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

For years we have had people literally filling out paper applications as recently as the beginning of this year, and sending paper by postal mail and all kinds of stuff. And we literally have a mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, which is very fun if you ever want to come see it, where we have hundreds of millions of file cabinets of people's retirement records.

That's what it is. It is Iron Mountain.

We'll arrange that after the episode.

Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Yeah. It's a great question, and I didn't know the answer to this one before I started talking to the administration about the job there. So I think the simple way to think about it is, look, we're the talent management organization for the federal government. So there's about 2.1 million federal employees, roughly, in the government today. And we are responsible for all policies related to people. So how do you hire, how do you fire, a performance management system, IT systems, and then we're also a cross-functional organization that everything we do obviously touches all the different agencies. So we're trying to make sure that we've got consistency of policies across the government. And the simple goal in my mind is just how do we make sure we have the right people in the right jobs in the federal government? That's basically the forward articulation of what we do.

But I can tell you it's definitely lower than a partner at a16z. Right. My salary is public, actually. In fact, you know what? You know you've hit a high point in your life when your oldest daughter, who is, I won't give her age, but she is, let's say, under 30, is making more money than I am at this.

Exactly. I'm very proud of her. Yeah, it's a great question. Look, the honest answer is it was a couple of things. One is just, it was the right time. You know, I've been at Andreessen, as you know, from the founding, for 16 years, super proud of what we did there. And Ben and Mark were incredibly gracious in giving me this opportunity. And I really felt like there is an opportunity in this administration to do something differently. So you mentioned a bunch of technology people come into the administration. There's also just a bunch of business people more generally. And look, we're not going to make the mistake of applying every private sector method and model to the federal government. But I think what the president has asked us to do is to think differently about things and giving us kind of the permission and the flexibility to do that. And so to me, look, I've been around the venture capital business. You know, ultimately companies succeed or fail. My lesson from the venture capital business is they succeed or fail almost entirely because of the people in the organization and the organizational structure and the culture and the incentives. It's pretty simple. And so my view is, look, why can't we learn some of those lessons and apply them as appropriate to the federal government and think about creating a culture where we've got great people who can do great stuff on behalf of the American people.

Yeah. So let me take you through the program. So the program is called US Digital Service Tech Force. So anybody who's interested can go to our X at US Tech Force and find more information about it. Basically here's the program. The goal is to bring a thousand engineers into the government. So software developers, AI experts, data scientists, product managers. So anybody who can help us basically with the job of modernizing government infrastructure. It's a two-year program. And we partnered with about 25 of the largest private technology companies, private sector technology companies, I should say. And we're really trying to accomplish a couple of things here. Number one is the government has a dearth of what I would call modern software expertise and modern AI technology expertise. And that's not a knock at all on the organizations, but a lot of what these big CIO organizations in the government have to do is they're maintaining these massive legacy infrastructures. And so the ability to do bespoke development is quite difficult in those organizations. So this will be a vehicle to help them accelerate bespoke development across the entire government. The second problem we're trying to solve is we have a massive early career pipeline problem in the federal government. So 7% of the federal workforce is early career. Let's call that less than five or seven years of work experience. And that compares to about 22 or 23% in the non-federal sector. So by a factor of three to one, the federal government is completely failing at getting early career people into government. And if you look at the other end of the spectrum, by the way, so we've got about 44% of our population that's over the age of 50. And that compares with about a third in the non-federal workforce. So we've got this looming problem, which is we're going to have a ton of people over the next five to ten years who rightly so are at retirement age and want to go do other things. And we've done very, very little to actually replenish the pipeline. So this program is really intended to do that. And one of the ways we're doing that is by making it a two-year program. So I don't think it's reasonable for us to go to a 22, 25, 27-year-old person and say, decide today, do you want to commit 40 years of your life to be a career public civil servant? What I'd rather do is expose them to the problems in government. Let them actually have a great experience. And you know what? Like we should convince them over time how great this is. But you know what? If at the end of the two-year period they want to go back to the private sector, that's great. And that's why we've lined up all these private sector partners who are going to actually help run a job fair for us and make sure that we have kind of greater connectivity between the public and private sectors.

Yeah. So I think there's a couple of problems. So one is, I think the fundamental issue, quite frankly, in my mind is a messaging problem, which is, I'll give you an anecdote. Right. So when I first came into office, I'd been in the office about six months now. I met with one of my managers in the organization who said, hey, you guys are ruining things. And I said, what do you mean? And by you guys, she meant DOGE. And you know, I'm not part of DOGE, but obviously, look, I come from, you know, I know a lot of those people. And I said, well, how are we ruining things? She said, well, our whole value prop to employees has been come to the federal government and have lifetime employment. And I said, oh my gosh, you're not going to like my answer. Because, number one, I'm going to tell you, like, that's a myth and a lie that people have been telling you. There is no such thing as lifetime employment. And two, I said, look, that's the worst, least compelling kind of narrative that I've ever heard, that I'm going to go tell some 25-year-old, like, that's the value proposition of coming to work for the government. So number one is like, we have to change the narrative. The narrative in my mind is come work on the toughest, biggest, most complex problems, you know, do some public service, but then give yourself career options. And you know what? If you want to go to the private sector after that, you know, God bless you. That's a perfect thing to do. So that's part of the problem. The other problem is the nature of what happens at government. And, you know, Jen Pahlka, as you guys mentioned in your intro, who's like brilliant on this stuff, diagnosed it perfectly, which is so much of what government does is it's a compliance-based culture, right? It's not just literally, you know, that we follow laws, but if I do something wrong, you know, I'm worried about getting an inspector general report or I'm worried about a GAO report, or I'm worried about some congressperson holding me in front of their committee to testify about stuff. And so the short answer as a result is like, we have a zero-risk-based culture inside of government. There's no concept of, you know, you guys mentioned I came from the venture capital world. You know, in that world, look, we take crazy risk because all we're doing is trying to maximize upside opportunity. Now, I'm not proposing we do that in government. And I've been using the term measured risk as a better way to try to describe it in government. But like, we have to kind of change the culture and enable people to think about the upside opportunity that comes from taking modest amounts of risk. And unfortunately, particularly on the technology side of things, that has not been the case. And so, again, if you're a young, you know, early career person, I think you want to do cutting-edge stuff. You want to learn things, you want to kind of go out a little bit on the risk curve. And right now, at least historically, government has not been a place for that.

So, look, there's no question that compensation is relevant, but I actually think we've been overstating the nature of that problem. So let me give you a couple of thoughts on it. So first of all, part of the reason why we're focused on early career here is at least the pay gap between private and public is a little bit more manageable. And it just kind of asymptotes like massively as you go farther through your career. So yes, it's totally unrealistic, you know, unless you're rich and you just decide you want to do something different, it's totally unrealistic for us to think we're going to compete against like a VP at Google for a senior-level executive person in government. So that's not even in my mind. Like that's not even worth worrying about basically, because like the pay gap is just crazy and nobody's going to do that. But my experience at least, and you know, you guys have been around a lot of organizations, is look, there are some people who are purely kind of profit-maximizing. And that's great. That's not a no, I have no normative objections to that, obviously. But my sense is that's actually a relatively small minority of the population of employees. I think most employees come to work every day because they're being challenged, they're learning, they have career development opportunities, they work for someone who cares about their career, and they feel like, you know, they can be rewarded when they actually do good stuff. They feel like they're held accountable. Like that to me is a culture that we can create inside of the federal government. And, you know, even if it means yes, in a short period of time, you are going to have like a remuneration challenge relative to the private sector. But this is also why, again, just to go back to it, this is why I think this whole narrative of come, you know, work for the federal government for 40 years to me is just crazy. Like, we should have an open idea that you can go back and forth between the public and private sector. And you know what? If you have points in your life where you think like profit maximization is the most important thing, then yes, like you should go to the private sector because the government is never going to deal with that. But I think we just have to break this. Like, to me, this dichotomy that there's one way to go or the other makes no sense. So look, in a perfect world, I would wave a magic wand and say, we pay everybody like what they can get paid at Google, but that's not realistic. And quite frankly, you know, there's zero support in Congress for that. The final thing we can do, though, just, Joe, to give you one last perspective, is we can do things inside of OPM to mitigate some of the challenges on the compensation side of things. So let me give you a very specific example. So as you probably know, there's a schedule which is like everybody gets paid, you know, GS one through 15. These are different levels. Today all those schedules are driven off of tenure and they're driven off of degree requirements. So if I don't have a college degree and I haven't worked for ten years, no matter how good I am, I can't get to a GS-15 level in government. In my mind, that's just silly, quite frankly. Right. That's the opposite of a merit-based culture. You all will remember, since we talked about this, right? You'll remember, I won't mention his name, but, you know, there's a DOGE engineer with a very colorful name that I'm sure your listeners have heard of. You know, when all the kind of exciting stuff was happening, there was a quote from an administration official who said, this guy is terrible. We never would have hired him because he didn't graduate from college and he didn't have, whatever, five years of work experience coming here. And in my mind, like, I literally wanted to pull my hair out when I heard that, because I'll say, that's the craziest thing in the world. Like, if this guy is capable of performing at a GS-15 level, why should we care about what his tenure is or whether he has a college degree? And so one of the things we're doing inside of OPM is we're going to eliminate all degree requirements and all tenure requirements in the pay schedule. And so as a result, if someone is doing awesome, like we can hire them at the appropriate level. So some of the pay gap problem is not just a numerical problem, it's a leveling problem. And I think we can solve that even in the absence of congressional legislation.

Yeah. So the short answer is we have to do it differently from how we do it today. But let me give you the very specific. So on the front end, historically, we have relied on self-attestation of skills in order to hire people into the federal government. So I applied for a software engineering job and I get this application where I check boxes and I say, you know what? I'm an expert Perl programmer. I'm an expert in, you know, AI technology. And I literally check the boxes. And that is the basis on which, like, my application gets through or doesn't get through to the next round of screening.

So in many roles there's not. And the reason is, let me give you a historical reason for this. So way back when we used to have literally a civil service exam, it was called PACE, was the name. I forget what the acronym stands for, but that existed until 1980. And there was a lawsuit at the very tail end of the Carter administration, very beginning of the Reagan administration, first Reagan administration, where there was a disparate impact claim, basically. So the kind of test results on this exam were disproportionately negative for minority applicants versus majority applicants. And so in 1981, the government entered into a consent decree where basically they banned essentially the use of these examinations. And from 1981 until literally four months ago, we were living under that consent decree. Nobody ever revisited it. And as a result, every agency was terrified to use any kind of actual merit-based assessment for hiring because they were afraid they would run afoul of this consent decree. Luckily for us, we revisited it along with the Department of Justice, and we got out of the consent decree. We actually found the original plaintiff actually was still alive. Lovano was his name. And we actually, you know, finally said, okay, 43 years later, we think it's time to get rid of this consent decree. And they agreed to that. So for the first time ever, now we have kind of avoided, we've eliminated the risk that the agency is worried about, which is if I use a technical assessment to judge somebody in their employment process, I might get sued, you know, under some type of disparate impact theory. So we are now doing that. So number one, to answer your, that's a long way to answer your question. But so like the way we're going to evaluate people is they actually have to demonstrate merit. So there's lots of private sector tests, as you probably know, CodeSignal, all these other things that every single private sector company uses where they're like, hey, basically let me give you a coding test if you're applying for a software development job, and then we could level you and figure out, are you, you know, a GS-5 or a GS-15 based on that? And then we can do secondary stuff like obviously an in-person interview or other things to make sure that, you know, you're actually a good fit for the organization. So that's kind of thing number one we have to do on the front end. Does that make sense, at least in kind of...

Yeah. That's right. And apply.