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?
Lauren Chambers There are a few other differences indeed. So if we’re thinking about 18F, that functioned as kind of an in-house consultancy in which the teams of experts at 18F would contract out to federal agencies. So those were more kind of permanent, civil-servant roles that were serving as tech expertise that the entire federal government could kind of rely on. Which obviously is really different than this sort of temporary two-to-four-year thing we’ve got proposed here. And then comparing to the U.S. Digital Service, as you mentioned, that was in some ways more similar because the Digital Service functioned through what they called tours of civil service. They would bring in experts from the private sector for these sorts of temporary tours to kind of sit in the public sector for a while and bring their expertise and then eventually return. The important difference, at least as I understand it there, is that those were really aiming for experts and high-level, kind of more senior workers to come in and do these tours with the Digital Service, whereas the Tech Force is more advertising towards early career workers. And there’s some open questions as to how much these kind of new minds who maybe haven’t had a lot of experience working in companies or in the government will be able to kind of get settled and have an impact working in these agencies.
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 That’s a great question.
Eric White As I mentioned, fill in the blanks as much as you can.
Lauren Chambers I’m not sure at the extent to which I have the answer to that. I think one thing that was really awesome and singular about programs like the U.S. Digital Service and 18F is that they explicitly attracted tech experts who were nonetheless really interested in service opportunities, right? There’s a fundamental difference between working in technology and trying to build a product that makes a profit, and working in technology and trying to improve services — such as the sorts of important services that the government offers that reach potentially hundreds of millions of people. What’s always been hard about government technology work is how to attract these specific kinds of individuals who have this interest in service-oriented technology work. And I think the jury is very much still out. As you mentioned, we haven’t even had any offers go out for the Tech Force yet. So it’s not quite clear what sorts of workers and sorts of experts this initiative will be attracting. And it’s not clear whether they will have that kind of boundary-crossing expertise that allows them to be effective in both government and in technology.
Eric White There are also some unforeseen implications when it comes to working directly with these big tech companies. They have their own interests, so when getting this far into the realm of workforce development with them raises some possible conflicts of interests, right? I mean, if you’re specifically tailoring a government agency or government workforce towards one company’s needs, are there going to be some tug-of-war back and forth between company to company, company to government? It just sounds like it might get messy.
Lauren Chambers I’m glad you mentioned that. So I mentioned earlier that kind of the main demographic that Tech Force seems to be advertising towards is these sorts of early career folks who might be coming into Tech Force as their first sort of go-around of a job out of college. But there’s also an important secondary kind of desired workforce that Tech Force is advertising to, which is more senior people who are inside companies. My understanding is the idea is these companies can nominate these senior employees to work in the Tech Force for, again, a temporary two-to-four-year stint in the public sector. Which maybe sounds good in theory, but exactly raises these sorts of conflicts of interest that you mentioned. So you can imagine if you have someone who’s working at NVIDIA and has been at that company for a while. They leave that company for a couple years, come work for a particular federal agency with the understanding that at the end of that time they’ll end up back at NVIDIA — at least the communications on the Tech Force website suggest they’re trying to figure out how these employees could still hold on to their stocks and other sorts of financial benefit packages from these companies. So there are huge unanswered questions here around conflict of interest and how we can make sure that company representatives with company interests being placed inside federal agencies are actually working in the interest of the government and not in the interests of their companies. So yeah, remains to be seen.
Eric White On that note … and this is going to be a loaded question. So if you just want to highlight one or two things that the federal government could do to make sure that they do have a pipeline of tech talent. Because this isn’t a necessarily a something that people don’t disagree with. It’s just the manner and the approach that they’re taking seems to be the hard part. What is it that federal agencies can do to make sure that they are still having opportunities for the nation’s best and brightest to come work for them, whether it be on a temporary basis or having them there in the long term?
Lauren Chambers The good news about this question is that we don’t really have to reinvent the wheel, right? We can look to the sorts of really successful initiatives that were punching way above their weight that the Trump administration indeed, as you mentioned, gutted as soon as they came into office back in January 2025. So the models that we saw at 18F, which again was a sort of in-house digital consultancy in which teams of tech-savvy civil servants would be contracted out to federal agencies, that had great success. Some of their communications before they were dissolved mentioned that they had completed over 450 projects across 34 different agencies in the 10 years that they have been set up. So that was a hugely successful initiative. Even though, I’ll flag, in 2024, they only had 90 full-time employees. So again, really crunching above their weight. And the U.S. Digital Service also was a really successful model where, again, they brought in temporary sorts of experts from the private sector for these tours of civic service. They, too, only had around 200 full-time employees in 2025 but were able to do amazing things, like helping to fix healthcare.gov when that whole debacle was going. So I think we can just look to those initiatives and continue to try to, again, not reinvent the wheel. Another thing I would like to flag is there is a remaining initiative within the GSA’s Technological Transformation Services Division, the United States Digital Corps, which is still trucking. So this is a fellowship program that brings in tech talent for, again, two-year fellowships, but with the express desire of having them convert into civil servants that will be situated within these agencies at the end of their time. They’ve had three cohorts so far since they launched in 2022, and they also have had really fantastic outcomes. So if there are people working in federal agencies listening, then maybe seeking out a Digital Corps fellow in future cohorts might be an easy, kind of low-hanging way that you can bring tech talent into your agency without having to reestablish models that have been dissolved.
Eric White Last question, I’ve got to hold your feet to the fire here. Were there any opportunities in the Tech Force initiative that you may have applied for, or maybe one of your fellow students may have applied for?
Lauren Chambers I actually don’t know of anyone in my circles who’s been talking about applying for Tech Force, which maybe says something right there, right? I’m a Ph.D. student and specifically study kind of social initiatives and technology. And so a lot of the people in my circles are interested in what we call public interest tech. There was a lot of love for the Digital Service and for 18F among myself and my communities and I have not seen the same sort of interest in the Tech Force. So of course I wish the best for our federal government initiatives and we want them to succeed. That’s the ultimate goal is to do government better. Time will tell.
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