Technical Talent Strategies to Build Capacity, Accelerate Priorities, and Drive Change
Summary
The Biden-Harris Administration is confronting multiple challenges that require a coordinated, innovative, and flexible response by the federal government. The recently released FY22 President’s budget sets a solid foundation for leveraging the capacity of the federal workforce, along with necessary science, technology and innovation expertise from the private sector, to meet the challenges ahead.
However, hollowed out agencies and technical skills gaps mean agencies lack the capacity to implement needed programs. Agencies have to rapidly scale up personnel, ensure they have the necessary skills, and implement underutilized hiring mechanisms to fill out talent gaps.
While the goals laid out in the budget will allow agencies to address climate, continue to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, rebuild the economy, and increase equity across government programs and services, it requires a sustained focus on building and hiring diverse expertise to accelerate progress on these initiatives – which increasingly rely on modernized IT infrastructure and equitable delivery of services.
This is an historic opportunity, driven by critical need, to focus on driving systemic change across government to equip all federal agencies with the capacity required to build back better while bolstering and reinvigorating the federal talent pipeline.
The following proposals are offered as ways to tackle hiring challenges, build a diverse technical talent pipeline, and continue to rebuild the public trust in government and interest in serving. The Day One Project and its partners stand ready to assist in fleshing out and supporting the proposals below.
It is in the interests of the United States to appropriately protect information that needs to be protected while maintaining our participation in new discoveries to maintain our competitive advantage.
Our analysis of federal AI governance across administrations shows that divergent compliance procedures and uneven institutional capacity challenge the government’s ability to deploy AI in ways that uphold public trust.
To secure the U.S. bio-infrastructure, maintain global leadership in biotechnology, and safeguard American citizens from emerging threats to their privacy, the federal government must modernize its approach to human genetic and biological data.
From use to testing to deployment, the scaffolding for responsible integration of AI into high-risk use cases is just not there.