The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will soon launch several initiatives to bring more technology expertise into the federal government and centralize hiring for roles that have broader responsibilities across agencies, OPM Director Scott Kupor said Monday.
Those initiatives will come at a time when artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a larger role as “a first-class citizen” in carrying out government services effectively, Kupor said in comments made during the National Academy of Public Administration National Conference.
Kupor said that the upcoming hiring initiatives will embrace the White House’s push for merit-based hiring, which it launched earlier this year.
“We’ll have a much more systematized way of hiring people in all facets of government and do it in a way that’s consistent, that’s merit-based, and then that actually is a much more efficient process than the kind of one-off processes that we have today,” Kupor said of the upcoming initiatives.
While he didn’t provide much detail on those initiatives, Kupor also said that while OPM will look for more tech-expertise, he also believes that by hiring “smart, capable people,” federal workers will be able to adapt to innovative technologies adopted by agencies.
“I don’t want to overstate the case, but I would say sometimes I think we use that as a crutch, where we say, ‘Hey, you must have X number of years of tenure before you’re ready for the next thing.’” Kupor explained. “I think the reality is … people can self-educate through AI technologies and learn new domains very, very quickly.”
“I think this idea that people can’t actually, with the right foundational skill set, be able to adapt to different environments and learn complex systems, I think that’s a little bit of an acronym, quite frankly, from a time ago in terms of technology,” he added.
Kupor said that while he doesn’t think AI will solve all problems in the federal government, he wants to apply it where it can improve efficiency, which means introducing federal workers to new technologies to get employees educated.
“We’re certainly not doing any service to the employees who are in government today, because if we keep our heads down, the pace of technology is not going to slow down,” said Kupor, adding that “the question is whether we properly equip these employees to be able to adapt to what will be a very changing environment. If not, the honest answer is, all of us will be obsolete, and we’ll have to bring in all new people, and that doesn’t serve anybody.”
Part of that process is building a culture of allowing federal employees to fail, or allowing a “modicum of risk,” as Kupor put it, to push creative and new approaches toward carrying out government services and functions in a more efficient manner.
“What I think we can do at OPM, and I hope we can do across government, is to relook at whether we have the right incentives to drive the kind of behavior we want. And again, to me, some modicum of risk-taking is part of that,” said Kupor.
“There is an opportunity, I think, to kind of change the mindset and give people the freedom to fail in a small way, sometimes in order to actually achieve something that has much greater upside if we also account for that risk,” he added.
Kupor’s comments landed during an ongoing government shutdown that has left millions of federal employees furloughed, or working in essential roles without pay, and while thousands of federal workers have received layoff notices, resulting in multiple court cases.
A federal hiring freeze has been in place since the start of the second Trump administration in January, which has allowed for a few exceptions, such as roles related to national security.
Kupor said Monday that the federal government had around 2.4 million civilian employees in January and predicted that the year would end with around 2.1 million employees.