, there are clearly bad actors in these systems. But I think what we're forgetting in that conversation is what's the value to the organizations of having people from different industries and different perspectives come in. And one of the challenges, you know, that I see, as we've seen in the federal government, is we have a lot of people who are very, very long tendered in the government who have not had other experiences. And that's not to say that one is better than the other, but I just think people benefit from diversity of experience. And so number one, I think like those conversations, you know, underestimate the value of what can be learned from having people in these different environments. And can it help? Two is, look, we have a very robust set of rules and laws. And yes, of course, as I mentioned, there may be bad actors who take advantage of it, but there's a very robust set of ethics. And so I'm quite confident if somebody's going to take advantage of the system, we will root out that problem.
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The fellowship program, it's two years, bring in a lot of early career folks and as you said, they can either then continue in government or leave and go into industry. How do you build kind of longer term institutional technology at agencies if folks are always rotating?
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What I've experienced in everything in life is if you create an environment that is attractive to people and you give an opportunity to tell that story and for people to see it and experience it, then like, we will get people to stay in government. So look, I think the obligation that we have to do as part of techforce and all the agencies that are hiring people is we have to go sell people on why being in government is a great opportunity. And look, the cell can't be, you know, come here and you have job security for 40 years because look, that's just not the way people work. And I don't think that's a, I don't think that's a truthful statement. To be completely honest. What we have to do is say like, this is a place where you can achieve your career goals, you can work with smart people, you can work on really complex problems. And we believe that, those of us who are here believe that, and that's why we're here. But if we can't demonstrate that, then quite frankly, we don't deserve to have great people come and stay longer term in the government. And the other thing, as I mentioned is, look, I'm quite happy with people coming back and forth. And so look, if the honest answer is, you know what, I just had a family and I got a bunch of kids and I think it's really important for me to maximize my income. Great. Go to the private sector for a couple of years and then come back when you feel like you're in a more stable position. So I just don't think we have any entitlement to people staying in a job unless we actually create a compelling reason for them to do so.
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I have to ask because, you know, in the private sector you were investing in technology, obviously from a business perspective. Now you're sort of investing it in a different way on behalf of the government. There's all this speculation right now about AI being a bubble and whether the technology actually matches kind of the hype. I'm curious what your take is on that.
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I'll give you my take. I'm not in the financial business anymore. This is not investment advice to anybody who's listening.
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You're betting on it too, for government.
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If my lawyers are on the phone, you know, I'm not. I'm not giving people investment. Look, I'm very firmly in the not a bubble camp and let me tell you why number one is having lived through the bubble I was, I started my career in the dot com boom and bust. And if you go back and look at that time period, the reason why we had the bus there in my mind was we didn't have any of the infrastructure and the fundamental economics of those businesses never work. You may remember this wonderful company, Webvan that or maybe, maybe you're, maybe your too young to remember but there was this thing called webvan which is now what we call Instacart today. Like there was just not a big enough market of people who were actually ready and willing to buy groceries online or you know, pets.com like was not, like there just were not enough folks. So the fundamental unit economics of the business didn't exist. What I think exists today in AI is the unit economics are very clear. Like there are very high gross margin businesses selling software on the AI side. It's very clear what the trade off is. So you know, if you are, you know, I've got a company that I invested in a long time ago when I was at Andreessen where they were basically using AI voice automation to help, you know, manage a lot of like healthcare use cases, right? So a nurse has to call you and see did you take your medication, you know, stuff like that. Those are all very logical things that are going after very, very big problems. Which is the labor problem, right? So labor is essentially 90% of all the costs for most businesses. So what I see right now is yes, like there is excitement about all this stuff. There's no question that in my former role as a venture capitalist, the venture capitalists will absolutely invest in a bunch of stuff that will not work. Like that is I can guarantee you that you will see spectacular blow ups and you will see spectacular failures. And I think if you are to the uninitiated, it looks like a bubble. It looks like people are throwing money at lots of places. What this is is I would say organized chaos of a bunch of venture capitalists trying to figure out how do we sift kind of the wheat from the chaff and figure out what the winners are. But yes, there's going to be a bunch of failures and people will write the bubble stories once we start seeing that. But to me that's not actually the failure. What will happen is coming out of that will be a very small number of companies. My guess is it'll be 3% of the companies that get started will ultimately generate 90% of the returns for the entire industry. And the industry will be a massive, massive boom. Industry does that.
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The idea of sort of bold bets and seeing what grows and what takes shape works in industry. I wonder if that translates at all to government where you have institutions that are a bit more risk averse, that have to be more fiscally conservative.
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Oh yeah, we are very risk commerce here.
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Yeah.
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And by the way, I'm not proposing that the government get in the venture capital business. I want to be totally clear. Yeah, the government's not going to. What I think the role of the government is, is twofold. One is the government should watch industry and as applications and companies start to develop, the government should, where appropriate, deploy those. Right. So again, I'll give you an example and in full disclosure, you know, my former employer is an investor in databricks. Right. Look, DataBricks is an AI type company. It's doing very well. And yes, like the government is a significant purchase of databricks because it's determined that, okay, like this software adds real value to what we do. So like, number one, I think the government should be in the business of only procuring products that are obviously relevant to their business. And then I think the government should be in the business of where appropriate, can we bring in talent that understands how to use open source technology and other things like that and AI and build bespoke applications that again, are directly addressing problems for the government. Like, that's, I think the role of government. Like, we should not be in the speculation business. We should not be in the investment business. Like, leave that to the people who can lose, you know, seven out of 10 times but still make, you know, 20 times their money if they get the one right. Like we will not get that right in government. So that's not our role and that's not what we're posing with techforce. But I think what is true is the pace of technology, the pace of modernization. Government needs to kind of, you know, run alongside that and not wake up five or ten years from now and realize that we are literally living in a system that doesn't actually meet the needs of the current population.
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B
Well, Scott, thanks for being here on Politico Tech.
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Great, thanks for.
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B
That's all for this week's Politico Tech. As I mentioned at the top, this is the last you'll be hearing from us for a little while, but you should go ahead and subscribe. You don't want to miss future updates as we close out the year I just want to say how rewarding it has been to host this show. We've recorded over 400 episodes of Politico Tech to date. Really smart conversations about the way tech is changing our politics and our lives. I appreciate all of the guests who have joined me on the show, and of course, all of you for listening and sharing your feedback. And we've still got so much more to talk about. You'll hear more from us soon. In the meantime, check out some of our past episodes and subscribe to our newsletters, Digital Future Daily and Morning Tech. Our producer is Nirmal Maliko. Philip Frobos and Kendall Ross helped make today's show, and Pray and Bandy made our theme music. I'm Stephen Overle. Thank you for listening.