The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) currently uses Cost-Plus-Fixed-Fee (CPFF) as its de facto default funding and contracting model. Unfortunately, this model prioritizes administrative compliance over performance, hindering USAID’s development goals and U.S. efforts to counter renewed Great Power competition with Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and other competitors. The U.S. foreign aid system is losing strategic influence as developing nations turn to faster and more flexible (albeit riskier) options offered by geopolitical competitors like the PRC. 

To respond and maintain U.S. global leadership, USAID should transition to heavily favor a Fixed-Price model – tying payments to specific, measurable objectives rather than incurred costs – to enhance the United States’ ability to compete globally and deliver impact at scale. Moreover, USAID should require written justifications for not choosing a Fixed-Price model, shifting the burden of proof. (We will use “Fixed-Price” to refer to both Firm Fixed Price Contracts and Fixed Amount Award Grants, wherein payments are linked to results or deliverables.) 

This shock to the system would encourage broader adoption of Fixed-Price models, reducing administrative burdens, incentivizing implementers (of contracts, cooperative agreements, and grants) to focus on outcomes, and streamlining outdated and inefficient procurement processes. The USAID Bureau for Management’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance (OAA) should lead this transition by developing a framework for greater use of Firm Fixed Price (FFP) contracts and Fixed Amount Award (FAA) grants, establishing criteria for defining milestones and outcomes, retraining staff, and providing continuous support. With strong support from USAID leadership, this shift will reduce administrative burdens within USAID and improve competitiveness by expanding USAID’s partner base and making it easier for smaller organizations to collaborate. 

Challenge and Opportunity

Challenge

The U.S. remains the largest donor of foreign assistance around the world, accounting for 29% of total official development assistance from major donor governments in 2023. Its foreign aid programs have paid dividends over the years in American jobs and economic growth, as well as an unprecedented and unrivaled network of alliances and trading partners. Today, however, USAID has become mired once again in procurement inefficiencies, reversing previous trends and efforts at reform and blocking – for years – sensible initiatives such as third country national (TCN) warrants, thereby reducing the impact of foreign aid for those it intends to help and impeding the U.S. Government’s (USG) ability to respond to growing Great Power Competition.

Foreign aid serves as a critical instrument of foreign policy influence, shaping geopolitical landscapes and advancing national interests on the global stage. No actor has demonstrated this more clearly than the PRC, whose rise as a major player in global development adds pressure on the U.S. to maintain its leadership. Notably, China has increased its spending of foreign assistance for economic development by 525% in the last 15 years. Through the Belt & Road Initiative, its Digital Silk Road, alternative development banks, and increasingly sophisticated methods of wielding its soft power, the PRC has built a compelling and attractive foreign assistance model which offers quick, low-cost solutions without the governance “strings” attached to U.S. aid. While it seems to fulfill countries’ needs efficiently, hidden costs include long-term debt, high lifecycle expenses, and potential Chinese ownership upon default. 

By contrast, USAID’s Cost-Plus-Fixed-Fee (CPFF) foreign assistance model – in which implementers are guaranteed to recover their costs and earn a profit – mainly prioritizes tracking receipts over achieving results and therefore often fails to achieve intended outcomes, with billions spent on programs that lack measurable impact or fail to meet goals. Implementers are paid for budget compliance, regardless of results, placing all performance risk on the government. 

The USG invented CPFF to establish fair prices where no markets existed. However, its use has now extended far beyond this purpose – including for products and services with well-established commercial markets. The compliance infrastructure necessary to administer USAID awards and adhere to the documentation/reporting requirements favors entrenched contractors – as noted by USAID Administrator Samantha Power – stifles innovation, and keeps prices high, thereby encumbering America’s ability to agilely work with local partners and respond to changing conditions. (Note: USAID typically uses “award” to refer to contracts, cooperative agreements, and grants. We use “award” in this same manner to refer to all three procurement mechanisms. We use “Fixed-Price Awards” to refer to fixed-price grants and contracts. “Fixed Amount Awards,” however, specifically refers to a fixed-price grant.)

In light of the growing Great Power Competition with China and Russia – and threats by those who wish to undermine the US-led liberal international order – as well as the possibility of further global shocks like COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine, USAID must consider whether its current toolset can maintain a position of strategic strength in global development. Furthermore, amid declining Official Development Assistance (ODA) – 2% year-over-year – and a global failure to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is critical for USAID to reconcile the gap between its funding and lack of results. Without change, USAID funding will largely continue to fall short of objectives. The time is now for USAID to act.

Opportunity

While USAID cannot have a de jure default procurement mechanism, CPFF has become the de facto default procurement mechanism, but it does not have to be. USAID has other mechanisms to deploy funding at its disposal. In fact, at least two alternative award and contract pricing models exist:

1. Time and materials (T&M): The implementer proposes a set of fully loaded (i.e., inclusive of salary, benefits, overhead, plus profit) hourly rates for different labor categories and the USG pays for time incurred – not results delivered.
2. Fixed-Price (Firm Fixed Price, FFP, for contracts, or Fixed Amount Award, FAA/Fixed Obligation Grants, FOG, for grants): The implementer proposes a set fee and is paid for milestones or results (not receipts).

While CPFF simply reimburses providers for costs plus profit, the Fixed-Price alternatives tie funding to achieving milestones, promoting efficiency and accountability. The Code of Federal Regulations (§ 200.1) permits using Fixed-Price mechanisms whenever pricing data can establish a reasonable estimate of implementation costs. 

USAID has acknowledged the need to adapt funding mechanisms to better support local and impact-driven organizations and enhance cost-effectiveness. USAID has already started supporting these goals by incorporating evidence-based approaches and transitioning to models that emphasize cost-effectiveness and impact. As an example, in the Biden administration, USAID’s Office of the Chief Economist (OCE) issued the Promoting Impact and Learning with Cost-Effectiveness Evidence (PILCEE) award, which aims to enhance USAID’s programmatic effectiveness by promoting the use of cost-effectiveness evidence in strategic planning, policy-making, activity design, and implementation. Progress, though, remains limited. Funding disbursed based on performance milestones has remained unchanged since Fiscal Year (FY) 2016. In FY 2022, Fixed Amount Awards represented only 12.4% of new awards, or 1.4% by value. 

An October 2020 Stanford Social Innovation Review article by two USAID officials argued that the Agency could enhance its use of Fixed Amount Awards by promoting “performance over compliance”. Other organizations have already begun to make this shift: the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria – among others – have invested in increasing results-based approaches and embedding different results-based instruments into their procurement processes for increased aid effectiveness.

To shift USAID into an Agency that invests in impact at scale, we propose going one step further, and making Fixed-Price awards the de facto default procurement mechanism across USAID by requiring procurement officials to provide written justification for choosing CPFF. 

This would build on the work completed during the first Trump administration under Administrator Mark Green, including the creation of the first Acquisition and Assistance Strategy, designed to “empower and equip [USAID] partners and staff to produce results-driven solutions” by, inter alia, “increasing usage of awards that pay for results, as opposed to presumptively reimbursing for costs”, and the promotion of the Pay-for-Results approach to development.

Such a  change would unlock benefits for both the USG and for global development, including:

1. Better alignment of risk and reward by ensuring implementers are paid only when they deliver on pre-agreed milestones. The risk of not achieving impact would no longer be solely borne by the USG, and implementers would be highly incentivized to achieve results.
2. Promotion of a results-driven culture by shifting focus from administrative oversight to actual outcomes. By agreeing to milestones at the start of an award, USAID would give implementers flexibility to achieve results and adapt more nimbly to changing circumstances and place the focus on performing and reporting results, rather than administrative reporting.
3. Diversification of USAID’s partner base by reducing the administrative burden associated with being a USAID implementer. This would allow the Agency to leverage the unique strengths, contextual knowledge, and innovative approaches of a diverse set of development actors. By allowing the Agency to work more nimbly with small businesses and local actors on shared priorities, it would further enhance its ability to counter current Great Power Competition with China and Russia.
4. Incentivization of cost efficiency, motivating implementers to reduce expenses if they want to increase their profits, without extra cost to the USG.
5. Facilitation of greater progress by USAID and the USG toward the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in ways likely to attract more meaningful and substantive private sector partnerships and leverage scarce USG resources.

Plan of Action 

Making Fixed-Price the de facto default option for both grants and contracts would provide the U.S. foreign aid procurement process a necessary shock to the system. The success of such a large institutional shift will require effective change management; therefore, it should be accompanied with the necessary training and support for implementing staff. This would entail, inter alia, establishing a dedicated team within OAA specialized in the design and implementation of FFPs and FAAs; and changing the culture of USAID procurement by supporting both contracting and programming staff with a robust change management program, including training and strong messaging from USAID leadership and education for Congressional appropriators. 

Recommendation 1. Making Fixed-Price the de facto “default” option for both grants and contracts, and tying payments to results. 

Fixed-Price as the default option for both grants and contracts would come at a low additional cost to USAID (assuming staff are able to be redistributed). The Agency’s Senior Procurement Executive, Chief Acquisition Officer (CAO), and Director for OAA should first convene a design working group composed of representatives from program offices, technical offices, OAA, and the General Counsel’s office tasked with reviewing government spending by category to identify sectors exempt from the “Fixed-Price default” mandate, namely for work that lacks deep commercial markets (e.g., humanitarian assistance or disaster relief). This working group would then propose a phased approach for adopting Fixed-Price as the default option across these sectors. After making its recommendations, the working group would be disbanded and a more permanent dedicated team would carry this effort forward (see Recommendation 2).

Once reset, Contract and Agreement Officers would justify any exceptions (i.e., the choice of T&M or CPFF) in an explanatory memo. The CAO could delegate authority to supervising Contracting Officers or other acquisition officials to approve these exceptions. To ensure that the benefits of Fixed-Price results-based contracting reach all levels of awardees, this requirement should become a flow-down clause in all prime awards. This will require additional training for the prime award recipient’s own overseers.

Recommendation 2. Establishing a dedicated team within USAID’s OAA, or the equivalent office in the next administration, specialized in the design and implementation of FFPs and FAAs.

To facilitate a smooth transition, USAID should create a dedicated team within OAA specialized in designing and implementing FFPs and FAAs using existing funds and personnel. This team would have expertise in the choices involved in designing Fixed-Price agreements: results metrics and targets, pricing for results, and optimizing payment structures to incentivize results.

They would have the mandate and resources necessary to support expanding the use of and the amount of funding flowing through high-quality FFPs and FAAs. They would jumpstart the process and support Acquisition and Program Officers by developing guidelines and procedures for Fixed-Price models (along with sector-specific recommendations), overseeing their design and implementation, and evaluating effectiveness. As USAID will learn along the way about how to best implement the Fixed-Price model across sectors, this team will also need to capture lessons learned from the initial experiences to lower the costs and increase the confidence of Acquisition and Assistance Officers using this model going forward. 

Recommendation 3. Launching a robust change management program to support USAID acquisition, assistance, program, and legislative and public affairs staff in making the shift to Fixed-Price grant and contract management. 

Successfully embedding Fixed-Price as the default option will entail a culture shift within USAID, requiring a multi-faceted approach. This will include the retraining of Contracts and Agreements Officers and their Representatives – who have internalized a culture of administrative compliance and been evaluated primarily on their extensive administrative oversight skills – and promoting a reorganization of the culture of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and Collaboration, Learning and Adaptation (CLA) to prioritize results over reporting. Setting contracting and agreements staff up for success requires capacity building in the form of training, toolkits, and guidelines on how to implement Fixed-Price models across USAID’s diverse sectors. Other USG agencies make greater use of Fixed-Price awards, and alternative training for both government and prime contractor overseers exists. OAA’s Professional Development and Training unit should adapt existing training from these other agencies, specifically ensuring it addresses how to align payments with results.

Furthermore, the broader change management program should seek to create the appropriate internal incentive structure at the Agency for Acquisition and Assistance staff, motivating and engaging them in this significant restructuring of foreign aid. To succeed at this, the mandate for change needs to come from the top, reassuring staff that the Fixed-Price model does not expose individuals, the Agency, or implementers to undue legal or financial liability.

While this change will not require a Congressional Notification, the Office of Legislative & Public Affairs (LPA) should join this effort early on, including as part of the design working group. LPA would also play a guiding role in both internal and external communications, especially in educating members of Congress and their staffs on the importance and value of this change to improve USAID effectiveness and return on taxpayer dollars. Entrenched players with significant investments in existing CPFF systems will resist this effort, including with political lobbying; LPA will play an important role informing Congress and the public.

Conclusion

USAID’s current reliance on CPFF has proven inadequate in driving impact and must evolve to meet the challenges of global development and Great Power Competition. To create more agile, efficient, and results-driven foreign assistance, the Agency should adopt Fixed-Price as the de facto default model for disbursing funds, prioritizing results over administrative reporting. By embracing a results-based model, USAID will enhance its ability to respond to global shocks and geopolitical shifts, better positioning the U.S. to maintain strategic influence and achieve its foreign policy and development objectives while fostering greater accountability and effectiveness in its foreign aid programs. Implementing these changes will require a robust change management program, which would include creating a dedicated team within OAA, retraining staff and creating incentives for them to take on the change, ongoing guidance throughout the award process, and education and communication with Congress, implementing partners, and the public. This transformation is essential to ensure that U.S. foreign aid continues to play a critical role in advancing national interests and addressing global development challenges.

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.

State, local, tribal, and territorial governments along with Critical Infrastructure Owners (SLTT/CIs) face escalating cyber threats but struggle with limited cybersecurity staff and complex technology management. Relying heavily on private-sector support, they are hindered by the private sector’s lack of deep understanding of SLTT/CI operational environments. This gap leaves SLTT/CIs vulnerable and underprepared for emerging threats all while these practitioners on the private sector side end up underleveraged.

To address this, CISA should expand the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) to allow broader participation by practitioners in the private sector who serve public sector clients, regardless of the size or current affiliation of their company, provided they can pass a background check, verify their employment, and demonstrate their role in supporting SLTT governments or critical infrastructure sectors. 

Challenge and Opportunity

State, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments face a significant increase in cyber threats, with incidents like remote access trojans and complex malware attacks rising sharply in 2023. These trends indicate not only a rise in the number of attacks but also an increase in their sophistication, requiring SLTTs to contend with a diverse and evolving array of cyber threats.The 2022 Nationwide Cybersecurity Review (NCSR) found that most SLTTs have not yet achieved the cybersecurity maturity needed to effectively defend against these sophisticated attacks, largely due to limited resources and personnel shortages. Smaller municipalities, especially in rural areas, are particularly impacted, with many unable to implement or maintain the range of tools required for comprehensive security. As a result, SLTTs remain vulnerable, and critical public infrastructure risks being compromised. This urgent situation presents an opportunity for CISA to strengthen regional cybersecurity efforts through enhanced public-private collaboration, empowering SLTTs to build resilience and raise baseline cybersecurity standards.

Average cyber maturity scores for the State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial peer groups are at the minimum required level or below. Source: Center for Internet Security

Furthermore, effective cybersecurity requires managing a complex array of tools and technologies. Many SLTT organizations, particularly those in critical infrastructure sectors, need to deploy and manage dozens of cybersecurity tools, including asset management systems, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, endpoint protection platforms, and data encryption tools, to safeguard their operations.

An example of the immense array of different combinations of cybersecurity tools that could comprise a full suite necessary to implement baseline cybersecurity controls. Source: The Software Analyst Newsletter

The ability of SLTTs to implement these tools is severely hampered by two critical issues: insufficient funding and a shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals to operate such a large volume of tools that require tuning and configuration. Budget constraints mean that many SLTT organizations are forced to make difficult decisions about which tools to prioritize, and the shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals further limits their ability to operate them. The Deloitte-NASCIO Cybersecurity Study highlights how state Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are increasingly turning to the private sector to fill gaps in their workforce, procuring staff-augmentation resources to support security control deployment, management of Security Operations Centers (SOCs), and incident response services.

The Top 5 Security Concerns for Nationwide Cybersecurity Review Respondents include lack of sufficient funding and inadequate availability of cybersecurity professionals. Source: Centers for Internet Security.

What Strong Regionalized Communities Would Achieve

This reliance on private-sector expertise presents a unique opportunity for federal policymakers to foster stronger public-private partnerships. However,  currently, JCDC membership entry requirements are vague and appear to favor more established companies, limiting participation from many professionals who are actively engaged in this mission. 

The JCDC is led by CISA’s Stakeholder Engagement Division (SED) which also serves as the agency’s hub for the shared stakeholder information that unifies CISA’s approach to whole-of-nation operational collaboration. One of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative’s (JCDC) main goals is to “organize and support efforts that strengthen the foundational cybersecurity posture of critical infrastructure entities,” ensuring they are better equipped to defend against increasingly sophisticated threats. 

Given the escalating cybersecurity challenges, there is a significant opportunity for CISA to enhance localized collaboration between the public and  private sectors in the form of improving the quality of service delivery that personnel at managed service providers and software companies can provide. This helps SLTTs/CIs close the workforce gap, allows vendors to create new services focused on SLTT/CIs consultative needs, and boosts a talent market that incentivizes companies to hire more technologists fluent in the “business” needs of SLTTs/CIs. 

Incentivizing the Private Sector to Participate

With intense competition for market share in cybersecurity, vendors will need to provide good service and successful outcomes in order to retain and grow their portfolio of business. They  will have to compete on their ability to deliver better, more tailored service to SLTTs/CIs and pursue talent that is more fluent in government operations, which incentivizes candidates to build great reputations amongst SLTT/CI customers.

Plan of Action

Recommendation 1. Community Platform

To accelerate the progress of CISA’s mission to improve the cyber baseline for SLTT/CIs, the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) should expand into a regional framework aligned with CISA’s 10 regional offices to support increasing participation. The new, regionalized JCDC should facilitate membership for all practitioners that support the cyber defense of SLTT/CIs, regardless of whether they are employed by a private or public sector entity. With a more complete community, CISA will be able to direct focused, custom implementation strategies that require deep public-private collaboration.

Participants from relevant sectors should be able to join the regional JCDC after passing background checks, employment verification, and, where necessary, verification that the employer is involved in security control implementation for at least one eligible regional client. This approach allows the program to scale rapidly and ensures fairness across organizations of all sizes. Private sector representatives, such as solutions engineers and technical account managers, will be granted conditional membership to the JCDC, with need-to-know access to its online resources. The program will emphasize the development of collaborative security control implementation strategies centered around the client, where CISA coordinates the implementation functions between public and private sector staff, as well as between cybersecurity vendors and MSPs that serve each SLTT/CI entity.

Recommendation 2. Online Training Platform

Currently, CISA provides a multitude of training offerings both online and in-person, most of which are only accessible by government employees. Expanding CISA’s training offerings to include programs that teach practitioners at MSPs and Software Companies how to become fluent in the operation of government is essential for raising the cybersecurity baseline across various National Cybersecurity Review (NCSR) areas with which SLTTs currently struggle. The training platform should be a flexible, learn-at-your-own-pace virtual learning platform, and CISA is encouraged to develop on existing platforms with existing user bases, such as Salesforce’s Trailhead. Modules should enable students around specific challenges tailored to the SLTT/CI operating environment, such as applying patches to workstations that belong to a Police or Fire Department, where the availability of critical systems is essential, and downtime could mean lives. 

The platform should offer a gamified learning experience, where participants can earn badges and certificates as they progress through different learning paths. These badges and certificates will serve as a way for companies and SLTT/CIs to understand which individuals are investing the most time learning and delivering the best service. Each badge will correspond to specific skills or competencies, allowing participants to build a portfolio of recognized achievements. This approach has already proven effective, as seen in the use of Salesforce’s Trailhead by other organizations like the Center for Internet Security (CIS), which offers an introductory course on CIS Controls v8 through the platform. 

The benefits of this training platform are multifaceted. First, it provides a structured and scalable way to upskill a large number of cybersecurity professionals across the country with a focus on tailored implementation of cybersecurity controls for SLTT/CIs. Second, the badge system incentivizes ongoing participation, ensuring that cybersecurity professionals can continue to maintain their reputation if they choose to move jobs between companies or between the public and private sectors. Third, the platform fosters a sense of community and collaboration around the client, allowing CISA to understand the specific individuals supporting each SLTT/CI organization, in the case that it needs to mobilize a team with both security knowledge and government operations knowledge around an incident response scenario.

Recommendation 3. A “Smart Rolodex”

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system should be integrated within CISA’s Office of Stakeholder Engagement to manage the community of cyber defenders more effectively and streamline incident response efforts. The CRM will maintain a singular database of regionalized JCDC members, their current company, their expertise, and their roles within critical infrastructure sectors. This system will act as a “smart Rolodex,” enabling CISA to quickly identify and coordinate with the most suitable experts during incidents, ensuring a swift and effective response. The recent recommendations by a CISA panel underscore the importance of this approach, emphasizing that a well-organized and accessible database is crucial for deploying the right resources in real-time and enhancing the overall effectiveness of the JCDC.

Recommendation 4. Establishment of Merit-Based Recognition Programs

Finally, to foster a sense of mission and camaraderie among JCDC participants, recognition programs should be introduced to increase morale and highlight above-and-beyond contributions to national cybersecurity efforts. Digital badges, emblematic patches, “CISA Swag” or challenge coins will be awarded as symbols of achievement within the JCDC, boosting morale and practitioner commitment to the greater mission. These programs will also enhance the appeal of cybersecurity careers, elevating those involved with the JCDC, and encouraging increased participation and retention within the JCDC initiative.

Cost Analysis

Estimated Costs and Justification

The proposed regional JCDC program requires procuring ~100,000 licenses for a digital communication platform (Based on Slack) across all of its regions and 500 licenses for a popular Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform(Based on Salesforce) for its Office of Stakeholder Engagement to be able to access records. The estimated annual costs are as follows:

Digital Communication Platform Licenses:

• Standard Plan: $8,700,000 per year (100,000 users at $7.25 per month).

CRM Platform Licenses:

• Professional Tier: $450,000 per year (500 users at $75 per month).

Total Estimated Cost:

• Lower Tier Option (Standard Communication + Professional CRM): $9,150,000 per year.

Buffer for Operational Costs: To ensure the program’s success, a buffer of approximately 15% should be added to cover additional operational expenses, unforeseen costs, and any necessary uplifts or expansions in features or seats. This does not take into consideration volume discounts that CISA would normally expect when purchasing through a reseller such as Carahsoft or CDW.

Cost Justification: Although the initial investment is significant, the potential savings from avoiding cyber incidents should far outweigh these costs. Considering that the average cost of a data breach in the U.S. is approximately $9.48 million, preventing even a few such incidents through this program could easily justify the expenditure. 

Conclusion

The cybersecurity challenges faced by State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) governments and critical infrastructure sectors are becoming increasingly complex and urgent. As cyber threats continue to evolve, it is clear that the existing defenses are insufficient to protect our nation’s most vital services. The proposed expansion of the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) to allow broader participation by practitioners in the private sector who serve public sector clients, regardless of the size or current affiliation of their company presents a crucial opportunity to enhance collaboration, particularly among SLTTs, and to bolster the overall cybersecurity baseline.These efforts align closely with CISA’s strategic goals of enhancing public-private partnerships, improving the cybersecurity baseline, and fostering a skilled cybersecurity workforce. By taking decisive action now, we can create a more resilient and secure nation, ensuring that our critical infrastructure remains protected against the ever-growing array of cyber threats.

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.

Congress should create a new Science and Technology (S&T) Hub within the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team to support an understaffed and overwhelmed Congress in addressing pressing science and technology policy questions. A new hub would connect Congress with technical experts and maintain a repository of research and information as well as translate this material to members and staff. There is already momentum building in Congress with several recent reforms to strengthen capacity, and the reversal of the Chevron doctrine infuses the issue with a new sense of urgency. The time is now for Congress to invest in itself. 

Challenge and Opportunity

Congress does not have the tools it needs to contend with pressing scientific and technical questions. In the last few decades, Congress grappled with increasingly complex science and technology policy questions, such as social media regulation, artificial intelligence, and climate change. At the same time, its staff capacity has diminished; between 1994 to 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS), key congressional support agencies, lost about a third of their employees. Staff on key science related committees like the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology fell by nearly half.

As a result, members frequently lack the resources they need to understand science and technology. “[T]hey will resort to Google searches, reading Wikipedia, news articles, and yes, even social media reports. Then they will make a flurry of cold calls and e-mails to whichever expert they can get on the phone,” one former science staffer noted. “You’d be surprised how much time I spend explaining to my colleagues that the chief dangers of AI will not come from evil robots with red lasers coming out of their eyes,” representative Jay Obernolte (R-CA), who holds a master’s degree in AI, told  The New York Times. And AI is just one example of a pressing science need Congress must handle, but does not have the tools to grapple with.

Moreover, reliance on external information can intensify polarization, because each side depends on a different set of facts and it is harder to find common ground. Without high-quality, nonpartisan science and technology resources, billions of dollars in funding may be allocated to technologies that do not work or policy solutions at odds with the latest science. 

Additional science support could help Congress navigate complex policy questions related to emerging research,  understand science and technologies’ impacts on legislative issues, and grapple with the public benefits or negative consequences of various science and technology issues. 

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo instills a new sense of urgency. The reversal of the decades old “Chevron deference,” which directed courts to defer to agency interpretations in instances where statutes were unclear or silent, means Congress will now have to legislate with more specificity. To do so, it will need the best possible experts and technical guidance. 

There is momentum building for Congress to invest in itself. For the past several years, the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress (which became a permanent subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration) advocated for increases to staff pay and resources to improve recruitment and retention. Additionally, the GAO Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team has expanded to meet the moment. From 2019 to 2022, STAA’s staff grew from 49 to 129 and produced 46 technology assessments and short-form explainers. These investments are promising but not sufficient. Congress can draw on this energy and the urgency of a post-Chevron environment to invest in a Science and Technology Hub. 

Plan of Action

Congress should create a new Science and Technology Hub in GAO STAA

Congress should create a Science and Technology Hub within the GAO’s STAA. While most of the STAA’s current work responds to specific requests from members, a new hub within the STAA would build out more proactive and exploratory work by 1) brokering long-term relationships between experts and lawmakers and 2) translating research for Congress. The new hub would maintain relationships with rank-and-file members, not just committees or leadership. The hub could start by advising Congress on emerging issues where the partisan battle lines have not been drawn, such as AI, and over time it will build institutional trust and advise on more partisan issues. 

Research shows that both parties respect and use congressional support agencies, such as GAO, so they are a good place to house the necessary expertise. Housing the new hub within STAA would also build on the existing resources and support STAA already provides and capitalizes on the recent push to expand this team. The Hub could have a small staff of approximately 100 employees. The success of recently created small offices such as the Office of Whistleblower Ombuds proves that a modest staff can be effective. In a post-Chevron world, this hub could also play an important role liaising with federal agencies about how different statutory formulations will change implementation of science related legislation and helping members and staff understand the ins and outs of the passage to implementation process. 

The Hub should connect Congress with a wider range of subject matter experts.

Studies show that researcher-policymaker interactions are most effective when they are long-term working relationships rather than ad hoc interactions. The hub could set up advisory councils of experts to guide Congress on different key areas. Though ad hoc groups of experts have advised Congress over the years, Congress does not have institutionalized avenues for soliciting information. The hub’s nonpartisan staff should also screen for potential conflicts of interest. As a starting point, these advisory councils would support committee and caucus staff as they learn about emerging issues, and over time it could build more capacity to manage requests from individual member officers. Agencies like the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine already employ the advisory council model; however, they do not serve Congress exclusively nor do they meet staff needs for quick turnaround or consultative support. The advisory councils would build on the advisory council model of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an agency that advised Congress on science between the 1970s and 1990s. The new hub could take proactive steps to center representation in its advisory councils, learning from the example of the United Kingdom Parliament’s Knowledge Exchange Unit and its efforts to increase the number of women and people of color Parliament hears from. 

The Hub should help compile and translate information for Congress.

The hub could maintain a one-stop shop to help Congress find and understand data and research on different policy-relevant topics.  The hub could maintain this repository and draw on it to distill large amounts of information into memos that members could digest. It could also hold regular briefings for members and staff on emerging issues. Over time, the Hub could build out a “living evidence” approach in which a body of research is maintained and updated with the best possible evidence at a regular cadence. Such a resource would help counteract the effects of understaffing and staff turnover and provide critical assistance in legislating and oversight, particularly important in a post-Chevron world. 

Conclusion

Taking straightforward steps like creating an S&T hub, which brokers relationships between Congress and experts and houses a repository of research on different policy topics, could help Congress to understand and stay up-to-date on urgent science issues in order to ensure more effective decision making in the public interest.

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.

Founded in 1977, the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) program is intended to be “the Federal Government’s premier leadership development program for advanced degree holders across all academic disciplines” with a mission “to recruit and develop a cadre of future government leaders from all segments of society.” The challenges facing our country require a robust pipeline of talented and representative rising leaders across federal agencies. The PMF program has historically been a leading source of such talent. 

The next Administration should leverage this storied program to reinvigorate recruitment for a small, highly-skilled management corps of upwardly-mobile public servants and ensure that the PMF program retains its role as the government’s premier pipeline for early-career talent. It should do so by committing to placing all PMF Finalists in federal jobs (rather than only half, as has been common in recent years), creating new incentives for agencies to engage, and enhancing user experience for all PMF stakeholders. 

Challenge and Opportunity

Bearing the Presidential Seal, the Presidential Management Fellows (PMF) Program is the Federal Government’s premier leadership development program for advanced degree holders across all academic disciplines. Appropriately for a program created in the President’s name, the application process for the PMF program is rigorous and competitive. Following a resume and transcript review, two assessments, and a structured interview, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) selects and announces PMF Finalists. 

Selection as a Finalist is only the first step in a PMF applicant’s journey to a federal position. After they are announced, PMF Finalists have 12 months to find an agency posting by completing a second round of applications to specific positions that agencies have designated as eligible for PMFs. OPM reports that “over the past ten years, on average, 50% of Finalists obtain appointments as Fellows.” Most Finalists who are placed are not appointed until late in the eligibility period: halfway through the 2024 eligibility window, only 85 of 825 finalists (10%) had been appointed to positions in agencies.

For applicants and universities, this reality can be dispiriting and damage the reputation of the program, especially for those not placed. The yearlong waiting period ending without a job offer for about half of Finalists belies the magnitude of the accomplishment of rising to the top of such a competitive pool of candidates eager to serve their country. Additionally, Finalists who are not placed in a timely manner will be likelier to pursue job opportunities outside of federal service.  At a moment when the federal government is facing an extraordinary talent crisis with an aging workforce and large-scale retirements, the PMF program must better serve its purpose as a trusted source of high-level, early-career talent.

zThe current program design also affects the experience of agency leaders—such as hiring managers and Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs)—as they consider hiring PMFs. When agencies hire a PMF for a 2-year placement, they cover the candidate’s salary plus an $8,000 fee to OPM’s PMF program office to support its operations. Agencies consider hiring PMF Finalists with the knowledge that the PMF has the option to complete a 6-month rotational assignment outside of their hiring unit. These factors may create the impression that hiring a PMF is “costlier” than other staffing options.

Despite these challenges, the reasons for agencies to invest in the PMF program remain numerous:

• It remains intensely competitive and desirable for applicants; in 2024, the program had an 11.5% acceptance rate. 
• PMFs are high quality hires: 87% of PMFs took a permanent or term position in government following the completion of their two-year fellowship. 
• The PMF alumni network includes celebrated career and political leaders across government. 
• The PMF program is a leading source of general management talent, with strong brand equity to reach this population.

The PMF is still correctly understood as the government’s premier onramp program for early career managerial talent. With some thoughtful realignment, it can sustain and strengthen this role and improve experience for all its core stakeholders.  

Plan of Action

The next Administration should take a direct hand in supporting the PMF Program. As the President’s appointee overseeing the program, the OPM Director should begin by publicly setting an ambitious placement percentage goal and then driving the below reforms to advance that goal. 

Recommendation 1. Increase the Finalist placement rate by reducing the Finalist pool.

The status quo reveals misalignment between the pool of PMF Finalists and demand for PMFs across government. This may be in part due to the scale of demand, but is also a consequence of PMF candidates and finalists with ever-broader skill sets, which makes placement more challenging and complex. Along with the 50% placement rates, the existing imbalance between finalists and placements is reflected in the decision to contract the finalist pool from 1100 in 2022 to 850 in 2023 and 825 in 2024. The next Administration should adjust the size of the Finalist pool further to ensure a near-100% placement rate and double down on its focus on general managerial talent to simplify disciplinary matching. Initially, this might mean shrinking the pool from the 825 advanced in 2024 to 500 or even fewer. 

The core principle is simple: PMF Finalists should be a valuable resource for which agencies compete. There should be (modestly) fewer Finalists than realistic agency demand, not more. Critically, this change would not aim to reduce the number of PMFs serving in government. Rather, it seeks to sustain the current numbers while dramatically reducing the number of Finalists not placed and creating a healthier set of incentives for all parties.

When the program can reliably boast high placement rates, then the Federal government can strategize on ways to meaningfully increase the pool of Fellows and use the program to zero in on priority hard-to-hire disciplines outside of general managerial talent.

Recommendation 2. Attach a financial incentive to hiring and retaining a PMF while improving accountability. 

To underscore the singular value of PMFs and their role in the hiring ecosystem, the next Administration should attach a financial incentive to hiring a PMF. 

Because of the $8,000 placement fee, PMFs are seen as a costlier route than other sources of talent. A financial incentive to hire PMFs would reverse this dynamic. The next Administration might implement a large incentive of $50,000 per Fellow, half of which would be granted when a Fellow is placed and the other half to be granted when the Fellow accepts a permanent full-time job offer in the Federal government. This split payment would signal an investment in Fellows as the future leaders of the federal government. 

Assuming an initial cohort of 400 placed Fellows at $50,000 each, OPM would require $20 million plus operating costs for the PMF program office. To secure funds, the Administration could seek appropriations, repurpose funds through normal budget channels, or pursue an agency pass-the-hat model like the financing of the Federal Executive Board and Hiring Experience program offices. 

To parallel this incentive, the Administration should also implement accountability measures to ensure agencies more accurately project their PMF needs by assigning a cost to failing to place some minimum proportion–perhaps 70%–of the Finalists projected in a given cycle. This would avoid too many unplaced Finalists. Agencies that fail to meet the threshold should have reduced or delayed access to the PMF pool in subsequent years. 

Recommendation 3. Build a Stronger Support Ecosystem 

In support of these implementation changes, the next Administration should pursue a series of actions to elevate the program and strengthen the PMF ecosystem. 

Even if the Administration pursues the above recommendations, some Finalists would remain unpaired. The PMF program office should embrace the role of a talent concierge for a smaller, more manageably-sized cohort of yet-unpaired Finalists, leveraging relationships across the government, including with PMF Alumni and the Presidential Management Alumni Association (PMAA) and OPM’s position as the government’s strategic talent lead to encourage agencies to consider specific PMF Finalists in a bespoke way. The Federal government should also consider ways to privilege applications from unplaced Finalists who meet criteria for a specific posting.

To strengthen key PMF partnerships in agencies, the Administration should elevate the role of PMF Coordinators beyond “other duties as assigned” to a GS-14 “PMF Director.” With new incentives to encourage placement and consistent strategic orientation from agency partners, agencies will be in a better position to project their placement needs by volume and role and hire PMF Finalists who meet them. PMF Coordinators would have explicit performance measures that reflect ownership over the success of the program.

The Administration must commit and sustain senior-level engagement—in the White House and at the senior levels of OMB, OPM, and in senior agency roles including Deputy Secretaries, Assistant Secretaries for Management, and Chief Human Capital Officers—to drive forward these changes. It must seize key leverage points throughout the budget and strategic management cycle, including OPM’s Human Capital Operating Plan process, OMB’s Strategic Reviews process, and the Cross-Agency Priority Goal setting rhythms. And it must sustain focus, recognizing that these new design elements may not succeed in their first cycle, and should provide support for experimentation and innovation.

Conclusion

For decades, the PMF program has consistently delivered top-tier talent to the federal government. However, the past few years have revealed a need for reform to improve the experience of PMF hopefuls and the agencies that will undoubtedly benefit from their skills. With a smaller Finalist pool, healthier incentives, and a more supportive ecosystem, agencies would compete for a subsidized pool of high-quality talent available to them at lower cost than alternative route, and Fellows who clear the significant barrier of the rigorous selection process would have far stronger assurance of a placement. If these reforms are successfully implemented, esteem for the government’s premier onramp for rising managerial talent will rise, contributing to the impression that the Federal government is a leading and prestigious employer of our nation’s rising leaders. 

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.

The federal government is dramatically inefficient, duplicative, wasteful, and costly in executing the common services required to operate. However, the new Administration has an opportunity to transform government operations to save money, improve customer experience, be more efficient and effective, consolidate, reduce the number of technology platforms across government, and have significantly improved decision-making power. This should be accomplished by adopting and transforming to a government-wide shared service business model involving the collective efforts of Congress, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), General Services Administration (GSA), and oversight agencies, and be supported by the President Management Agenda (PMA). In fact, this is a real opportunity for the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to realize a true systemic transformation to a better and more streamlined government. 

Challenge and Opportunity

The federal government is the largest employer in the world with many disparate mission-centric functions to serve the American people. To execute mission objectives, varied mission support functions are necessary, yet costly with many disconnected and inefficient layers added over many years. For example, a hiring action costs over $10,000 in the federal government vs. $4,000 in the private sector, and transactions such as paying an invoice cost hundreds of dollars compared to $1–2 in other sectors. Many support functions—such as travel management, FOIA management, background investigations, human resources, financial management, facilities management, and more — are equally costly and inefficient.

While these functions are critical to helping government programs achieve their mission, over many years they have grown costly and inefficient through high staffing ratios, duplication of technology platforms, disparate data systems, lack of standardization, and poor modernization. Congress focuses on individual agencies independently and not holistically on the opportunity for government-wide efficiency. Because improving operations has no mandate and GSA serves only in a coordinating role, agencies are free to approach operations any way they wish, resulting in a lack of standardization and the interoperability of systems. Many systems are still operating on extremely old software code, and the Administration and Congress lack government-wide data capacity to have the facts they need to govern. With a burdening national debt, we need to streamline government. To illustrate this opportunity, the federal government operates hundreds of human resources functions, whereas Walmart, the second largest U.S. employer with two million employees, operates just two, one for American and one for Europe.  

There are several small examples in government demonstrating the ability to realize large cost savings and improved services. When the NASA shared services operations were established, it saved over $200 million through consolidation in their first several years. The consolidation of federal payroll services from 24 to 4 functions saved over $3.2 billion. The Technology CEO Council report “The Government We Need” estimated savings of over $1 trillion by the federal government moving to shared services. Commercial sector entities such as Johnson & Johnson saved approximately $2 billion in just two years. 

Plan of Action

Over 85% of Fortune 500 companies and growing numbers of public sector governments around the world have committed to shared services as a mainstream business model. Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and others have realized significant reduction in cost and improved delivery. While shared services have been attempted in many forms since the 1980s in the federal government, implementation has been inconsistent and incomplete due to Congressional and Administration inattention.  As part of past PMAs, a GSA Office of Shared Solutions and Performance (OSSPI) was established, along with a Technology Management Fund (TMF) to support modernization, yet little action has been taken to set goals and achieve results. Most government shared service centers operate on antiquated technology platforms, are at high risk of failure, and are in critical need of modernization. 

Immediate legislative and executive action are necessary to enable robust, cross-government benefits. Transforming government into an efficient and effective operation will take time, measurement, and accountability. It’s important that this be done correctly and begin by building the requisite capacity to realize success and regularly report to the Administration and Congress. To ensure success, the following initial actions should be taken:

1. Congress should make the consolidation of common service operating and business models statutorily mandatory and provide resources for GSA to conduct the appropriate analysis, design, and transformation to consolidated common services.
2. The Administration should install the leadership with the responsibility, authority, and accountability for transforming government operations. This would be a Senate-confirmed Commissioner of Government Operations at GSA directing operations with policy authority resting with the OPM Deputy Director for Management (DDM).  
3. The Administration should enhance GSA/OSSPI to create an effective governance structure and increase their capacity and role. Governance would be structured through the DDM, the GSA Commissioner for government operations, the establishment of a Shared Services Advisory Board (SSAB) made up of agency Deputy Secretaries, and the inclusion of the existing chief operating councils. OSSPI would take on the lead role for transformation and operations oversight and have the staff resources and authority necessary to execute.
4. Congress should direct and the Administration should conduct a deep analysis and design the most effective operating and business models. It is necessary to identify current resources, cost, and performance as well as benchmarks against other entities. This would be led by GSA and conducted by an independent, non-conflicted entity. Based on this analysis GSA would design optimized models, provide a clear business case, and prepare a transformation/modernization plan. The Commission would then approve and recommend further Congressional and/or executive action required to implement the transformation. In parallel, GSA would develop selected government staff and managers to participate in the analysis and transformation process.
5. The Administration, through OMB and GSA, should implement the multi–year transformation and modernization effort and implement, measure, report results, and realize the requisite Return on Investment (ROI). 

These initial activities should cost approximately $80 million and be cost-neutral by allocating funding from existing redundant operational and modernization efforts. This would fund cross-government analysis, GSA operations, government staff training, and transformation planning with an ROI to the taxpayer. Impacted federal staff would be retrained in new associated shared services roles and/or other mission support functions where needed.

Conclusion

The time to act boldly is now. The Administration needs to immediately begin reducing costs and improving services to taxpayers and government programs through the implementation of a shared services business model with strong leadership, a proven approach, and accountability to demonstrate results. Trillions of dollars fed back into supporting governments financial needs are necessary and attainable.

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.

A federal agency takes over 100 days on average to hire a new employee — with significantly longer time frames for some positions — compared to 36 days in the private sector. Factors contributing to extended timelines for federal hiring include (1) difficulties in quickly aligning position descriptions with workforce needs, and (2) opaque and poor processes for screening applicants.

Fortunately, federal hiring managers and HR staffing specialists already have many tools at their disposal to accelerate the hiring process and improve quality outcomes – to achieve better hires faster. Inside and outside their organizations, agencies are already starting to share position descriptions, job opportunity announcements (JOAs), assessment tools, and certificates of eligibles from which they can select candidates. However, these efforts are largely piecemeal and dependent on individual initiative, not a coordinated approach that can overcome the pervasive federal hiring challenges.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council should integrate these tools into a technology platform that makes it easy to access and implement effective hiring practices. Such a platform would alleviate unnecessary burdens on federal hiring staff, transform the speed and quality of federal hiring, and bring trust back into the federal hiring system.

Challenge and Opportunity 

This memo focuses on opportunities to improve two stages in the federal hiring process: (1) developing and posting a position description (PD), and (2) conducting a hiring assessment.

Position Descriptions. Though many agencies require managers to review and revise PDs annually, during performance review time, this requirement often goes unheeded. Furthermore, volatile occupations for which job skills change rapidly – think IT or scientific disciplines with frequent changes to how they practice (e.g., meteorology) or new technologies that upend how analytical skills (e.g., data analytics) are practiced – can result in yet more changes to job skills and competencies embedded in PDs.

When a hiring manager has an open position, a current PD for that job is necessary to proceed with the Job Opportunity Announcement (JOA)/posting. When the PD is not current, the hiring manager must work with an HR staffing specialist to determine the necessary revisions. If the revisions are significant, an agency classification specialist is engaged. The specialist conducts interviews with hiring managers and subject-matter experts and/or performs deeper desk audits, job task analyses, or other evaluations to determine the additional or changed job duties. Because classifiers may apply standards in different ways and rate the complexity of a position differently, a hiring manager can rarely predict how long the revision process will take or what the outcome will be. All this delays and complicates the rest of the hiring process.

Hiring Assessments. Despite a 2020 Executive Order and other directives requiring agencies to engage in skills-based hiring, agencies too often still use applicant self-certification on job skills as a primary screening method. This frequently results in certification lists of candidates who do not meet the qualifications to do the job in the eyes of hiring managers. Indeed, a federal hiring manager cannot find a qualified candidate from a certified list approximately 50% of the time when only a self-assessment questionnaire is used for screening. There are alternatives to self-certification, such as writing samples, multiple-choice questions, exercises that test for particular problem-solving or decision-making skills, and simulated job tryouts. Yet hiring managers and even some HR staffing specialists often don’t understand how assessment specialists decide what methods are best for which positions – or even what assessment options exist.

Both of these stages involve a foundation of occupation- and grade-level competencies – that is, the knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviors, and experiences it takes to do the job. When a classifier recommends PD updates, they apply pre-set classification standards comprising job duties for each position or grade. These job duties are built in turn around competencies. Similarly, an assessment specialist considers competencies when deciding how to evaluate a candidate for a job.

Each agency – and sometimes sub-agency unit – has its own authority to determine job competencies. This has caused different competency analyses, PDs, and assessment methods across agencies to proliferate. Though the job of a marine biologist, Grade 9, at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is unlikely to be considerably different from the job of a marine biologist, Grade 9 at the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the respective competencies associated with the two positions are unlikely to be aligned. Competency diffusion across agencies is costly, time-consuming, and duplicative. 

Plan of Action

An Intergovernmental Platform for Competencies, PDs, Classifications, and Assessment Tools to Accelerate and Improve Hiring

To address the challenges outlined above, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) should create a web platform that makes it easy for federal agencies to align and exchange competencies, position descriptions, and assessment strategies for common occupations. This platform would help federal hiring managers and staffing specialists quickly compile a unified package that they can use from PD development up to candidate selection when hiring for occupations included on the platform.

To build this platform, the next administration should:

• Invest in creating Position Description libraries starting with the unitary agencies (e.g. the Environmental Protection Agency) then broadening out to the larger, disaggregated ones (e.g., the Department of Health and Human Services).  Each agency should assign individuals responsible for keeping PDs in the libraries current at those agencies. Agencies and OPM would look for opportunities to merge common PDs. OPM would then aggregate these libraries into a “master” PD library for use within and across agencies. OPM should also share examples of best-in-class JOAs associated with each PD. This effort could be piloted with the most common occupations by agency.
  Adopt competency frameworks and assessment tools already developed by industry associations, professional societies and unions for their professions. These organizations have completed the job task analyses and have developed competency frameworks, definitions, and assessments for the occupations they cover. For example, IEEE has developed competency models and assessment instruments for electrical and computer engineering. Again, this effort could be piloted by starting with the most common occupations by agency, and the occupations for which external organizations have already developed effective competency frameworks and assessment tools.
• Create a clearinghouse for assessments at OPM indexed to each occupation associated in the PD Library. Assign responsibility to lead agencies for those occupations responsible for the PDs to keep the assessments current and/or test banks robust to meet the needs of the agencies. Expand USA Hire and funding to provide open access by agencies, hiring managers, HR professionals and program leaders.
• Standardize classification determinations for occupations/grade levels included in the master PD library. This will reduce interagency variation in classification changes by occupation and grade level, increase transparency for hiring managers, and reduce burden on staffing specialists and classifiers.
• Delegate authority to CHCOs to mandate use of shared, common PDs, assessments, competencies, and classification determinations. This means cleaning up the many regulatory mandates that do not already designate the agency-level CHCOs with this delegated authority. The workforce policy and oversight agencies (OPM, OMB, Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)) need to change the regulations, policies, and practices to reduce duplication, delegate decision making, and lower variation (For example, allow the classifiers and assessment professionals to default to external, standardized occupation and grade-level competencies instead of creating/re-creating them in each instance.)
• Share decision frameworks that determine assessment strategy/tool selection. Clear, public, transparent, and shared decision criteria for determining the best fit assessment strategy will help hiring managers and HR staffing specialists participate more effectively in executing assessments.
• Agree to and implement common data elements for interoperability. Many agencies will need to integrate this platform into their own talent acquisition systems such as ServiceNow, Monster, and USA Staffing. To be able to transfer data between them, the agencies will need to accelerate their work on common HR data elements in these areas of position descriptions, competencies, and assessments.

Data analytics from this platform and other HR talent acquisition systems will provide insights on the effectiveness of competency development, classification determinations, effectiveness of common PDs and joint JOAs, assessment quality, and effectiveness of shared certification of eligible lists. This will help HR leaders and program managers improve how agency staff are using common PDs, shared certs, classification consistency, assessment tool effectiveness, and other insights.

Finally, hiring managers, HR specialists, and applicants need to collaborate and share information better to implement any of these ideas well. Too often, siloed responsibilities and opaque specialization set back mutual accountability, effective communications, and trust.  These actions entail a significant cultural and behavior change on the part of hiring managers, HR specialists, Industrial/Organizational psychologists, classifiers, and leaders. OPM and the agencies need to support hiring managers and HR specialists in finding assessments, easing the processes that can support adoption of skills-based assessments, agreeing to common PDs, and accelerating an effective hiring process.

Conclusion

The Executive Order on skills-based hiring, recent training from OPM, OMB and the CHCO Council on the federal hiring experience, and potential legislative action (e.g. Chance to Compete Act) are drivers that can improve the hiring process. Though some agencies are using PD libraries, joint postings, and shared referral certificates to improve hiring, these are far from common practice. A common platform for competencies, classifications, PDs, JOAs, and assessment tools, will make it easier for HR specialists, hiring managers and others to adopt these actions – to make hiring better and faster.

Opportunities to move promising hiring practices to habit abound. Position management, predictive workforce planning, workload modeling, hiring flexibilities and authorities, engaging candidates before, during, and after the hiring process are just some of these. Making these practices everyday habits throughout agency regions, states and programs rather than the exception will improve hiring. Looking to the future, greater delegation of human capital authorities to agencies, streamlining the regulations that support merit systems principles, and stronger commitments to customer experience in hiring, will help remove systemic barriers to an effective customer-/and user-oriented federal hiring process.

Taking the above actions on a common platform for competency development, position descriptions, and assessments will make hiring faster and better. With some of these other actions, this can change the relationship of the federal workforce to their jobs and change how the American people feel about opportunities in their government.

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.

“The decisions that humans make can be extraordinarily costly. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were multi-trillion dollar decisions. If you can improve the accuracy of forecasting individual strategies by just a percentage point, that would be worth tens of billions of dollars.” – Jason Matheny, CEO, RAND Corporation

Predicting the future—a notoriously hard problem—is a core function of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format. We propose that ODNI leverage its earlier investments in crowd-forecasting research to enhance intelligence analysis and interagency coordination. Specifically, ODNI should develop a next-generation crowd-forecasting program that balances academic rigor with policy relevance. To do this, we propose partnering a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) with crowd forecasting experience with executive branch agencies to generate high-value forecasting questions and integrate targeted forecasts into existing briefing and decision-making processes. Crucially, end users (e.g. from the NSC, DoD, etc.) should be embedded in the question-generation process in order to ensure that the forecasts are policy-relevant. This approach has the potential to significantly enhance the quality and impact of intelligence analysis, leading to more robust and informed national security decisions.

Challenge & Opportunity 

ODNI is responsible for the daunting task of delivering insightful, actionable intelligence in a world of rapidly evolving threats and unprecedented complexity. Traditional analytical methods, while valuable, struggle to keep pace with the speed and intricacy of global events where dynamic reports are necessary. Crowd forecasting provides infrastructure for building shared understanding across the Intelligence Community (IC) with a very low barrier to entry. Through the process, each agency can share their assessments of likely outcomes and planned actions based on their intelligence, to be aggregated alongside other agencies. These techniques can serve as powerful tools for interagency coordination within the IC, quickly surfacing areas of consensus and disagreement. By building upon the foundation of existing Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) crowd forecasting research — including IARPA’s Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) tournament and Hybrid Forecasting Competition (HFC) — ODNI has within its reach significant low-hanging fruit for improving the quality of its intelligence analysis and the use of this analysis to inform decision-making.

Despite the IC’s significant investment in research demonstrating the potential of crowd forecasting, integrating these approaches into decision-making processes has proven difficult. The first-generation forecasting competitions showed significant returns from basic cognitive debiasing training, above and beyond the benefits of crowd forecast aggregation. Yet, attempts to incorporate forecasting training and probabilistic estimates into intelligence analysis have fallen flat due in large part to internal politics. Accordingly, the incentives within and among agencies must be considered in order for any forecasting program to deliver value. Importantly, any new crowd forecasting initiative should be explicitly rolled out as a complement, not a substitute, to traditional intelligence analysis. 

Plan of Action

The incoming administration should direct the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to resume its study and implementation of crowd forecasting methods for intelligence analysis. The following recommendations illustrate how this can be done effectively.

Recommendation 1. Develop a Next-Generation Crowd Forecasting Program

Direct a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) experienced with crowd forecasting methods, such as MITRE’s National Security Engineering Center (NSEC) or the RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI), to develop a next-generation pilot program. 

Prior IARPA studies of crowd-sourced intelligence were focused on the question: How accurate is the wisdom of the crowds on geopolitical questions? To answer this, the IARPA tournaments posed many forecasting questions, rapid-fire, over a relatively short period of time, and these questions were optimized for easy generation and resolution (i.e. straightforward data-driven questions) — at the expense of policy relevance. A next-generation forecasting program should build upon recent research on eliciting from experts the crucial questions that illuminate key uncertainties, point to important areas of disagreement, and estimate the impact of interventions under consideration.   

This program should:

1. Incorporate lessons learned from previous IARPA forecasting tournaments, including difficulties with getting buy-in from leadership to incentivize the participation of busy analysts and decision-makers at ODNI.
2. Develop a framework for generating questions that balance rigor, resolvability, and policy relevance.
3. Implement advanced aggregation and scoring methods, leveraging recent academic research and machine learning methods.

Recommendation 2. Embed the Decision-Maker in the Question Generation Process

Direct the FFRDC to work directly with one or more executive branch partners to embed end users in the process of eliciting policy-relevant forecasting questions. Potential executive branch partners could include the National Security Council, Department of Defense, Department of State, and Department of Homeland Security, among others.

A formal process for question generation and refinement should be established, which could include:

1. A structured methodology for transforming policy questions of interest into specific, quantifiable forecasting questions.
2. A review process to ensure that questions meet criteria for both forecasting suitability and policy relevance.
3. Mechanisms for rapid question development in response to emerging crises or sudden shifts.
4. Feedback mechanisms to refine and improve question quality over time, with a focus on policy relevance and decision-maker user experience.

Recommendation 3. Integrate Forecasts into Decision-Making Processes

Ensure that resulting forecasts are actively reviewed by decision-makers and integrated into existing intelligence and policy-making processes.

This could involve:

1. Incorporating forecast results into regular intelligence briefings, as a quantitative supplement to traditional qualitative assessments.
2. Developing visualizations/dashboards (Figure 1) to enable decision-makers to explore the reasoning, drivers of disagreement, unresolved uncertainties and changes in forecasts over time.
3. Organizing training sessions for senior leadership on how to interpret and use probabilistic forecasts in decision-making.
4. Establishing a simple, formal process by which policymakers can request forecasts on questions relevant to their work.
5. Creating a review process to assess how forecasts influenced decisions and their outcomes.
6. Using forecast as a tool for interagency coordination, to surface ideas and concerns that people may be hesitant to bring up in front of their superiors.

Figure 1. Example of prototype forecasting dashboards for end-users, highlighting key factors and showing trends in the aggregate forecast over time. (Source: Metaculus)

Conclusion 

ODNI’s mission to “deliver the most insightful intelligence possible” demands continuous innovation. The next-generation forecasting program outlined in this document is the natural next step in advancing the science of forecasting to serve the public interest. Crowd forecasting has proven itself as a generator of reliable predictions, more accurate than any individual forecaster. In an increasingly complex information environment, our intelligence community needs to use every tool at its disposal to identify and address its most pressing questions about the future. By establishing a transparent and rigorous crowd-forecasting process, ODNI can harness the collective wisdom of diverse experts and analysts and foster better interagency collaboration, strengthening our nation’s ability to anticipate and respond to emerging global challenges.

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.

This policy proposal was incubated at the Energy for Growth Hub and workshopped at FAS in May 2024. 

Increasingly, U.S. national security priorities depend heavily on bolstering the energy security of key allies, including developing and emerging economies. But U.S. capacity to deliver this investment is hamstrung by critical gaps in approach, capability, and tools. 

The new administration should work with Congress to give the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) the mandate and capacity to lead the U.S. interagency in implementing ‘Energy Security Compacts’, bilateral packages of investment and support for allies whose energy security is closely tied to core U.S. priorities. This would require minor amendments to the Millennium Challenge Act of 2003 to add a fourth business line to MCC’s Compact operations and grant the agency authority to coordinate an interagency working group contributing complementary tools and resources. 

This proposal presents an opportunity to deliver on global energy security, an issue with broad appeal and major national security benefits. This initiative would strengthen economic partnerships with allies overseas, who consistently rank energy security as a top priority; enhance U.S. influence and credibility in advancing global infrastructure; and expand growing markets for U.S. energy technology. This proposal is built on the foundations and successes of MCC, a signature achievement of the G.W. Bush administration, and is informed by lessons learned from other initiatives launched by previous presidents of both parties. 

Challenge and Opportunity 

More than ever before, U.S. national security depends on bolstering the energy security of key allies. Core examples include: 

• Securing physical energy assets: In countries under immediate or potential military threat, the U.S. may seek to secure vulnerable critical energy infrastructure, restore energy services to local populations, and build a foundation for long-term restoration.
  
• Countering dependence on geostrategic competitors: U.S. allies’ reliance on geostrategic competitors for energy supply or technologies poses short- and long-term threats to national security. Russia is building large nuclear reactors in major economies including Turkey, Egypt, India, and Bangladesh; has signed agreements to supply nuclear technology to at least 40 countries; and has agreed to provide training and technical assistance to at least another 14. Targeted U.S. support, investment, and commercial diplomacy can head off such dependence by expanding competition.
• Driving economic growth and enduring diplomatic relationships: Many developing and emerging economies face severe challenges in providing reliable, affordable electricity to their populations. This hampers basic livelihoods; constrains economic activity, job creation, and internet access; and contributes to deteriorating economic conditions driving instability and unrest. Of all the constraints analyses conducted by MCC since its creation, roughly half identified energy as a country’s top economic constraint. As emerging economies grow, their economic stability has an expanding influence over global economic performance and security. In coming decades, they will require vast increases in reliable energy to grow their manufacturing and service industries and employ rapidly growing populations. U.S. investment can provide the foundation for market-driven growth and enduring diplomatic partnerships.
• Diversifying supply chains: Many crucial technologies depend on minerals sourced from developing economies without reliable electricity. For example, Zambia accounts for about 4% of global copper supply and would like to scale up production. But recurring droughts have shuttered the country’s major hydropower plant and led to electricity outages, making it difficult for mining operations to continue or grow. Scaling up the mining and processing of key minerals in developing economies will require investment in improving power supply. 

The U.S. needs a mechanism that enables quick, efficient, and effective investment and policy responses to the specific concerns facing key allies. Currently, U.S. capacity to deliver such support is hamstrung by key gaps in approach, capabilities, and tools. The most salient challenges include: 

A project-by-project approach limits systemic impact: U.S. overseas investment agencies including the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), and the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) are built to advance individual commercial energy transactions across many different countries. This approach has value–but is insufficient in cases where the goal is to secure a particular country’s entire energy system by building strong, competitive markets. That will require approaching the energy sector as a complex and interconnected system, rather than a set of stand-alone transactions. 

Diffusion of tools across the interagency hinders coordination. The U.S. has powerful tools to support energy security–including through direct investment, policy support, and technical and commercial assistance–but they are spread across at least nine different agencies. Optimizing deployment will require efficient coordination, incentives for collaboration; and less fragmented engagement with private partners.

Insufficient leverage to incentivize reforms weakens accountability. Ultimately, energy security depends heavily on decisions made by the partner country’s government. In many cases, governments need to make tough decisions and advance key reforms before the U.S. can help crowd in private capital. Many U.S. agencies provide technical assistance to strengthen policy and regulatory frameworks but lack concrete mechanisms to incentivize these reforms or make U.S. funding contingent on progress.

Limited tools supporting vital enabling public infrastructure blocks out private investment. The most challenging bottleneck to modernizing and strengthening a power sector is often not financing new power generation (which can easily attract private investment under the right conditions), but supporting critical enabling infrastructure including grid networks. In most emerging markets, these are public assets, wholly or partially state-owned. However, most U.S. energy finance tools are designed to support only private sector-led investments. This effectively limits their effectiveness to the generation sector, which already attracts far more capital than transmission or distribution. 

To succeed, an energy security investment mechanism should: 

• Enable investment highly tailored to the specific needs and priorities of partners;
• Provide support across the entire energy sector value chain, strengthening markets to enable greater direct investment by DFC and the private sector; 
• Co-invest with partner countries in shared priorities, with strong accountability mechanisms.

Plan of Action

The new administration should work with Congress to give the Millennium Challenge Corporation the mandate to implement ‘Energy Security Compacts’ (ESCs) addressing the primary constraints to energy security in specific countries, and to coordinate the rest of the interagency in contributing relevant tools and resources. This proposal builds on and reflects key lessons learned from previous efforts by administrations of both parties. 

Each Energy Security Compact would include the following: 

• A process led by MCC and the National Security Council (NSC) to identify priority countries.
• An analysis jointly conducted by MCC and the partner country on the key constraints to energy security.
• Negotiation, led by MCC with support from NSC, of a multi-year Energy Security Compact, anchored by MCC support for a specific set of investments and reforms, and complemented by relevant contributions from the interagency. The Energy Security Compact would define agency-specific responsibilities and include clear objectives and measurable targets.
• Implementation of the Energy Security Compact, led by MCC and NSC. To manage this process, MCC and NSC would co-lead an Interagency Working Group comprising representatives from all relevant agencies.
• Results reporting, based on MCC’s top-ranked reporting process, to the National Security Council and Congress. 

This would require the following congressional actions: 

• Amend the Millennium Challenge Act of 2003: Grant MCC the expanded mandate to deploy Energy Security Compacts as a fourth business line. This should include language applying more flexible eligibility criteria to ESCs, and broadening the set of countries in which MCC can operate when implementing an ESC. Give MCC the mandate to co-lead an interagency working group with NSC.
• Plus up MCC Appropriation: ESCs can be launched as a pilot project in a few markets. But ultimately, the model’s success and impact will depend on MCC appropriations, including for direct investment and dedicated staff. MCC has a track record of outstanding transparency in evaluating its programs and reporting results.
• Strengthen DFC through reauthorization. The ultimate success of ESCs hinges on DFC’s ability to deploy more capital in the energy sector. DFC’s congressional authorization expires in September 2025, presenting an opportunity to enhance the agency’s reach and impact in energy security. Key recommendations for reauthorization include: 1) Addressing the equity scoring challenge; and 2) Raising DFC’s maximum contingent liability to $100 billion. 
• Budget. The initiative could operate under various budget scenarios. The model is specifically designed to be scalable, based on the number of countries with which the U.S. wants to engage. It prioritizes efficiency by drawing on existing appropriations and authorities, by focusing U.S. resources on the highest priority countries and challenges, and by better coordinating the deployment of various U.S. tools.

This proposal draws heavily on the successes and struggles of initiatives from previous administrations of both parties. The most important lessons include: 

• From MCC: The Compact model works. Multi-year Compact agreements are an effective way to ensure country buy-in, leadership, and accountability through the joint negotiation process and the establishment of clear goals and metrics. Compacts are also an effective mechanism to support hard infrastructure because they provide multi-year resources.
• From MCC: Investments should be based on rigorous analysis. MCC’s Constraints Analyses identify the most important constraints to economic growth in a given country. That same rigor should be applied to energy security, ensuring that U.S. investments target the highest impact projects, including those with the greatest positive impact on crowding in additional private sector capital.
• From Power Africa: Interagency coordination can work. Coordinating implementation across U.S. agencies is a chronic challenge. But it is essential to ESCs–and to successful energy investment more broadly. The ESC proposal draws on lessons learned from the Power Africa Coordinator’s Office. Specifically, joint-leadership with the NSC focuses effort and ensures alignment with broader strategic priorities. A mechanism to easily transfer funds from the Coordinator’s Office to other agencies incentivizes collaboration, and enables the U.S. to respond more quickly to unanticipated needs. And finally, staffing the office with individuals seconded from relevant agencies ensures that staff understand the available tools, how they can be deployed effectively, and how (and with whom) to work with to ensure success. Legislative language creating a Coordinator’s Office for ESCs can be modeled on language in the Electrify Africa Act of 2015, which created Power Africa’s interagency working group.

Conclusion

The new administration should work with Congress to empower the Millennium Challenge Corporation to lead the U.S. interagency in crafting ‘Energy Security Compacts’. This effort would provide the U.S. with the capability to coordinate direct investment in the energy security of a partner country and contribute to U.S. national priorities including diversifying energy supply chains, investing in the economic stability and performance of rapidly growing markets, and supporting allies with energy systems under direct threat. 

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.

Validating the Need and Planning for Success in the Federal Hiring Process

Most federal agencies consider the start of the hiring process to be the development of the job posting. However, the federal hiring process really begins well before the job is posted and the official clock starts. There are many decisions that need to be made before an agency can begin hiring. These decisions have a number of dependencies and require collaboration and alignment between leadership, program leaders, budget professionals, hiring managers, and human resource (HR) staff. What happens in these early steps can not only determine the speed of the hiring process, but the decisions made also can cause the hiring process to be either a success or failure. 

In our previous blog post, we outlined the steps in the federal hiring process and identified bottlenecks impacting the staffing of roles to support permitting activities (e.g., environmental reviews). This post dives into the first phase of the process: planning and validation of the hiring need. This phase includes four steps:  

1. Allocate Budget for Program Staffing and Workload
2. Validate Hiring Need Against Workforce, Staffing, and Recruiting Plans
3. Request Personnel Action to Fill the Job
4. Launch Recruiting Efforts for the Position

Clear communication and quality collaboration between key actors shape the outcomes of the hiring process. Finance staff allocate the resources and manage the budget. HR workforce planners and staffing specialists identify the types of positions needed across the agency. Program owners and hiring managers define the roles needed to achieve their mission and goals. These stakeholders must work together throughout this phase of the process.

Even with collaboration, challenges can arise. For example, there may be:  

• A lack of clarity in the budget appropriation and transmission regarding how the funds can be used for staffing versus other program actions;
• Emergent hiring needs from new legislation or program changes that do not align with agency workforce plans, meaning the HR recruiting and hiring functions are not prepared to support these new positions; and
• Pressure from Congressional appropriators and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to speed up hiring and advance implementation, which is particularly acute with specific programs named in legislation;
• New tools outside of the boundaries of individual staffing (e.g., shared certificates of eligibles) that need to be considered and integrated into this phase.

Adding to these challenges, the stakeholders engaging in this early phase bring preconceptions based on their past experience. If this phase has previously been delayed, confusing, or difficult, these negative expectations may present a barrier to building effective collaboration within the group.

Breaking Down the Steps

For each step in the Planning and Validation phase, we provide a description, explain what can go wrong, share what can go right, and provide some examples from our research, where applicable. This work is based on extensive interviews with hiring managers, program leaders, staffing specialists, workforce planners and budget professionals as well as on-the-job experience.  

Step I. Allocate Budget for Program Staffing and Workload

In this first step, the agency receives budget authorization or program direction funding through OMB derived from new authorizing legislation, annual appropriations, or a continuing resolution. Once the funds are available from the Treasury Department, agency budget professionals  allocate the resources to the particular programs inside the agency. They provide instructions regarding how the money is to be used (e.g., staffing, contracting, and other actions to support program execution). For example, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) provided funding for grants to build cell towers and connections for expanding internet access to underserved communities. This included a percentage of funds for administration and program staffing.

In an ideal world, program leaders could select the best mix of investments in staffing, contracting, equipment, and services to implement their programs efficiently and effectively. They work toward this in budget requests, but in the real world, some of these decisions are constrained by the specifics of the authorizing legislation, OMB’s interpretation, and the agency’s language in the program direction. 

What Can Go Wrong

• Prescriptive program direction funding can limit the options of program managers and HR leaders to craft the workforce for the future. In some cases, the legislation even identifies types of people to hire or the hiring authority to be used (e.g., Excepted Service, Competitive Service, Direct Hire Authority, etc.). This limits the program leaders’ options to build or buy the resource solutions that will work best for them.
• Legislation can be ambiguous regarding how programs can use the funding for staffing. This delays implementation because it requires deliberation by OMB, the agency budget function, program leaders, and even the agency attorneys to determine what is permissible with the funding. This can also increase risk aversion as agency leaders have grown concerned with trespassing on the Anti-Deficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation, and from accepting voluntary services. For example, with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding, one agency we spoke with decided to only authorize term hires because of the time-limited nature of the funding, despite having attrition data that predicted permanent positions would become available in the coming years. This can limit recruiting to only those willing to take temporary positions and reduce the ability to fill permanent, competitive roles.
• Delays between the passing of legislation, Treasury Department authorization, and OMB budget direction can create impatience and frustration by Congressional appropriators and agency leaders who want to fill jobs and implement intended programs. This pressures program leaders and HR specialists to make faster, sometimes suboptimal, decisions about who to hire and the timeline. They tend to proceed with the positions they already have, instead of making data-based decisions to match future workload with their hiring targets. In one case, a  permitting hiring manager under this kind of pressure wanted to hire an Environmental Protection Specialist, but did not have a current PD or recruiting strategy. They opted for a management analyst position for which they already had a PD because they could hire for this position faster.

What Can Go Right

• Budget/Legislative Integration: Agency Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), program leaders and Legislative Affairs consult with each other to anticipate the impacts of new legislation and changes to budget language that alter resource management and staffing decisions. For example, one agency we spoke with anticipated the increased demand for HR services resulting from the yet-to-be passed BIL, and thus used existing open positions to hire the HR staff needed to recruit and hire the hundreds of new staff to support the legislation.
• Clear Guidance: Establishing clear budget guidance as early as possible and anticipating upcoming changes helps program and HR leaders plan for and implement optimal program resources. This frequently requires collaboration and consultation with all the parties involved in resource decisions, especially when new legislative mandates are ambiguous or provide no direction on resource use. In one of our discussions with a science agency, we learned that the agency engaged in collaborative negotiations across its programs to allocate the resources from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the absence of clear legislative direction.

Step II. Validate Hiring Need Against Workforce, Staffing, and Recruiting Plans

After receiving their budget allocation, program leaders validate their hiring need by matching budget resources with workload needs. A robust workforce plan becomes useful, as it allows leaders to identify gaps in the current workforce, workload, and recruiting plans and future workload requirements. Workforce plans that align with budget requests and anticipate future needs enable HR specialists and hiring managers to quickly validate the hiring need and move to request the personnel action. 

What Can Go Wrong

• Frequently, workforce plans do not address emergent needs coming from new legislation or abrupt program changes. This is often due to rapid technology changes in the job (e.g., use of geographical information systems or data analysis tools), dynamism in the external environment, or unfunded mandates. This means program leaders and hiring managers need to quickly adapt their workload estimates and workforce configurations to match these new needs. 
• Ambiguity in the legislative intent for staffing can extend into this step. This creates a delay as the program leads work to build consensus on the positions needed, the hiring authorities to be used, and the timeline for bringing new candidates onboard.
• If program leaders have been constrained in backfilling open positions (due to previous budget issues) these immediate needs limit their options to configure a workforce for the future. When coupled with competition across the agency for resources and a lack of workforce planning data, program leaders often sacrifice longer term, sustainable workforce needs for short-term solutions.

What Can Go Right

• Readiness: A mature process in which workforce planners, legislative analysts, and program leaders are anticipating and addressing changes in legislation and their external environment reduces surprises and enables HR staff and program managers to adapt when new staffing or changes are required. In one interview, a program leader described using empirical data on key workload indicators to develop workload projections and determine the positions needed for implementing their program requirements.
• Strike Teams: When legislation or outside changes result in a hiring surge, successful agencies form strike teams with sponsorship from senior leaders. These strike teams pull staff from across the agency – leaders, program leaders, HR leaders and implementers – to focus on meeting the demands of the hiring surge. In response to the infrastructure laws, affected agencies were able to accelerate hiring and target key positions with these teams. Many agencies are doing this to address the AI talent surge right now.
• Integration with Strategy Development: The best workforce planning emerges when key actors are embedded into the agency’s strategy; each strategic goal has a workforce component. Using scenario planning, simulation, and other foresight tools agencies can develop adaptive, predictive workforce plans that model the workforce of the future and focus on the skills needed across the agency to sustain and thrive in achieving its mission. When the future changes, the agency is ready to pivot. OPM’s Workforce of the Future Playbook moves in this direction.

Step III. Request Personnel Action to Fill the Job and Launch Recruiting Efforts for the Position

Note: Requesting personnel action to fill the job is a relatively straightforward step, so we have combined it with launching the recruiting process for simplification.

In most agencies, the hiring manager or program leader fills out an SF-52 form to request the hiring action for a specific position. This includes defining the position title, occupation, grade level, type of position, agency, location, pay plan, and other pertinent information. To do this, they verify that the funding is available and they have the budget authority to proceed. 

Though recruiting can begin before and after this step, this is the chance to begin recruiting in earnest. This can involve activating agency HR staff, engaging contract recruiting resources if they are available, preparing and launching agency social media announcements, and notifying recruitment networks (e.g., universities, professional organizations, alumni groups, stakeholders, communities of practice, etc.) of the job opening.

What Can Go Wrong

• If a hiring manager intimates that a potential candidate has an “inside track” on a position or promises that a candidate will be hired. These trespass on Merit Systems Principles and Prohibited Personnel Practices can result in financial damage to the agency and censure for the hiring manager.
• When an agency lacks recruiting resources and network connections, especially for highly specialized roles or a talent surge, this hinders agencies from reaching the right communities to attract strong applicants and restricts the applicant pool.
• Segmented recruiting to just HR and its resources results in a lack of expectation that the hiring manager plays a key role in recruiting and actively promotes the job to their networks.
• At any point in the process, funding can be pulled and the personnel action will need to be canceled. This disheartens the hiring manager and HR staff, who are ready to start the hiring process.

What Can Go Right

• Build The Pipeline: Hiring managers and recruiters who build and maintain pipelines of potential applicants for key positions have a ready base to begin outreach. This is permissible as long as there is no expectation that those on this list will receive any preferential treatment, as stated above. For example, in our discussion with one land-management agency, we learned that they keep in touch with potential candidates by sharing periodic updates on their programs and job opportunities. This continues to engage a pool of candidates and provides access to an interested community when launching a new position.
• Build Enthusiasm For The Job Across The Ecosystem: Rallying peers, fellow alumni, agency leaders, universities, contractor contacts, and others across HR and program networks to build enthusiasm for the open position and joining the agency. One sub-agency office we met promotes its positions on a variety of public sites (i.e., LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and their website). 
• Direct and Sustained Attention to Recruiting: Agencies that set clear expectations for hiring manager engagement in recruiting fare better at attracting qualified candidates because the hiring manager can directly speak to the job opportunity.
• Tell the Story: Hiring managers and recruiters that tell a compelling story of the agency and the importance of this job to the mission help potential applicants see themselves in the role and their potential impact, which increases the likelihood that they will apply.

Conclusion

Following What Can Go Right practices in this beginning phase can reduce the risk of challenges emerging later on in the hiring process. Delays in decision making around budget allocation and program staffing, lingering ambiguity in the positions needed for programs, and delayed recruiting activities can lead to difficulties in accessing the candidate pools needed for the roles. This ultimately increases the risk of failure and may require a restart of the hiring process.

The best practices outlined here (e.g., anticipating budget decisions, adapting workforce plans, and expanding recruiting) set the stage for a successful hiring process. They require collaboration between HR leaders, recruiters and staffing specialists, budget and program professionals, workforce planners, and hiring managers to make sure they are taking action to increase the odds of hiring a successful employee.

The actions that OPM, the Chief Human Capital Officers Council (CHCO), their agencies, and others are taking as a result of the recent Hiring Experience Memo support many of the practices highlighted in What Can Go Right for each step of the process. Civil servants should pay attention to OPM’s upcoming webinars, guidance, and other events that aim to support you in implementing these practices.

As noted in our first blog on the hiring process for permitting talent, close engagement between key actors is critical to making the right decisions about workforce configuration and workload management. Starting right in this first phase increases the chances of success throughout the hiring process.

Current hiring processes for political appointees are opaque and problematic; job openings are essentially closed off except to those in the right networks. To democratize hiring, the next administration should develop a public jobs board for non-Senate-confirmed political appointments, which includes a list of open roles and job descriptions. By serving as a one-stop shop for those interested in serving in an administration, an open jobs board would bring more skilled candidates into the administration, diversify the appointee workforce, expedite the hiring process, and improve government transparency.

Challenge and Opportunity

Hiring for federal political appointee positions is a broken process. Even though political appointees steer some of the federal government’s most essential functions, the way these individuals are hired lacks the rigor and transparency expected in most other fields.

Political appointment hiring processes are opaque, favoring privileged candidates already in policy networks. There is currently no standardized hiring mechanism for filling political appointee roles, even though new administrations must fill thousands of lower-level appointee positions. Openings are often shared only through word-of-mouth or internal networks, meaning that many strong candidates with relevant domain expertise may never be aware of available opportunities to work in an administration. Though the Plum Book (an annually updated list of political appointees) exists, it does not list vacancies, meaning outside candidates must still have insider information on who is hiring.

These closed hiring processes are deeply problematic because they lead to a non-diverse pool of applicants. For example, current networking-based processes benefit graduates of elite universities, and similar networking-based employment processes such as employee referral programs tend to benefit White men more than any other demographic group. We have experienced this opaque process firsthand at the Aspen Tech Policy Hub; though we have trained hundreds of science and technology fellows who are interested in serving as appointees, we are unaware of any that obtained political appointment roles by means other than networking.

Appointee positions often do not include formal job descriptions, making it difficult for outside candidates to identify roles that are a good fit. Most political appointee jobs do not include a written, formalized job description—a standard best practice across every other sector. A lack of job descriptions makes it almost impossible for outside candidates utilizing the Plum Book to understand what a position entails or whether it would be a good fit. Candidates that are being recruited typically learn more about position responsibilities through direct conversations with hiring managers, which again favors candidates who have direct connections to the hiring team.

Hiring processes are inefficient for hiring staff. The current approach is not only problematic for candidates; it is also inefficient for hiring staff. Through the current process, PPO or other hiring staff must sift through tens of thousands of resumes submitted through online resume bank submissions (e.g. the Biden administration’s “Join Us” form) that are not tailored to specific jobs. They may also end up directly reaching out to candidates that may not actually be interested in specific positions, or who lack required specialized skills.

Given these challenges, there is significant opportunity to reform the political appointment hiring process to benefit both applications and hiring officials.

Plan of Action

The next administration’s Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) should pilot a public jobs board for Schedule C and non-career Senior Executive Service political appointment positions and expand the job board to all non-Senate-confirmed appointments if the pilot is successful. This public jobs board should eventually provide a list of currently open vacancies, a brief description for each currently open vacancy that includes a job description and job requirements, and a process for applying to that position.

Having a more transparent and open jobs board with job descriptions would have multiple benefits. It would:

• Bring in more diverse applicants and strengthen the appointee workforce by broadening hiring pools; 
• Require hiring managers to write out job descriptions in advance, allowing outside candidates to better understand job opportunities and hiring managers to pinpoint qualifications they are looking for; 
• Expedite the hiring process since hiring managers will now have a list of qualified applicants for each position; and 
• Improve government transparency and accessibility into critical public sector positions.

Additionally, an open jobs board will allow administration officials to collect key data on applicant background and use these data to improve recruitment going forward. For example, an open application process would allow administration officials to collect aggregate data on education credentials, demographics, and work experience, and modify processes to improve diversity as needed. Having an updated, open list of positions will also allow PPO to refer strong candidates to other open roles that may be a fit, as current processes make it difficult for administration officials or hiring managers to know what other open positions exist.

Implementing this jobs board will require two phases: (1) an initial phase where the transition team and PPO modify their current “Join Us” form to list 50-100 key initial hires the administration will need to make; and (2) a secondary phase where it builds a more fulsome jobs board, launched in late 2025, that includes all open roles going forward. 

Phase 1. By early 2025, the transition team (or General Services Administration, in its transition support capacity) should identify 50-100 key Schedule C or non-career Senior Executive service hires they think the PPO will need to fill early in the administration, and launch a revised resume bank to collect applicants for these positions. The transition team should prioritize roles that a) are urgent needs for the new administration, b) require specialized skills not commonly found among campaign and transition staff (for instance technical or scientific knowledge), and c) have no clear candidate already identified. The transition team should then revise the current administration’s “Join Us” form to include this list of 50-100 soon-to-be vacant job roles, as well as provide a 2-3 sentence description of the job responsibilities, and allow outside candidates to explicitly note interest in these positions. This should be a relatively light lift, given the current “Join Us” form is fairly easy to build.

Phase 2. Early in the administration, PPO should build a larger, more comprehensive jobs board that should aim to go live in late 2025 and includes all open Schedule C or non-Senior Executive Service (SES) positions. Upon launch, this jobs board should include open jobs for whom no candidate has been identified, and any new Schedule C and non-SES appointments that are open going forward. As described in further detail in the FAQ section, every job listed should include a brief description of the position responsibilities and qualifications, and additional questions on political affiliation and demographics.

During this second phase, the PPO and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) should identify and track key metrics to determine whether it should be expanded to cover all non-Senate confirmed appointments. For example, PPO and OPM could compare the diversity of applicants, diversity of hires, number of qualified candidates who applied for a position, time-to-hire, and number of vacant positions pre- and post-implementation of the jobs board. 

If the jobs board improves key metrics, PPO and OPM should expand the jobs board to all non-Senate confirmed appointments. This would include non-Senate confirmed Senior Executive Service appointee positions.

Conclusion

An open jobs board for political appointee positions is necessary to building a stronger and more diverse appointee workforce, and for improving government transparency. An open jobs board will strengthen and diversify the appointee workforce, require hiring managers to specifically write down job responsibilities and qualifications, reduce hiring time, and ultimately result in more successful hires.

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.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Innovation and Jobs Act are set to drive $300 billion in energy infrastructure investment by 2030. Without permitting reform, lengthy review processes threaten to make these federal investments one-third less effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why Congress has been grappling with reforming the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for almost two years. Yet, despite the urgency to reform the law, there is a striking lack of available data on how NEPA actually works. Under these conditions, evidence-based policy making is simply impossible. With access to the right data and with thoughtful teaming, the next administration has a golden opportunity to create a roadmap for permitting software that maximizes the impact of federal investments.

Challenge and Opportunity

NEPA is a cornerstone of U.S. environmental law, requiring nearly all federally funded projects—like bridges, wildfire risk-reduction treatments, and wind farms—to undergo an environmental review. Despite its widespread impact, NEPA’s costs and benefits remain poorly understood. Although academics and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) have conducted piecemeal studies using limited data, even the most basic data points, like the average duration of a NEPA analysis, remain elusive. Even the Government Accountability Office (GAO), when tasked with evaluating NEPA’s effectiveness in 2014, was unable to determine how many NEPA reviews are conducted annually, resulting in a report aptly titled “National Environmental Policy Act: Little Information Exists on NEPA Analyses.”

The lack of comprehensive data is not due to a lack of effort or awareness. In 2021, researchers at the University of Arizona launched NEPAccess, an AI-driven program aimed at aggregating publicly available NEPA data. While successful at scraping what data was accessible, the program could not create a comprehensive database because many NEPA documents are either not publicly available or too hard to access, namely Environmental Assessments (EAs) and Categorical Exclusions (CEs). The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) also built a language model to analyze NEPA documents but contained their analysis to the least common but most complex category of environmental reviews, Environmental Impact Statements (EISs).

Fortunately, much of the data needed to populate a more comprehensive NEPA database does exist. Unfortunately, it’s stored in a complex network of incompatible software systems, limiting both public access and interagency collaboration. Each agency responsible for conducting NEPA reviews operates its own unique NEPA software. Even the most advanced NEPA software, SOPA used by the Forest Service and ePlanning used by the Bureau of Land Management, do not automatically publish performance data.

Analyzing NEPA outcomes isn’t just an academic exercise; it’s an essential foundation for reform. Efforts to improve NEPA software have garnered bipartisan support from Congress. CEQ recently published a roadmap outlining important next steps to this end. In the report, CEQ explains that organized data would not only help guide development of better software but also foster broad efficiency in the NEPA process. In fact, CEQ even outlines the project components that would be most helpful to track (including unique ID numbers, level of review, document type, and project type).

Put simply, meshing this complex web of existing softwares into a tracking database would be nearly impossible (not to mention expensive). Luckily, advances in large language models, like the ones used by NEPAccess and PNNL, offer a simpler and more effective solution. With properly formatted files of all NEPA documents in one place, a small team of software engineers could harness PolicyAI’s existing program to build a comprehensive analysis dashboard.

Plan of Action

The greatest obstacles to building an AI-powered tracking dashboard are accessing the NEPA documents themselves and organizing their contents to enable meaningful analysis. Although the administration could address the availability of these documents by compelling agencies to release them, inconsistencies in how they’re written and stored would still pose a challenge. That means building a tracking board will require open, ongoing collaboration between technologists and agencies.

• Assemble a strike team: The administration should form a cross-disciplinary team to facilitate collaboration. This team should include CEQ; the Permitting Council; the agencies responsible for conducting the greatest number of NEPA reviews, including the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; technologists from 18F; and those behind the PolicyAI tool developed by PNNL. It should also decide where the software development team will be housed, likely either at CEQ or the Permitting Council.
• Establish submission guidelines: When handling exorbitant amounts of data, uniform formatting ensures quick analysis. The strike team should assess how each agency receives and processes NEPA documents and create standardized submission guidelines, including file format and where they should be sent. 
• Mandate data submission: The administration should require all agencies to submit relevant NEPA data annually, adhering to the submission guidelines set by the strike team. This process should be streamlined to minimize the burden on agencies while maximizing the quality and completeness of the data; if possible, the software development team should pull data directly from the agency. Future modernization efforts should include building APIs to automate this process.
• Build the system: Using PolicyAI’s existing framework, the development team should create a language model to feed a publicly available, searchable database and dashboard that tracks vital metadata, including:
  • The project components suggested in CEQ’s E-NEPA report, including unique ID numbers, level of review, document type, and project type
  • Days spent producing an environmental review (if available; this information may need to be pulled from agency case management materials instead)
  • Page count of each environmental review
  • Lead and supporting agencies
  • Project location (latitude/longitude and acres impacted, or GIS information if possible) 
  • Other laws enmeshed in the review, including the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, and the National Forest Management Act
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, cost of producing the review
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, staff hours used to produce the review
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, jobs and revenue created by the project
  • When clearly stated in a NEPA document, carbon emissions mitigated by the project

Conclusion

The stakes are high. With billions of dollars in federal climate and infrastructure investments on the line, a sluggish and opaque permitting process threatens to undermine national efforts to cut emissions. By embracing cutting-edge technology and prioritizing transparency, the next administration can not only reshape our understanding of the NEPA process but bolster its efficiency too.

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.