The Trump administration wants Silicon Valley to fix federal tech

[Skye Jacobs]

The takeaway: The US government is tapping Silicon Valley to modernize its aging digital infrastructure through a new initiative called Tech Force. Under the program, roughly 1,000 software engineers will spend two years embedded within federal agencies, applying artificial intelligence and contemporary software practices to systems that, in many cases, have remained largely untouched for decades.

Tech Force – spearheaded by the Office of Personnel Management and led by Scott Kupor, a former Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalist – has secured partnerships across the tech industry. Apple, Coinbase, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, xAI, and Palantir have all agreed to participate, providing executives and training resources to support the program's recruits.

Kupor said the initiative aims to create a fluid exchange between private- and public-sector talent, with companies offering lectures, mentorship, and free access to in-house certification programs. Executives such as Palantir's Alex Karp and OpenAI's Sam Altman are expected to lead sessions for the first cohort.

"We'll put together a speaker series," Kupor told the Financial Times. Corporate partners will also provide roughly 100 experienced managers to guide new hires as they integrate advanced tools including generative AI, predictive analytics, and secure cloud systems, into agency workflows.

More than 10,000 applications have already been submitted. Unlike typical federal hiring campaigns, selections will be based primarily on technical skill rather than formal education or prior work experience. Successful applicants will earn between $150,000 and $200,000 annually, well above the average entry-level IT salary in government.

Kupor said ethical guidelines are being finalized to ensure that private-sector experts temporarily seconded to federal agencies won't lose stock options or other financial benefits. "What we really want to lean on the private-sector companies for is [to] augment the individual contributor roles… with managerial roles," he said.

Tech Force is distinct from the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, a cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk last year that sought to reduce federal spending by $1 trillion.

Still, the two efforts share personnel and philosophy. Several Doge veterans now hold senior government positions and are helping coordinate Tech Force's rollout, including Sam Corcos, the Treasury's chief information officer, and Emil Michael, who has volunteered to advise on Pentagon integration.

Kupor highlighted projects led by another Doge alumnus, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, as early proofs of concept. Gebbia's team revamped federal retirement platforms and launched new public websites for Trump-era initiatives – examples Kupor sees as templates for what the next wave of engineers could accomplish.

Many of the companies backing Tech Force have made significant political donations to President Trump in recent years, including contributions connected to his White House ballroom project. While this has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest, Kupor argues that the benefits of leveraging industry expertise outweigh the risks. The ultimate goal, he said, is to rebuild the federal digital backbone with the same rigor and speed found in the tech sector.

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The Trump administration wants Silicon Valley to fix federal tech

 

[pnntmp]

Great!
The administration should embrace new technologies, use them everywhere, continuously update employee skills, and actively dismantle any obstacles.
Today's bureaucracy is doing the exact opposite - it's actively creating obstacles, constantly concocting preposterous restrictions and regulations and plotting against the implementation of new technologies.

 

[wiyosaya]

I can see this ending about as well as that JA who worked for DOGE last year especially since the current admin is so well versed in Tech.

 

[jwdR311]

Cool, government employee's can sit around watching spinning circles instead of porn!

 

[NumberNine]

Oh they'll fix it alright. Greedy fools.

 

[Puiu]

Great!
The administration should embrace new technologies, use them everywhere, continuously update employee skills, and actively dismantle any obstacles.
Today's bureaucracy is doing the exact opposite - it's actively creating obstacles, constantly concocting preposterous restrictions and regulations and plotting against the implementation of new technologies.

It's a complete waste of money. Two years is absolutely nothing for this scale and the "tech" is just nonexistent. It's just another free gift for big tech in the US.

 

[pnntmp]

It's a complete waste of money. Two years is absolutely nothing for this scale and the "tech" is just nonexistent. It's just another free gift for big tech in the US.

Do you mean nobody should ever try to bring bureaucracy up to date?
Two years may be nothing considering how the bureaucracy works today, but if they make a mandatory certification and fire everyone who fails, you'll see how they can work 100x faster.
A huge part of the bureaucracy is not just idling parasites who collect salaries and do nothing, they are actively harmful. Something must be done to change that, and this seems to be a step in the right direction.

 

[Bluescreendeath]

Do you mean nobody should ever try to bring bureaucracy up to date?
Two years may be nothing considering how the bureaucracy works today, but if they make a mandatory certification and fire everyone who fails, you'll see how they can work 100x faster.
A huge part of the bureaucracy is not just idling parasites who collect salaries and do nothing, they are actively harmful. Something must be done to change that, and this seems to be a step in the right direction.

Government agencies often dont have the funding and staff to transition to entirely new software systems. The amount of funds Congress and the agencies themselves devote to IT systems and tech is piecemeal and grossly insufficient. You need to either fund the entire transition or it becomes a waste of money if you only half heartedly devote minimal funds that wont accomplish much.

DOGE didnt do its job correctly and just randomly laid off people with no regards to usefulness or job performance. A proper efficency operation would have required audits and working with the unions to id redundant roles...like what Bill Clinton successfully did a few decades ago.

And have you ever taken mandatory cert classes and stuff like continuing education courses/tests? Theyre usually jokes. People I know skip through the trainings and skip striaght to the test with unlimited tries to get course credit....because ppl have actual work to do.

Creating another mandatory cert is literally creating another useless layer of beaucracy.

 

[DukeJukem]

"applying artificial intelligence and contemporary software practices to systems that, in many cases, have remained largely untouched for decades."

So they're updating those Windows XP machines to Windows 11.

 

[Puiu]

Do you mean nobody should ever try to bring bureaucracy up to date?
Two years may be nothing considering how the bureaucracy works today, but if they make a mandatory certification and fire everyone who fails, you'll see how they can work 100x faster.
A huge part of the bureaucracy is not just idling parasites who collect salaries and do nothing, they are actively harmful. Something must be done to change that, and this seems to be a step in the right direction.

You can do it properly, not with crap like this which won't have any real deliverables.

"you'll see how they can work 100x faster" - at making coffee and laughing about how they are getting a ton of money for nothing.

"his seems to be a step in the right direction" - anybody who works in IT will tell you that it's all just a bunch of BS.

 

[pnntmp]

You can do it properly, not with crap like this which won't have any real deliverables.

"you'll see how they can work 100x faster" - at making coffee and laughing about how they are getting a ton of money for nothing.

"his seems to be a step in the right direction" - anybody who works in IT will tell you that it's all just a bunch of BS.

Well, you obviously know better than the tech companies and the VCs and ... Guys that can explain why nothing will work and it's all BS are so valuable!

 

[onebignerd]

The ocean of red-tape and the vast political swamp needed to wade through in order to make upgrades\modifications happen will kill this program before it leaves the gate. The U.S Government has spent 45 years since 1981 and tens of billions trying to upgrade the Air Traffic Control system and failing miserably.

Yeah, this will be a huge failure guaranteed!!

 

[imdarkbreeze]

Government agencies often dont have the funding and staff to transition to entirely new software systems. The amount of funds Congress and the agencies themselves devote to IT systems and tech is piecemeal and grossly insufficient. You need to either fund the entire transition or it becomes a waste of money if you only half heartedly devote minimal funds that wont accomplish much.

DOGE didnt do its job correctly and just randomly laid off people with no regards to usefulness or job performance. A proper efficency operation would have required audits and working with the unions to id redundant roles...like what Bill Clinton successfully did a few decades ago.

And have you ever taken mandatory cert classes and stuff like continuing education courses/tests? Theyre usually jokes. People I know skip through the trainings and skip striaght to the test with unlimited tries to get course credit....because ppl have actual work to do.

Creating another mandatory cert is literally creating another useless layer of beaucracy.

100% this. Especially the uselessness of "certifications". I have a LOT of friends that are among the best at what they do in the world for the armed forces, and the literal daily nightmare stories they relate about the new hires that come in with these "certifications" is enough to very seriously make you fear for our future AND is making many of them just say to hell with it and retire because the administration itself is making it impossible for these competent individuals to weed out the incompetents. Of which, is most of them.

But the article is contradictory anyhow because it specifically says they are going to target skills based hires rather than certification based hires, and then turns around and says "in-house certification programs". What's in-house ain't working, so we want those people to train more people? What are they going to be certified in? Incompetence?

This will be even less successful as DOGE, which cost us more than it saved.

 

[JSabin]

"Danger, Will Robinson, danger!"

 

[Jeff Murray]

This is nothing more than a Big Tech Bro capture of all the Federal Agencies in one fell swoop. The data captured will be used to train their biased AI models for their own greedy uses. The final gutting of their golden calf.
What can possibly go wrong?

 

[GrayDragon]

Do you mean nobody should ever try to bring bureaucracy up to date?
Two years may be nothing considering how the bureaucracy works today, but if they make a mandatory certification and fire everyone who fails, you'll see how they can work 100x faster.
A huge part of the bureaucracy is not just idling parasites who collect salaries and do nothing, they are actively harmful. Something must be done to change that, and this seems to be a step in the right direction.

Bureaucrats aren't "actively harmful", they are people loyal to the U.S. who want to do the best they can within the law. That's more than can be said of the current administration. Updating tech has nothing to do with what you're talking about and under other adminstrations would be a good thing. Under this one though, one must be very cautious because the guy at the top is clearly set on disabling this country piece by piece into a set of feudal states. This backward step is definitely going to be harmful for the average person.

 

[pnntmp]

Bureaucrats aren't "actively harmful", they are people loyal to the U.S. who want to do the best they can within the law. That's more than can be said of the current administration. Updating tech has nothing to do with what you're talking about and under other adminstrations would be a good thing. Under this one though, one must be very cautious because the guy at the top is clearly set on disabling this country piece by piece into a set of feudal states. This backward step is definitely going to be harmful for the average person.

The vast majority of bureaucrats are only loyal to themselves. Their goals is to keep their cushy no-responsibility job and expand their reach - the latter means to inject themselves in as many processes as possible in a way that allows them to block the process. That's why bureaucracy is an endless source of absurd requirements and preposterous restrictions and regulations that need even more bureaucracy to handle. And why the government should be as small as possible, not the hyperinflated monstrosity we have today.

What bureaucracy is perfect at is to avoid change. After the incredible boom in nuclear power generation in the 1970s and 80s, bureaucrats got in charge of it - and everything immediately and abruptly stopped. Nothing done for many decades, because of which today we have shortages and rising prices and all sorts of dire consequences.
But you're saying they're not actively harmful.

 

[GrayDragon]

The vast majority of bureaucrats are only loyal to themselves. Their goals is to keep their cushy no-responsibility job and expand their reach - the latter means to inject themselves in as many processes as possible in a way that allows them to block the process. That's why bureaucracy is an endless source of absurd requirements and preposterous restrictions and regulations that need even more bureaucracy to handle. And why the government should be as small as possible, not the hyperinflated monstrosity we have today.

What bureaucracy is perfect at is to avoid change. After the incredible boom in nuclear power generation in the 1970s and 80s, bureaucrats got in charge of it - and everything immediately and abruptly stopped. Nothing done for many decades, because of which today we have shortages and rising prices and all sorts of dire consequences.
But you're saying they're not actively harmful.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. I have a sister in government and I know that she's pretty typical. Someone with a sense of duty to the country and just wants to do the best she can in her position to carry out her duties of service. She's also a veteran, which is not uncommon among government workers as veterans get preferred entry into such positions, but also veterans serve because of their loyalty to the country. Trump and his cronies don't understand any of that.

 

[Bluescreendeath]

The vast majority of bureaucrats are only loyal to themselves. Their goals is to keep their cushy no-responsibility job and expand their reach - the latter means to inject themselves in as many processes as possible in a way that allows them to block the process.

No, that is contradictory. Keeping their responsibilities to a minimum is in contradiction to expanding their reach (which would expand their responsibilities).

And the vast majority of bureaucrats are ordinary middle class people who have mortgages to pay and mouths to feed. They are like everyone else - they care about having a JOB with a paycheck.

Do you expect people to risk their jobs by speaking out against the Trump administration (or any other administration) out of a sense of patriotism? They'll get fired and nothing will change. Trump has already fired all the top level leaders and bureaucrats who were appointed by Congress and by the Judicial branch (previous presidents couldn't/wouldn't have fired them even if they disliked em), even purged the DOJ lawyers for being "assigned" to work on cases that made Trump look bad, and fired FBI agents for anything perceived as disloyal to the cause (like being photographed as kneeling during protests).

Virtually all of the administration's top level appointees were appointed out of personal loyalty to Trump - not loyalty to the country (which is exactly what Trump's former cabinet staff like White House Chief of Staff General Kelly, General Mattis, etc. were as warning us about).

Anybody smart who wants to keep their jobs and livelihoods would keep their mouths shut at this point.

That's why bureaucracy is an endless source of absurd requirements and preposterous restrictions and regulations that need even more bureaucracy to handle. And why the government should be as small as possible, not the hyperinflated monstrosity we have today.

What do you think is the source of the absurd requirements and preposterous restrictions? Not the rank and file bureaucrats, that's for sure.

Take a look at our state and federal Legislative and Executive Branches that pass thousands of pages of ambiguous laws every year that literally then tells the executive administrative agencies to figure out ways to interpret and adhere to these laws (which then creates regulations).

Look at yourself and your own local politicians. If you want something to be done, you lobby your politicians. The politicians then create laws to get stuff done, and these laws have to be interpreted and enforced through regulations of the agencies.

If we as a society want less requirements/restrictions/regulations then the first step is to stop wanting the government to keep doing stuff for us.

This includes the national military, healthcare subsidies for the poor and elderly, social security, scientific research, environmental restrictions, subsidies for farmers and energy companies, welfare/subsidies for the poor, disease control, parks & rec., etc. IIRC, the USA's first permanent income tax was levied to fund the national military. Today, the Department of Defense is one of the biggest contributors to increasing regulation, and is actually one of the main writers for all Federal regulations.

Why do you think DOGE went in to cut the government, but ended up being a complete failure and barely cut anything after they realized 99% of the spending were actually important or politically sensitive stuff that people wanted?

Everyone wants to blame OTHER people like the other party, politicians, bureaucrats, the government, etc - instead of looking in the mirror and realizing that we the voters are at the root of many of these problems.