Onboarding Critical Talent in Days: Establishing a Federal STEM Talent Pool
It often takes the federal government months to hire for critical science and technology (STEM) roles, far too slow to respond effectively to the demands of emerging technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence), disasters (COVID), and implementing complex legislation (CHIPS). One solution is for the Federal Government to create a pool of pre-vetted STEM talent to address these needs. This memo outlines how the federal government can leverage existing authorities and hiring mechanisms to achieve this goal, making it easier to respond to staffing needs for emerging policies, technologies, and crises in near-real time.
To lead the effort, the White House should appoint a STEM talent lead (or empower the current Tech Talent Task Force Coordinator or Senior Advisor for Talent Strategy). The STEM talent lead should make a national call to action for scientists and technologists to join the government. They should establish a team in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) to proactively recruit and vet candidates from underrepresented groups, and establish a pool of talent that is available to every agency on-demand.
Challenge and Opportunity
In general, agencies are lagging in adopting best practices for government hiring. This includes the Subject Matter Expert Qualifications Assessment (SMEQA, a hiring process that replaces simple hiring questionnaires with efficient subject-matter-expert-led interviews), shared certificate hiring (which allow qualified but unsuccessful candidates to be hired into similar roles without having to reapply or re-interview), flexible hiring authorities (which allow the government to recruit talent for critical roles (e.g. cybersecurity) more efficiently and allow for alternative work arrangements, such as remote work), proactive sourcing (individual identification and relationship building), and continuous recruiting.
Failure to effectively leverage these hiring tools leads to significant delays in federal hiring, which in turn makes it difficult or impossible for the federal government to nimbly handle rapidly emerging and evolving STEM issue areas (e.g., AI, cybersecurity, extreme weather, quantum computing) and to execute on complex implementation demands.
There is an opportunity to correct this failure by empowering a STEM talent lead in the White House. The talent lead would work with agencies to build a national pool of pre-vetted STEM talent, with the goal of making it possible for federal agencies to fill critical roles in a matter of days – especially when crises strike. This will save the government time, effort, and money while delivering a better candidate experience, which is critical when hiring for in-demand roles.
Plan of Action
The federal government should adopt a four-part plan of action to realize the opportunity described above.
Recommendation 1. Hire and empower a STEM talent lead for critical hiring needs
The next administration should recruit, hire, and empower a STEM talent lead in the Executive Office of the President. The STEM lead should be offered a senior role, either political (Special Assistant to the President) or a senior-level civil service role. The role should sit in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and report to the OSTP director. The STEM talent lead would be tasked with coordinating hiring for critical STEM roles throughout the government. Similar roles currently exist, but are limited to specific subject areas. For instance, the Tech Talent Task Force Coordinator coordinates tech talent policy in an effort to scale hiring and manages a task force that seeks to align agency talent needs. The Senior Advisor for Talent Strategy serves a similar function. The Senior Advisor leads a “tech surge” at the Office of Management and Budget, pulling together workforce and technology policy implementation, including efforts to speed up hiring. Either of these roles could be elevated to the STEM lead, or a new position could be created.
The STEM talent lead would also coordinate government units that have already been established to help deliver STEM talent to federal agencies efficiently. Such units include the United States Digital Service, 18F, Presidential Innovation Fellows, the Lab at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Department of Homeland Security’s Artificial Intelligence Corps, and the Digital Corps at the General Services Administration. The STEM talent lead should be empowered to pull experts from these teams into OSTP for short details to define critical hiring needs. The talent lead should also be responsible for coordinating efforts among the various groups. The goal would not be to supplant the operations of these individual groups, rather to learn from and streamline government-wide efforts in critical fields.
Recommendation 2. Proactive, continuous hiring for key roles across the government
The STEM talent lead should work with the administration and agencies to define the most critical and underrepresented scientific and technical skill sets and identify the highest impact placement for them in the federal government. This is currently being done under the Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence which could be expanded to include all STEM needs. The STEM Lead should establish sourcing strategies and identify prospective hires, possibly building on OPM’s Talent Network goals.
The lead should also collaborate with public and private subject matter experts and use approved and tested hiring processes, such as SMEQA and shared certificates, to pre-vet candidates. These experts would then be placed on a government-wide hiring certificate so that every federal agency could make them a job offer. Once vetted and placed on a government-wide hiring certificate, experts would be available for agencies to onboard within days.
Recommendation 3. Implement a “shared-certificate-by-default” policy
Traditionally, more than one qualified applicant will apply to a federal job opening. In most cases, one applicant will be chosen and the rest rejected, even if the government (even the same agency) has another open role for the same job class. This creates an unnecessary burden on qualified applicants and the government. Qualified applicants should only have to apply once when multiple opportunities exist for the same or similar jobs. This exists, to a limited extent, for excepted service applicants but not for everyone. To achieve this, all critical, scientific, and national security roles should default to shared hiring certificates. Sharing hiring certificates is an approved federal policy but is not the default. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) could issue a policy memo making shared certificates the default, and then work with the OPM to implement it.
Furthermore, the STEM talent lead should coordinate a centralized list of qualified applicants who were not chosen off of shared certificates if they opt-in to receiving job offers from other agencies. This functionality, called “Talent Programs,” has been piloted through USAJobs but has had limited success due to a lack of centralized support.
Recommendation 4. Let departing employees remain available for rapid re-hire into federal roles
Departing staff in critical roles (as determined by the STEM talent lead; see Recommendation 2) with good performance reviews should be offered an opportunity to join a central pool of experts that are available for rehire. The government invests heavily in hiring, training, and providing security clearances to employees with an expectation that they will serve long careers. 20+ year careers, however, are no longer the norm for most applicants. Increasingly, talent is lost to burnout, lack of opportunity inside government, or a desire to do something different. Current policy offers only “reinstatement” benefits, which allow former federal employees to apply for jobs without competing with the broader public. Reinstatement job seekers are still required to apply from scratch to individual positions.
Former employees are a critical group when staffing up quickly. Immediate access to staff with approved security clearances is particularly critical in national emergencies. Former employees also bring their prior training and cultural awareness, making them more effective, quicker than new hires. To incentivize participation from departing employees, the government could offer to maintain their security clearance, give them access to their Thrift Savings Plan and/or medical insurance, and other benefits. This could be piloted through existing authorities (e.g., as intermittent consultants) and OMB and/or OPM could develop a new retention policy based on the outcomes of that pilot.
Conclusion
The federal government needs to establish processes to proactively recruit for key roles, help every qualified candidate get a job, and rapidly respond to STEM staffing needs for critical and complex policies, technologies, and crises. A central pool of science and technology experts can be called upon to fill permanent roles, respond to emergencies, and provide advisory services. Talent can enter and exit the pool as needed, providing the government access to a broad set of skills and experience to pull from immediately.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Yes. It can take several months to establish and execute a government-wide hiring action, especially when relying on OPM for approvals. Once a candidate is vetted and placed on a shared certificate, however, the only delay in hiring is an individual agency’s onboarding procedure. Some agencies are already able to hire in days, others will need support refining their processes if they want the fastest response times.
Yes, both processes are approved by OPM and have been implemented many times with positive results. Despite their success, they remain a small portion of overall hiring processes.
The government has diverse talent, just not enough of it. Pooled and government-wide hiring are ways to leverage limited skill sets to increase the number of experts in any given field. In other words, these are approaches that use critical talent from several agencies to vet potential hires that can be distributed to agencies without the expertise to vet the talent themselves. In this way, talent is seeded throughout the government. Those experts can then ramp up hiring in their own agency, accelerating the hiring of critical skills.
While there are costs to developing these capabilities they will likely be offset in the short term by savings in agencies that no longer need to run time-consuming and labor-intensive job searches. The government will benefit from having fewer people with more expertise operating a centralized service. This program also builds on work that has already been piloted, such as SMEQA and Talent Networks which could also be streamlined to provide greater government-wide efficiency.
Given the government-wide nature of the project, it could be funded in subsequent years through OMB’s Cross Agency Priority (CAP) process, which takes place at the end of the fiscal year. CAP recovers unspent funds from federal agencies to fund key projects. The CAP process was used to successfully scale the SMEQA process and the Digital IT Acquisition Program (DITAP), both of which were similar in scope to this proposal.
It is unlikely that this proposal would increase retirements. The problem recently faced by the Secret Service is a program where agents can retire and then take on part-time work after retirement.
The proposal in this memo, by contrast, focuses on pre-retirement-age personnel who are leaving federal service for a variety of reasons. The goal is to make it easier for this pool to rejoin either permanently (pre-vetted for competitive hiring), temporarily (using non-competitive hiring authorities or political avenues), or as advisors (intermittent consultants).
Reinstatement is the process of rejoining the federal government after having served for a minimum of three years. The benefit of reinstatement is that applicants can apply for non-public jobs, where they compete for jobs against internal candidates rather than the public. Reinstatement requires applicants to apply to individual jobs.
By entering the STEM talent pool, this memo envisions that candidates in critical roles with positive performance reviews would not have to apply for jobs. Instead, agencies looking to hire for critical roles would be able to offer a candidate from this pool a job (without the candidate having to apply). If the candidate accepts, the agency would then be able to onboard them immediately.
Critical roles will and should change over time. Part of the duties of the STEM talent lead would be to continually research and define the emerging needs of the STEM workforce and proactively define what roles are critical for the government.
Yes, but it is often hard to find and decipher. FedScope contains federal hiring data that can be mined for insights. For example, 45% of Federal STEM employees who separated from large agencies from 2020-2024 were people who quit, rather than retired from service. The average length of service has dropped since 2019 and is far below retirement age (11.6 years). Internal federal data has also shown a significant drop in IT employees (2210 series jobs) under the age of 35 across CFO Act agencies.
Where should this office be located in the Federal Government?
The most likely place to pilot the STEM talent team would be in the Executive Office of the President, either as a political role (e.g., Special Assistant to the President) in the Office of Science and Technology Policy or limited-term career role (e.g., Senior Leader or Scientific and Professional). The White House’s authority to coordinate and convene experts from across the government makes it an ideal location to operate from at first. Proximity to the President would make it easier to research critical roles throughout government, coordinate the efforts of disparate hiring programs throughout government, and recruit applicants.
Ultimately, however, the team could be piloted anywhere in the government with sufficient centralized authority. After a defined pilot period, the team may benefit from moving into a less political environment. The team should be founded in an environment that is friendly to iteration, risk-taking, and policy coordination.
Throughout this phase of work, there are many actions hiring managers and staffing specialists can take to streamline the process and improve the quality of eligible candidates. Most importantly, hiring managers and staffing specialists can collaborate within and across agencies to expedite and simplify the process.
With a collaborative, cross-agency lens and a commitment to engaging jobseekers where they live, the government can enhance its ability to attract talent while underscoring to Americans that the federal government is not a distant authority but rather a stakeholder in their communities that offers credible opportunities to serve.
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