Odd Lots

Scott Kupor's New Plan to Bring Tech Workers Into the Federal Government

December 25, 2025

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  • The Director of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Scott Kupor, is launching the US Tech Force to recruit 1,000 engineers for two-year stints to modernize federal infrastructure and address a severe early-career pipeline problem. 
  • A primary historical barrier to federal tech recruitment is a culture of compliance and zero risk tolerance, which the OPM is actively trying to change by eliminating degree and tenure requirements for pay schedules to reward demonstrated merit. 
  • The narrative for federal employment must shift away from promising 'lifetime employment' to emphasizing the opportunity to work on complex public service problems while gaining valuable career experience transferable back to the private sector. 
  • The speaker advocates for taking calculated risks within government processes, citing the potential to drastically reduce retiree payment delays (from 90-120 days to 0-7 days) as a worthwhile upside despite minor overpayment risks. 
  • The diffusion of AI in the federal government will likely be highly incremental, focusing on immediate productivity gains (like summarizing 40,000 public comments) rather than revolutionary, AI-native overhauls seen in the private sector. 
  • The federal government is in the very early stages of AI adoption, having only recently gained access to tools like ChatGPT on government desktops, and there is a leaning toward using open-source models for development work where security allows. 

Segments

OPM Director Role and Motivation
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(00:06:23)
  • Key Takeaway: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) functions as the federal government’s talent management organization, setting policies for hiring, firing, and performance management for 2.1 million employees.
  • Summary: OPM is responsible for all policies related to federal personnel, aiming to ensure the government has the right people in the right jobs. Scott Kupor transitioned from Andreessen Horowitz to OPM to apply lessons from the venture capital world regarding people, structure, and incentives to the federal government.
Introducing US Tech Force Program
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(00:09:16)
  • Key Takeaway: The US Tech Force aims to embed 1,000 engineers (software developers, AI experts, data scientists, product managers) into government for two-year stints to accelerate bespoke development.
  • Summary: The program addresses the government’s lack of modern software and AI expertise, which is often constrained by maintaining massive legacy infrastructures. It also targets the federal government’s severe early-career pipeline problem, where only 7% of the workforce is early career compared to 22-23% in the private sector.
Recruitment Narrative Shift
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(00:15:07)
  • Key Takeaway: The federal recruitment narrative must change from emphasizing ’lifetime employment’—which is a myth—to highlighting opportunities to solve complex problems and gain career options.
  • Summary: A compliance-based culture, driven by fear of Inspector General or GAO reports, has fostered a zero-risk environment unsuitable for cutting-edge technology work. The goal is to shift toward a culture that enables ‘measured risk’ to pursue upside opportunities, which appeals more to young talent.
Compensation vs. Culture in Recruitment
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(00:18:13)
  • Key Takeaway: While the pay gap for senior tech roles is uncompetitive, the primary driver for most employees is challenge, learning, career development, and feeling rewarded for good work, not just profit maximization.
  • Summary: The pay gap for early-career roles is more manageable, and the focus should be on creating a culture of challenge and development rather than trying to match executive salaries at companies like Google. OPM plans to mitigate compensation issues by eliminating degree and tenure requirements, allowing high performers to be leveled appropriately (e.g., GS-15) based on merit.
Reforming Hiring and Performance Evaluation
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(00:21:59)
  • Key Takeaway: The government is moving away from relying on self-attestation for hiring by reintroducing merit-based assessments, following the end of a 1981 consent decree that restricted the use of competency exams.
  • Summary: Historically, agencies feared disparate impact lawsuits, leading to a reliance on checking boxes on applications rather than testing skills, exemplified by past instances where highly capable individuals were rejected for lacking formal degrees or tenure. Performance management is also being reformed, with a forced distribution cap (30% for top rankings) implemented for senior executives to differentiate high performers.
Knowledge Transfer in Short-Term Roles
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(00:31:42)
  • Key Takeaway: To counter knowledge loss from high turnover, US Tech Force participants must prioritize documentation, source code notes, and training for the existing CIO organization to ensure system maintenance continuity.
  • Summary: The OPM is actively modernizing systems, such as the Online Retirement Application (ORA), demonstrating that new teams can build modern solutions that integrate with legacy backends. The expectation is that while some participants will stay, the program must account for the reality that many, especially technologists, have short tenures, necessitating robust knowledge capture.
Operational Streamlining and Risk Tolerance
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(00:38:37)
  • Key Takeaway: OPM is tackling bureaucratic drag by prioritizing headcount planning to remove outdated statutory or embedded services and by promoting a culture where measured risk-taking is incorporated into performance plans.
  • Summary: The government cannot ‘move fast and break things’ due to essential services like Social Security, but it must move faster than current bureaucratic speeds allow. A key example of overcoming risk aversion was the decision to expand ‘interim pay’ for retirees, accepting a minimal financial risk (a few million dollars out of a $1.2 trillion fund) to drastically improve service delivery time from months to days.
Workforce Respect and Turnover Context
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(00:44:15)
  • Key Takeaway: The recent 317,000 employee exits were overwhelmingly voluntary (92.5% through retirement programs), indicating that most departures were employees choosing not to remain in the changing environment, rather than arbitrary layoffs.
  • Summary: The director acknowledges that restructuring breaks trust, but the data shows the vast majority of exits were voluntary separations offered incentives to leave. The focus must be on respecting the workforce by fixing accountability systems and being transparent about the need for efficiency improvements driven by technology, which will inevitably impact some roles.
Risk Tolerance and Payment Delays
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(00:54:04)
  • Key Takeaway: A small risk of overpayment is acceptable to drastically reduce the time retirees wait for payments from months to days.
  • Summary: Shrinking the time for someone to receive a payment from 90 to 120 days down to zero to seven days is achievable through an interim pay process. The speaker is willing to defend taking a modicum of risk if it significantly improves the lives of hundreds of thousands of retirees. This illustrates a cultural issue where ingrained risk aversion prevents conversations about upside opportunities.
AI Diffusion and Native Companies
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(00:55:03)
  • Key Takeaway: Meaningful, revolutionary AI breakthroughs require organizations built ground-up as AI-native, not just incremental productivity gains in existing workflows.
  • Summary: The initial impact of AI often focuses on common, incremental use cases, such as improving customer support or legal document review for existing companies. The real breakthroughs will come from companies rethinking entire processes, like customer relationship management, with an AI-first mentality. This pattern is observed in the venture capital world and is expected to be even slower in the federal government.
Federal AI Adoption Strategy
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(00:58:23)
  • Key Takeaway: The federal government’s AI strategy focuses on achieving small, immediate productivity gains (3-10%) in current processes rather than long-term transformation plans.
  • Summary: The speaker is not asking staff to build a 2040 AI plan, which would be a waste of time, but rather to find ways to use existing AI tools to achieve modest performance improvements today. An example cited is using AI for summarization to assist in drafting responses to 40,000 public comments on a regulation, a task currently done manually. The U.S. Tech Force aims to bring in people who understand these tools to drive incremental progress.
Current Government AI Platforms
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(01:00:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Government access to generative AI tools is very recent, with personal use often preceding official desktop access, and there is a preference for open source in development.
  • Summary: Until about a month prior to the recording, ChatGPT was not available on government desktops, forcing some users to use personal phones for queries. Currently, government users have access to ChatGPT, XAI, and Microsoft Copilot via their laptops. The speaker believes the government will appropriately use open-source models for development work, provided security standards are met.
Drug Testing Constraints on Hiring
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(01:01:39)
  • Key Takeaway: The impact of drug testing on recruiting new hires, particularly in tech, is currently unknown to the OPM Director but is flagged as an important question to investigate.
  • Summary: The speaker does not have an immediate answer regarding how much drug testing constrains the recruiting pipeline for new hires. It has not yet surfaced as a major red flag causing candidate loss. The speaker commits to finding out the answer, acknowledging the general curiosity surrounding drug use in the workforce.
Sociology of Bureaucracy and Pay
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(01:03:03)
  • Key Takeaway: Bureaucratic pathologies and the cultural perception of government work are sociological issues that affect recruitment, alongside the significant financial draw of the private tech sector.
  • Summary: The conversation touches on the sociology of large bureaucracies, where unnecessary paperwork and complexity frustrate individuals, mirroring issues in private organizations. While career fulfillment is important, the ability of young tech workers to make fortunes quickly in the private sector makes government pay a very tricky constraint. The two-year stint proposed by the U.S. Tech Force is framed as an educational process for young workers.