The semiconductor shortfall during the COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted the consequences of underinvesting in critical technology ecosystems. This wake-up call, following years of advocacy and growing consensus, spurred bipartisan action through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which made transformative investments in the semiconductor industry as well as future-focused programs like the Economic Development Administration’s Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs (Tech Hubs) – a program I helped launch as EDA’s chief of staff – and the National Science Foundation’s Regional Innovation Engines (NSF Engines). These latter two initiatives – Tech Hubs and NSF Engines – are catalyzing dynamic innovation ecosystems across the country, advancing technologies critical to our national security and economic competitiveness while spurring broad-based regional economic growth.

But as these innovation ecosystems grow, so too does their demand for talent. Across these ecosystems, there is a need to fill specialized positions essential to their success. At the same time, we’re witnessing an exodus of talent from the federal service – scientists, engineers, technologists, workforce experts, and skilled generalists – professionals whose expertise could be lost altogether if not effectively deployed. While these departures are deeply troubling for government operations and the services Americans rely on, we face three pressing imperatives: preserving specialized knowledge, responding to the human impact on individuals suddenly without work, and addressing critical talent needs among these tech regions. During my time as a Senior Fellow at FAS, I’m focused on building bridges that connect these experienced professionals with innovation ecosystems where they can continue to apply their hard-won expertise in service of important national priorities. 

Innovation ecosystems: What are they?

Both NSF Engines and Tech Hubs seek to advance critical and emerging technologies, but each focuses on different stages of technological advancement – NSF Engines on the research and development and early translation of technologies, while Tech Hubs comes in to support scaling and commercializing these technologies to achieve global competitiveness. 

Together, they’re advancing our capabilities in 10 key technology areas: 

1. Advanced manufacturing and robotics 
2. Advanced materials 
3. Artificial intelligence 
4. Biotechnology 
5. Communications technology and immersive technology 
6. Cybersecurity and data storage 
7. Disaster risk and resilience 
8. Energy technology 
9. Quantum 
10. Semiconductors and advanced computing. 

This geographically distributed innovation model is taking root across America, with 31 designated Tech Hubs and 10 NSF Engines receiving between approximately $15 million to $50 million each – not to mention the dozens of other innovation ecosystems that received development grants to continue to build their ecosystem strategies – spanning the majority of states across the country.

NSF Engines

Map of NSF Engines & EDA BBBRC via NSF on Tableau

Note: NSF’s interactive map also includes the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, a program of the Economic Development Administration, that includes many innovation ecosystems that span the country as well. In this version, only Tech Hubs and NSF Engines are demarcated on the map.

The strength of these innovation ecosystems lies in their coalition approach, which brings together industry, start-ups, research universities, community colleges, economic and workforce development organizations, community-based nonprofits, and entrepreneurial ecosystem builders. As these ecosystems scale, this broad spectrum of stakeholders need talent to fill a variety of roles: lab scientists, engineers, technicians, partnership managers, business support and entrepreneurship program staff, workforce development program managers, and other specialized industry and ecosystem builder roles. Where will some of this talent come from? I believe part of the answer lies in the talented professionals departing federal service.

The federal service: Who are they?

Since January 2025, tens of thousands of federal workers have left the federal government, in addition to thousands of contractors who have supported government services. They come from agencies where they worked in areas helpful to innovation ecosystems, like the National Institutes of Health (helpful for biotech-focused ecosystems) to the Department of Labor (helpful for workforce development strategizing). These individuals have managed multimillion-dollar grant programs, provided expert technical analyses and developed best practices across every area you can think of, and navigated complex stakeholder networks. Many already live in or near regions with emerging innovation ecosystems, given the distributed nature of federal agencies, and others are willing to relocate for the right mission-driven opportunity, potentially even back to places they call home. Their early involvement in these innovation ecosystems would help build the momentum needed for technological breakthroughs and sustained growth, in turn leading to more job creation for others at the local and regional level. 

The initiative

With FAS’s support, I am launching an initiative to connect scientists, engineers, technologists, economic and workforce development practitioners, program manager extraordinaires, and other professionals who recently departed federal service with emerging innovation ecosystems across the country that need their expertise. 

We’re talking directly with Tech Hubs and NSF Engines communities to identify immediate and near-term talent needs within their leadership teams, across federally funded Tech Hub and NSF Engine component projects, and among consortium stakeholders. Simultaneously, we are engaging displaced federal workers and contractors through job fairs and direct outreach to understand their skillsets, career interests, and location preferences. To help both innovation ecosystems and these workers, we aim to showcase opportunities across innovation ecosystems, facilitate direct matchmaking to expedite hiring, and create additional resources tailored to the needs of these professionals and innovation ecosystems. 

This is an opportunity for innovation ecosystems to take advantage of the availability of mission-driven professionals who have transferable skills to meet the needs of these regions. At the same time, this allows former federal professionals to continue meaningful, public-purpose work that contributes to America’s technological leadership in a new capacity. 

It is to our national peril if we do not set up these innovation ecosystems to succeed. And it is also to our peril if we do not leverage the thousands of years of collective experience these former feds have to offer. This FAS initiative wants to see regions, people, and the country succeed, and is doing so by addressing critical talent gaps in these strategically imperative innovation ecosystems, offering pathways for continued public-purpose impact, and ensuring the nation as a whole does not lose valuable expertise. 

What you can do

We are excited to share more information soon on these available opportunities and how federal workers can plug in. In the meantime, if you are an innovation ecosystem – even outside of Tech Hubs and NSF Engines – please do reach out to learn more or share open roles. If you are a federal worker, fill out this interest form, and we’ll add you to the list to receive more information as it becomes available. And if you have any thoughts to offer on this initiative, we are all ears. 

As the design of Tech Hubs and NSF Engines shows us, it takes a coalition of committed organizations and individuals to achieve big, but necessary, goals.

Maryam Janani-Flores (mjananiflores@fas.org) is a Senior Fellow at FAS and former chief of staff at the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

Decision to Sunset IRS’ Direct File Previews Worse Taxpayer Experience in 2026

Yesterday, tens of thousands of taxpayers filed their returns using IRS Direct File, the agency’s new free, public, online tax filing service now in its second filing season. They joined hundreds of thousands who have used the service, and who have been nearly-unanimously thrilled to fulfill their tax obligations easily and directly. It seems we have finally done the impossible: make Tax Day anything but the most dreaded day of the year. At least we did.

Today, the Associated Press reported that the Treasury Department will discontinue the program. “Cutting costs and saving money for families were just empty campaign promises,” says Adam Ruben, a vice president at the Economic Security Project of the administration’s decision to end the program.

I was an original architect of Direct File from 2021 until just a few months ago, and got to see its impact on government and on taxpayers directly. Make no mistake: Direct File is a shining example of government capacity and government efficiency. By providing a critical government service for free, and helping taxpayers file more timely and more accurate returns, it is projected to eventually generate $11 billion in net savings for taxpayers every year. 

The dismantling of the program is not, at all, a step toward government efficiency. This is a move that will degrade our government services, incurring massive costs for people trying to file their taxes, further damaging the capacity of the nation’s revenue-collection agency, and making our institutions less robust and less capable.

It’s no secret: Americans do not love tax season.

The Direct File story started for me, personally, when I moved back to the U.S. after living in London for 9 years. I had already spent years working in digital services: I had built the first in-house digital team at the brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, and then worked on multiple projects in London, culminating in helping the London Borough of Camden digitally transform its entire operations practically overnight during the pandemic. I moved back to the States and joined the US Digital Service to help rebuild after Covid, bringing the lessons I had learned from the UK. My first project at USDS was leading our efforts on Child Tax Credit expansion — ensuring that families across the country could access the enormous new child benefit that was created in the March 2021 American Rescue Plan.

But there was a problem: families naturally had to file a tax return to claim their tax credit. And I was pretty surprised to learn that our government still did not, in 2021, offer a free, online way to file your taxes directly with the government. Around the world, tax collection is seen as an inherent government function and, as such, tax filing is a service that the government offers free of charge. I thought we should too, especially if we were going to make such critical social supports contingent on it during a crisis. 

Instead, in the U.S., we relied on a confusing — and sometimes costly — mishmash of private offerings and support from non-profits designed to ensure most people could maybe, sort of, file a return for free if they needed to. It made the barrier to entry high, both in terms of trying to navigate how to simply file a return, nevermind to do so without cost. Tax filing, I thought, is a core function of government, and making it free and easy to use would cut through this waste and deliver for the American people.

I wasn’t the only one who thought this way. By 2021, a free public filing service was already the “white whale” of civic tech; everyone knew this was the critical government function to bring into a modern digital product, and yet it was too big, too daunting, too much of a change. Honestly, never in a million years did I think we would pull it off, either. The IRS, for all its genuine accomplishments in the face of constantly shrinking budgets and aging technology, had no real experience launching an enormous, high-stakes tech product designed to simplify the mind-numbing complexities of an American tax return. This was government capacity we would have to create.

But, we did. Since Direct File launched as a pilot in March 2023, hundreds of thousands of people have now filed their returns with it, to stunning results. In its pilot year, 86% of users said that Direct File increased their trust in the IRS. In its second year, it is winning awards and killing it with users, with a Net Promoter Score in the +80s, up from +74 last year (Apple’s, which is considered astronomically high, is +72). Direct File is a wildly successful government startup. Not only that, but the IRS now has its own in-house capacity to continue building awesome digital experiences — capacity that could have gone toward cost savings and experience improvements in all matter of IRS operations. This is all capacity, needless to say, that has gone away, all in the name of “efficiency.”

The impact for taxpayers from Direct File alone are, and would have been, enormous. In the U.S., the IRS estimates that it takes the average person over 9 hours and costs $160 to file your taxes each year. We even heard anecdotally from Direct File users who had paid thousands of dollars to do what Direct File does for free. There also remain millions of households who, every year, don’t file their returns at all, leaving sizable refunds on the table, because they can’t navigate the confusing tax filing “offers” advertising tax filing services. These households would have stood to finally access billions of dollars they leave unclaimed every year.

Not only are taxpayers saving these hundreds of dollars, they also feel newly empowered to interact with their government and take control of their tax situations. For decades, Americans have been told that they are not smart enough to do your own taxes; only highly-paid specialists that you have to pay for, can do it for you. Direct File stripped away the noise and showed taxpayers that filing can be simple and easy. The valuable trust this creates in government and public institutions is impossible to quantify.

Finally, there is the issue of data privacy and security. Taxpayers filing via private services must expose their most sensitive personal and financial information to third parties that monetize their data, sometimes illegally and without taxpayers’ consent. Without a public filing option, taxpayers are more or less required to sacrifice their privacy and the security of their data just to fulfill their filing obligations. Direct File gives taxpayers the option to protect their data and provide it straight to the tax agency, without a middleman.

All this — the in-house capacity to modernize the IRS, billions of dollars in cost savings, an empowered public — is what is cancelled today. But they have it exactly backwards. It’s a functional, high-quality government that’s efficient. The chaos they are sowing is anything but.

Fellows Brown, Janani-Flores, Krishnaswami, Ross and Vinton will work on projects spanning government modernization, clean energy, workforce development, and economic resiliency

Washington, D.C. – March 17, 2025 – Today our first cohort of Senior Fellows join the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a non-partisan, nonprofit science think tank dedicated to developing evidence-based policies to address national challenges. These senior-level scientists and technologists represent a diverse group of thinkers and doers with deep experience across multiple fields who have committed to developing policy solutions to specific problems. The fellows were selected through a competitive process of project proposals, and will work in their area of expertise independently and collaboratively with FAS staff for six months.

“We are leaning into the reality of the present moment and bringing exceptional talent to join forces with our staff and the wider science and policy community to develop new policy ideas that solve specific and difficult societal challenges,” says Daniel Correa, CEO of the Federation of American Scientists.

Senior Fellows – 2025 Cohort

The inaugural cohort of senior fellows and their primary areas of focus are:

Quincy K. Brown served as Director of Space STEM and Workforce Policy on the National Space Council in the White House Office of the Vice President. She will design a participatory, strategic foresight process to identify solutions to the most pressing challenges we face in the evolving science and technology ecosystem. She will leverage data-driven insights, strategic partnerships, and evidence-based research to shape national policy, scale innovative initiatives, and cultivate cross-sector collaborations.

Maryam Janani-Flores served as the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce, where she oversaw policy, strategy, and operations for a $5 billion grant portfolio. She will focus on broad-based participation in innovation ecosystems by placing recently departed federal scientists, engineers, and technologists in innovation hubs nationwide to build inclusive, durable innovation ecosystems.

Arjun Krishnaswami served in the Biden-Harris Administration as the Senior Policy Advisor for Clean Energy Infrastructure in the White House. He will take lessons learned at the federal level to elicit adoption of clean technology at the state level, modernizing our nation’s energy grid so that communities across the country can benefit from the greater resiliency, lower costs, and cleaner air that follow from clean energy upgrades.

Denice Ross, former U.S. Chief Data Scientist and Deputy U.S. CTO, will prototype a Federal Data Use Case Repository for documenting and sharing how people across the nation use priority federal datasets from many agencies. Her project is a front-line effort to protect the continued flow of federal data.

Merici Vinton served as a Senior Advisor to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel and prior to that was an original architect of the Direct File service. She will focus on technology innovation to deliver public services in a post “digital services” era, making institutions more relevant and responsive.

“This is a time where we need solutions, and these senior fellows bring with them the expertise,  motivation and a vision for how to use policy as a tool to affect meaningful, positive change,” says Dr. Jedidah Isler, Chief Science Officer at FAS. 

She continues: “These senior fellows have years of hands-on experience to draw upon to imagine, plan, and develop ambitious science and technology policy. We look forward to a bidirectional flow of expertise between senior fellows and our staff to deliver actionable policy ideas that will serve the public using the technical tools of today and emerging technology of tomorrow. They give me hope that we can co-create a future that provides safety, access and prosperity for all.”

Role of Senior Fellows at FAS 

Senior fellows will work independently to develop and refine their policy plans over the next six months. All of the proposals are ambitious; to reach their desired outcomes, fellows will collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders in the science and policy communities, seeking to understand and implement feedback from evidence-based datasets, specialized experts, people with lived experience, and ultimately, from th​e people whom their policy could impact.

During the course of this policy development senior fellows will have access to FAS resources and full-time staff to ensure these ideas can be realized. 

Senior fellows will be an extension of the wide range of​​ scientific and technical expertise housed within FAS – ranging from nuclear weapons to climate science to emerging technologies – one of the country’s oldest science policy think tanks. 

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About FAS

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