New initiative brings nine experts with federal government experience to work with the FAS and Tech & Society’s Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, the Knight-Georgetown Institute, and the Institute for Technology Law & Policy

Wednesday, June 11, 2025—Today Georgetown University’s Tech & Society Initiative and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) announce two new fellowship programs. These fellowships will bring technologists, lawyers, and policymakers with recent federal government experience to Georgetown University centers, where they will advance nonpartisan research and analysis in their areas of expertise and engage with students. 

Federal Alumni Fellows will work with Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, the Knight-Georgetown Institute, and the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy to advance competition policy and antitrust enforcement in the tech sector, modernize consumer protection and competition for American innovation, and support expanded internet access for underserved communities. 

Digital Service Alumni Fellows will be housed under the University’s Tech & Society Initiative and will collaborate with FAS senior fellows to develop and execute “big wins” that significantly impact the science and tech policy landscape. In addition to providing a place and community for senior leaders to carry forward their work, both FAS and Tech & Society are providing support for digital service experts exiting federal service and continuing to grow the skills of the next generation of leaders in tech and policy.

“The launch of the Federal Alumni and Digital Service Fellowship Programs is a critical step in leveraging the departure of leaders and innovators from the federal government who helped modernize tech policy and digital service delivery,” said incoming Tech & Society Chair and Beeck Center Executive Director Lynn Overmann. “The fellows will bring deep experience that aligns with Tech & Society’s mission to foster innovative and interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of tech, ethics, and governance. The fellows will elevate our centers’ collaborative work and share their expertise with Georgetown students, benefiting both our academic community and the broader field of science, data, effective service delivery, and technology communications. I am thrilled to welcome them to Georgetown University.”

“At FAS, we believe that talented and well-placed policy entrepreneurs are one of the most critical keys to unlocking innovation and solving our society’s most pressing challenges,” said Dr. Jedidah Isler, Chief Science Officer at the Federation of American Scientists.  “It’s why we launched our Senior Fellows Program earlier this year, and why we wanted to collaborate with Georgetown to supercharge our collective impact. Together with our FAS Senior Fellows, the Digital Services Alumni Fellows will tackle ambitious projects – from clean energy modernization to preserving the most essential federal datasets – that drive positive change. In an uncertain time, we are taking a bold step to lead the way and champion the current and future science, technology and innovation policy leaders we will need for tomorrow.”

Federal Alumni Fellows 

Erie Meyer most recently served as chief technologist of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). She was on the implementation team that launched the bureau and was a founding member of its Office of Technology and Innovation. Prior to that, she served as senior adviser for policy planning to former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, as well as FTC chief technologist and technology adviser to former FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra. Before working at the FTC, Meyer launched the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) in the White House, served as senior director for Code for America, and was a senior adviser to the White House chief technology officer. She is a recipient of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein fellowship and received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from American University. Meyer will be placed at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.

Stephanie Nguyen most recently served as chief technologist of the FTC. She spearheaded and launched the agency’s first Office of Technology with senior technologist experts to strengthen and support enforcement matters. Prior to her tenure at the FTC, Nguyen worked at the USDS in the White House, where she built and deployed products and services to millions of people across the Department of Education, Department of State, Health and Human Services, and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She previously was a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, a researcher at Consumer Reports, and a Gleitsman scholar at the Center for Public Leadership. She received a Master in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a bachelor’s degree in Digital Media Theory and Design from the University of Virginia. Nguyen will be placed at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.

Reed Showalter most recently served as senior policy adviser on the National Economic Council. Showalter has broad expertise in competition law, previously serving at the Department of Justice as counsel for antitrust in the Office of Legislative Affairs and as an attorney adviser in the Antitrust Division. He has also worked as an antitrust attorney at the FTC, an associate at the Kanter Law Group, and as a member of the Digital Markets Investigation in the House of Representatives. He received a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a B.A. in International Politics from New York University. Showalter will be placed at the Knight-Georgetown Institute.

Stephanie Weiner most recently served as chief counsel of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in the Department of Commerce. She has held senior positions in private industry, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the Department of Energy. She previously served as senior legal adviser to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, where she oversaw all FCC matters relating to broadband competition and deployment. She received her law degree, magna cum laude, from Northwestern University School of Law, her master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago, and her bachelor’s degree from Brown University. Weiner will be placed at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy.

Digital Service Alumni Fellows

Thushan Amarasiriwardena is an Emmy award-winning product leader focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and public impact. He led Google’s earliest efforts to bring large language models into production to power the Google Assistant; this project grew into the foundations of Gemini. Most recently, he served in the White House’s USDS, driving AI products in federal agencies like the IRS, following the Biden-era AI executive order. Previously, he co-founded Launchpad Toys, a Y Combinator and venture backed startup acquired by Google. His apps were recognized by the New York Times and Apple as one of the top iPad Apps.  Amarasiriwardena began his career as a journalist at The Boston Globe.

Luke Farrell is a public interest technology and policy executive. He currently serves as a fellow at FAS and as executive director for strategic innovation at the College Board. Most recently, Farrell served as senior adviser for technology and delivery on the White House Domestic Policy Council, where he worked to improve the delivery of core safety net benefits and health care for millions of Americans. At the USDS, he built and led rapid-response technology teams that mitigated nationwide supply chain shocks, launched critical public websites, and ensured millions of Americans remained enrolled in Medicaid following the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency. Prior to government service, Farrell led crisis response and machine learning teams at Google.

Faith Savaiano is a public policy professional and consultant with expertise in technology, government innovation, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) workforce development. Most recently, she served as a digital services expert with the USDS, where she provided policy guidance and contributed to the implementation of workforce and skilling objectives in President Biden’s executive order on AI. Additionally, she served as a subject-matter expert on federal regulatory policies and issues related to the federal workforce, public-private partnerships, and technology policy. Previously, Savaiano was the associate director of social innovation at the Federation of American Scientists, where she helped launch and lead a fellowship program that has now placed more than 100 technical experts into government. Prior to that time, she has worked at a variety of advocacy organizations focused on STEM workforce and education issues and the U.S. Department of State.

Diego Núñez most recently served in the Biden-Harris administration’s White House Climate Policy Office as a senior policy adviser. In that role, he led major initiatives across the power and transportation sectors, focusing on advanced transmission technologies, grid modernization, nuclear power, critical minerals, and solutions to manage increased demand from data centers and AI. Núñez began his tenure in the White House as an Associate Staff Secretary. Before that, Núñez served at the Department of the Treasury in the Office of Recovery Programs, at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and on multiple political campaigns. 

Meron Yohannes is a fellow at FAS focused on innovation, inclusivity, and technology related to economic and national security policy. Most recently, she served as the senior policy adviser for the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, formulating policy decisions related to economic development, minority businesses, workforce development, disaster recovery, and entrepreneurship. Her purpose was to guide policy development and program design for several agencies, a portfolio worth over $5 billion in funding that benefits underserved, distressed, and rural communities. Previously, she was the housing, infrastructure, and technology policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank researching and developing recommendations on affordable housing, water infrastructure, AI implications for the U.S. workforce, and evidence-based policymaking.

Participating Organizations: 

Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University: 

The Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University connects government and the civic tech ecosystem to tackle problems that no one can solve alone, to create a people-centered, digitally-enabled government for all. An anchor of Georgetown University’s Tech & Society Initiative, the Beeck Center works alongside public, private, and nonprofit organizations to identify and establish human-centered solutions that help government services work better for everyone—especially the most vulnerable and underserved populations.

Federal of American Scientists: 

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) works to advance progress on a broad suite of contemporary issues where science, technology, and innovation policy can deliver transformative impact, and seeks to ensure that scientific and technical expertise have a seat at the policymaking table. Established in 1945 by scientists in response to the atomic bomb, FAS continues to bring scientific rigor and analysis to address contemporary challenges. 

Institute for Technology Law & Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center:

The Tech Institute is a hub for policymakers, academics, advocates, and technologists to study and discuss how to center humans and the social good, using technology as a tool. With the leading academic program for law and technology in the United States, the institute trains the next generation of lawyers and lawmakers with deep expertise in technology law and policy, provides nonpartisan insights to policymakers on issues related to new and emerging technologies, and fosters interdisciplinary approaches to solving complex technology law and policy problems. 

Knight-Georgetown Institute: 

The Knight-Georgetown Institute (KGI) is dedicated to connecting independent research with technology policy and design. KGI serves as a central hub for the growing network of scholarship that seeks to shape how technology is used to produce, disseminate, and access information. KGI is designed to provide practical resources that policymakers, journalists, and private and public sector leaders can use to tackle information and technology issues in real time. Georgetown University and the Knight Foundation came together to launch the institute in 2024.

Tech & Society Initiative: 

The Tech & Society Initiative creates novel approaches for interdisciplinary collaboration, research, and understanding at the intersection of technology, ethics, and governance at Georgetown University. We bring together ten centers and programs at Georgetown that are deeply immersed in particular parts of the technology and society equation: ethics, privacy, national security, law, policy, governance, and data—and we are building connective tissue between them. We identify the points of connection between them, and then create opportunities for them to collaborate in tangible and productive ways. 

Media Contact

Jessica Yabsley
Director of Communications
jessica.yabsley@georgetown.edu

On May 29, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) published two memoranda that could substantially reshape federal hiring. The first–“Merit Hiring Plan”–issued with the White House Domestic Policy Council—implements Executive Order 14170.  The second provides guidance on “Hiring and Talent Development for the Senior Executive Service”. Spanning 53 pages, the documents are written in dense HR jargon that can overwhelm even seasoned practitioners. To clarify their meaning and impact, the Niskanen Center and the Federation of American Scientists have teamed up to translate both memos for journalists, researchers, and the general public.

The Memos Generally: Lots To Like, Dangerous Partisanship, & A Long Road Ahead

The memos, at their core, attempt to address well-documented and long-existing challenges: federal hiring is too sluggish, procedural, and opaque. Both of our organizations have long argued for the need to move faster, hire better, and hold poor performing employees accountable while still adhering to the merit system principles.  A high-performing, agile, and engaged federal workforce is essential if Americans are to trust if Americans are to trust that laws passed by Congress will be executed quickly, competently and efficiently. 

These memos are the latest in a long line of efforts by Presidents of both parties to bring common sense to federal hiring and performance – speed up the hiring process, focus on the skills to do the job, evaluate those skills objectively, and share resources across agencies to economize on effort and investment. These memos push that agenda further than earlier efforts, delivering several long‑sought wins such as streamlined applications and résumés more in line with private‑sector norms. 

They also venture further than any recent initiative in politicizing the civil service. Mandatory training and essay questions tied to the current Administration’s executive orders—and explicit political sign‑off on certain hiring actions—risk blurring the firewall between career professionals and partisan appointees. We have discussed the dangers associated with this type of partisan drift in other places, including in response to the recent OPM rulemaking on “Schedule Policy/Career”.

Implementing even the non-controversial portions will be daunting. Reforming the federal government–the largest employer in the country–requires sustained, years-long effort from OPM and OMB. 

The memos themselves are only the starting gun. Notably absent is a realistic plan to resource this work: for example, OPM has fired or lost nearly all of its enterprise data analytics team, limiting its ability to supply the metrics needed for oversight and accountability. Additionally, the inclusion of extremely ideological and partisan goals politicizes the entire agenda and risks overshadowing the rest of the positive reform agenda, threatening its ability to succeed anywhere. 

In evaluating these documents, we have to weigh each part of the Administration’s strategy separately and objectively – there is a lot to like in these documents, there are things that are deeply troubling, and there are things that desperately need leadership attention in implementation.

What We Like: Skills-Based Hiring, Resume Reform, Assessments, Sharing Across Agencies

The bulk of both memos represents a bold next step in long‑running federal hiring reforms—initiatives that agencies have piloted for years but often struggled to scale. We commend OPM for learning from past efforts and, in several critical areas, pushing further than any of its predecessors by:

• Recognizing the role of recruiting and sourcing talent – The plan highlights the importance of active recruiting in the hiring process.Agencies have long relied on USAJobs alone as a crutch, hoping the right kinds of talent will be scouring the job board every day and happen upon job postings – this works okay for some roles that are highly-specialized to government, but particularly as agencies have need for emerging talent it they cannot assume critical talent pools are even aware that the federal government wants to hire them.
• Focusing on skills and evaluating for those skills – The memo limits the use of self-assessments to minimum qualifications only and requires agencies to use some form of technical or alternative assessment for all postings, implementing 2024’s bipartisan Chance to Compete Act. This is a critical move forward from the reliance on applicant’s self-assessment,a status quo that disadvantages honesty and self-awareness.
• Implementing ‘Rule of Many’ ranking procedures – OPM will finalize its proposed ‘Rule of Many’ regulation from the last Administration, which empowers agencies to choose the various ways to “cut off” applicants after they are assessed. Finalizing ‘Rule of Many’ will enable agencies to set clear, objective criteria for which applicants it will consider based on test scores (e.g., considering the top 10% of scorers), a numerical approach (e.g., considering the top 50 applicants), and other mechanisms (e.g., clear pass/fail standards) that give hiring managers and HR specialists the flexibility they need to tailor hiring procedures to specific needs.
• Sharing resources and certifications of eligibles across agencies – This expands requirements for agencies to share candidates, position descriptions, and talent pools across agencies, including conducting pooled hiring actions where one candidate can apply once to many similar jobs across government. It builds on recent tremendous success agencies have with recruiting high-quality applicants across government through shared hiring actions, which enables agencies to surge talent in a specific field and advertise as one enterprise to potential applicants.
• Reducing size of referral resumes to two pages – OPM is finally attempting to move away from a “federal resume” format that needlessly burdens members of the public with overly-specific requirements. Previously, applicants that didn’t know to include things like the “average number of hours worked per week” or their complete salary history were unknowingly disqualifying themselves from federal employment and even those that knew better had to maintain two separate resumes, making it harder to jump between sectors.
• Simplifying Senior Executive applications – Applicants for Senior Executive Service roles will no longer be required to write multiple pages of essays describing their experience – a process so unique it has spawned a cottage industry of professional writers – and will be evaluated via resumes and structured interviews like their peers across the economy. This builds on a long history of successful pilots of new selection procedures focusing on resumes and structured interviews rather than the traditional essays.
• Removing unnecessary degree requirements – While efforts have been underway since the first Trump Administration to remove unnecessary degree requirements. The new memos solidify that trajectory, embracing a skills‑first hiring model that prizes demonstrated ability over paper credentials—a trend mirrored in state governments and the private sector. Yet dropping degree rules is only half the battle. To truly broaden the talent pool, agencies must replace résumé shortcuts (like “years of experience”) with rigorous, job‑relevant assessments that let candidates prove what they can actually do. 
• Focusing on speed and responsiveness – The memo doesn’t ignore the aspect of the applicant experience that differs most from the private sector: speed and responsiveness, setting a government-wide target of 80 days for hiring actions and requiring timely updates to applicants on their status. This builds on years of work to wrestle down timelines for security clearances and recognizes that one of the biggest reasons the federal government loses amazing applicants is the length of the process, not the pay.

Finally, the memos contain a compendium of useful resources in Appendices that agencies that can use to improve their approach to hiring.

Potential Red Flags: Politicization, Red Tape, & Extra, Unfunded Mandates

While OPM is advancing important nonpartisan reforms, we are concerned that several explicitly ideological provisions could erode the civil service’s neutrality and jeopardize the very hiring‑efficiency agenda OPM seeks to champion:

• Requiring essay questions on political views–Despite reducing applicant burden in other areas, OPM also introduces a requirement for all applicants for jobs above GS-05 (98%+ of jobs) to draft responses to free-response essay questions that describe their views on the present administration, including identifying which of the current president’s Executive Orders are “significant” to them. At best, this is an additional requirement that will be irrelevant for most jobs – there shouldn’t be any impact of EOs on a seasonal wildland firefighter’s strategy for fighting fires, for instance.  More realistically, this constitutes a partisan loyalty test for federal employees to evaluate their views on the current President. Federal employees swear their allegiance to the Constitution, not the current President and there are legitimate open questions about the constitutionality of many Executive Orders.
• Introducing extra layers of political approval in the hiring process–While the memo emphasizes time to hire, it also emphasizes that “agency leadership” must either personally approve or designate an official to approve all positions before they are posted and all selections prior to extension of an offer. It also requires that they do an “executive interview” with candidates and opens the door to obvious partisan abuse of the merit hiring process when paired with the free response essay questions. Even without that risk, however, this requirement adds tremendous amounts of friction into a process that is already too full of approvals and pulls the decision-making authority in the wrong direction: to leadership instead of to the line management that knows the needs of a given program best. We are already seeing the problems with this approach play out with a similar requirement for agency leadership to personally approve payments or contracts, leading to extreme slowdowns. Additionally, just as with OPM’s recent rulemaking on Schedule Policy/Career, the opportunity for abuse is extremely obvious: highly partisan agency leaders may see it as their right to disapprove of candidates for purely political reasons–like, for example, donations to opposing candidates.
• Prioritizes political training for the SES corps–While the Administration has closed down training programs like the Federal Executive Institute that were designed to train new generations of federal leaders, it is also adding ideological training to the SES that lacks a clear purpose or evidence that it will improve governing outcomes. Requiring Senior Executives to watch an “80-hour video-based program that provides training regarding President Trump’s Executive Orders” is both offensive to the principle of a nonpartisan civil service and a waste of time for the busiest, most senior leaders across the entire enterprise. While America’s most productive tech companies are trying to reduce the meeting load to free staff to get things done, torching 4% of our senior executives’ working years for ideological training is the opposite of efficient. 
• No mention of resources to carry out these changes – As with past legislation, EOs, and memos requiring skills-based talent practices, no apparent financial or other resources come with these memos. This has hampered adoption for more than a decade. The Talent Teams at OPM and the agencies, the communications and education support, the changes to OPM and agency systems all need people, money, and IT support. The lack of committed resources will delay, and perhaps scuttle, implementation. We know this because it has happened before. In the Clinton Administration, for example, a major push to de-proceduralize federal hiring fell down because they underresourced agency HR offices to stick the landing. This will happen again on skills-based hiring without commensurate investment, a problem discussed at length in a recent paper from the Niskanen Center.

What’s Missing: A Scalable Implementation Strategy

Executing these reforms will be no small feat, and the toughest tasks are also the most crucial: getting good technical assessments in the hands of managers, conducting strategic workforce planning, changing the culture around hiring to empower managers and not HR, and letting line managers be managers. OPM’s memos are light on details about how they intend to resource and manage implementation, an omission that they have plenty of time to correct but one that needs some serious consideration if they are going to be successful:

• Changing entrenched oversight, HR, and hiring manager policies, practices, and culture – OPM and the agencies will need to focus on how to move decades-learned compliance and risk aversion behaviors embedded in the current hiring and performance management practices into a skills-based future. The change management and consistent leadership required here is a substantial undertaking. Because OPM has conditioned the federal HR profession to be incredibly risk-averse, it won’t immediately embrace these new mandates without coaching, training, and professional development. To facilitate this, OPM should re-submit its uncontroversial legislative proposal from last year to help professionalize and develop the federal HR workforce, and Congress should expeditiously pass it.
• Hiring is just one piece of the effective federal employee puzzle – Though the SES Memo addresses some aspects of performance management, the focus on hiring diminishes other parts of the management system that impact effectiveness and performance. Onboarding, the early job experience, consistent feedback, professional development, challenging assignments, and career paths all help to ensure employees are helping meet agency missions. Implementation needs to take the whole system into account if OPM and the agencies are going to impact effectiveness and accountability.
• An all-of-the-above approach for getting assessments into the hands of agencies – The memo focuses on USAHire but, as we’ve discussed, there are many third-party assessment vendors that offer validated assessments and tools to help lower the unit and marginal cost of using objective assessments. Emerging companies offer things like AI-proctored video interviews that could quickly surface the most promising candidates and are already in use by the private sector for high-volume roles. At the federal level, parts of the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies have already experimented with some of these platforms. We want to see OPM think bigger about how to quickly bring assessments online and recognize that the private sector can play a role in accelerating this transformation.
• Focus on the candidate experience – Job candidates – users of the federal hiring system – complain that the experience of applying for a federal job is neither easy nor seamless, as it can be in the private sector. While the memos make some progress in reducing the burden on candidates (e.g., reducing resume and SES application requirements), the system is still rife with bureaucratic bloat. High-performing candidates have many options; they will go elsewhere if we do not reduce the friction. 
• Public accountability & data – According to the hiring plan memo, agencies need to develop a data-driven plan for implementation and report frequently to OPM and OMB on their progress. With the practical dissolution of OPM’s human capital data team and a years-long problem with lagging human capital data releases via Fedscope, OPM should commit to releasing data publicly on their progress: how many people are hired, where they are hired, how many apply, how many pass technical assessments, etc. that will hold agencies accountable for getting this work done, give Congress the insight it needs to trust OPM, and provide the public with a window into progress.
• A plan to staff for success – In the best of times, OPM struggles with capacity for human capital policy work, and it will need every federal human capital expert it can get to pull off implementation of these memos. However, at the same time, OMB’s FY2026 budget proposal outlines a significant reduction in total headcount for OPM that locks in a 25%+ reduction in headcount across all parts of the agency, from policy to direct support for agencies. Given the technical complexity involved in many of these efforts–delivering validated assessments, for example, will likely require bringing in new expertise from outside government–OPM will need a plan to staff itself for success that is missing in these memos today.

In urgent circumstances, agencies have experimented with some of these practices and policies (e.g., cybersecurity hiring and intelligence community hiring, infrastructure and energy development). However, action on skills-based talent practices is far from pervasive. Together with outside experts, we continue to map the obstacles that keep skills‑first hiring from taking root: limited resources, hesitant leadership, and a pervasive fear of downside risk. Many of the opportunities and chokepoints highlighted in the memos came from this work, and we will keep collaborating with all stakeholders to craft practical fixes.

Most of the reforms in these memoranda set federal hiring on a promising trajectory, but their impact will hinge on disciplined execution. Some of them are deeply troubling attacks on the basis of the merit system. We will track OPM’s progress closely—amplifying best practices and calling out any drift from merit‑based, nonpartisan norms.  These challenges are not new, yet  they have become increasingly existential to building a government that works; OPM must keep that urgency front and center as implementation moves forward.

Our government depends on objective, evidence-based, information to make the best policy. From national defense to our everyday quality of life, Americans depend on highly specialized  government professionals doing research, gathering data, analyzing results, and delivering services. We depend on people doing this work, making the best decisions they can, without fear or favor. That objectivity is key to their work.

Right now there’s a threat to government professionals’ ability to do their jobs: The Proposed Rule on Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service, also known as Schedule Policy/Career. If adopted, this rule will change the employment relationship for a significant number of federal employees, depending on the agencies’ reclassification determinations. It changes them to “at will” employees, stripping them of civil service protections if they are in positions that affect policy. 

On the surface, changing a federal employee’s status seems like simply an administrative change. But, the reason Americans want federal employees with career longevity isn’t just for all their accumulated knowledge and expertise; it is to insulate our system from the shocks and cold-starts that come with constant turnover. When we introduce “at-will” employment to government employees, we also introduce the potential for environments where people are more concerned about self-preservation than service to others.

What makes this problematic, and even potentially dangerous, is that the Proposed Rule has few guidelines for agencies to determine what positions “influence policy” and therefore go into this new schedule. “Schedule Policy/Career” (“Schedule PC”) rescinds civil servant employment protections, placing unnecessary and undesirable political pressure on highly specialized scientific and technical career professionals serving in government. Assigning federal employees to this status could foster an environment of fear when reporting data that is viewed as politically incorrect or inconvenient. For these reasons FAS believes this could have an outsized, negative impact on scientific and technical research in particular. Read our full policy statement here; we encourage citizens to submit public comment here through May 23rd, when the window for comment closes.

How might a change like this proposed rule make it difficult to keep, or even do, one’s job? How might this be damaging not to just one person, but to our government’s capacity to pursue necessary scientific and technical research? 

Picture yourself an industrial hygienist, a person tasked with evaluating workplace safety, at a nuclear power research facility. You are a federal employee newly placed in the Policy/Career Schedule because it has been determined that your job affects policy. Through your work testing the safety of new nuclear generator technologies, you uncover serious vulnerabilities that would require safety equipment and protocols. If you make the recommendation to implement safety changes, you know that this will likely delay power deployment and increase costs. However, you are working in an administration that has policies, written and unwritten, to accelerate nuclear technology development, even if it includes taking greater risks in deployment. What would you choose to do? If you were working as a Schedule P/C there might be immense pressure to drop safety recommendations to speed power delivery. You are now in a position to either bring this information forward and potentially risk your job or hold back or downplay this information and keep your job.

Consider a few more examples of how this shift in classification could permanently alter the way in which federal employees are incentivized. Do you want them looking out only for themselves, or for the larger mission and for the health and wellbeing of the nation? Do you want them to have the freedom to present challenging data, or would you prefer they meekly do whatever serves the immediate needs of their individual situation even if it causes long term or widespread harm?

How do you want the marine biologist to handle this? How about a cybersecurity professional protecting the nation from cyberattacks? How about the statisticians reporting on the health of our economy? How about the pharmacologist testing the safety of your medicines? How about the administrative law judge deciding on Social Security benefits? Each of these federal employees are gathering information and making decisions that affect us. We depend on their objectivity and their forthright, evidence-based delivery of what they find.

If you want better, more effective, more efficient government write a comment to oppose this Proposed Rule before comments close June 7th.