The Person Who Runs HR For 2 Million Federal Workers

Katherine Boyle 0:00 We are talking about a subject that I think is top of mind for everyone, making government cool again

Greg Barbaccia 0:05 This is a administration that wants to lean forward and isn't afraid of upsetting some of the ecosystem that's out there

Scott Kupor 0:11 Technology continues to advance rapidly, and, you know, just to be blunt, the government is nowhere near prepared for it. We just don't have the right talent here

Greg Barbaccia 0:18 While it's very hard for the government to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation, we do rule on mission. You get access to some of the world's hardest problems in the government. You get agency to affect potentially over 300 million people

Katherine Boyle 0:33 The US will win the future if we blank

Scott Kupor 0:36 Win the AI race

Greg Barbaccia 0:38 Remain undistracted

Katherine Boyle 0:39 [upbeat music]

Katherine Boyle 0:43 Scott, Greg, it is so wonderful to have you both here. Today, we are talking about a subject that I think is top of mind for everyone, making government cool again. Um, we're pleased today to have Scott Kupor, who's the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, and Greg Barbaccia, who's the Chief Information Officer for the United States. Both of you have very different backgrounds, coming to Washington than what we've previously seen. But we are seeing this, I, I would call it a renaissance of people in the private sector, and particularly people in tech, with tech backgrounds, wanting to serve their country, wanting to come into government.

Katherine Boyle 1:12 So I think I'd, I'd start with you, Scott. You know, you were employee number one, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, had, had long been in the private sector helping to build companies, investing in companies. What made you say, "I'm done with managing a 600-person organization, and now I'm gonna manage 2.3 million people in the federal government"?

Scott Kupor 1:28 Well, first of all, thanks for having us. It's, uh, it's really... And it's great, great to see you again-

Katherine Boyle 1:32 Great to see you

Scott Kupor 1:32 ... obviously, as a, as a former partner. Um, I definitely was not running away from a16z, just to be-

Greg Barbaccia 1:36 [laughs]

Scott Kupor 1:36 ... totally clear. In case Marc and Ben are listening-

Katherine Boyle 1:38 Sure. Sure

Scott Kupor 1:39 ... uh, in case Marc and Ben are listening-

Katherine Boyle 1:40 [laughs]

Scott Kupor 1:40 No, no, no, I love a16z. You know, look, it was very simple, which is, um, I just thought it was a confluence of events that made sense, which is, uh, we know we're on this kind of precipice from a fiscal perspective, right? We're clearly spending way more money than we should, and we've got this problem, which I know Greg is, you know, well-versed on, which is w- technology continues to advance rapidly, and, you know, just to be blunt, the government is nowhere near prepared for it. And some of that is obviously a procurement issue, and others that I know Greg and team are working on it. A lot of it's a talent issue. We just don't have the right talent here. So it was a combination of those things, you know, an administration that I felt like actually this was a real priority for them, and, you know, we've had incredible support from the president around everything from what, you know, David Sacks is doing on the AI side to obviously a lot of the merit hiring proposals that we're doing. So I don't know, it just was almost, like, serendipitous, which is right time for me personally, right time, uh, luckily for Marc and Ben to be able to say, "Hey, like, you know, if, if this is what you wanna do, like, you know, you know, go do it," and then an opportunity to really just kind of do some things that I thought were really important for the country.

Katherine Boyle 2:35 Totally. And I think a lot of our tech listeners probably have never heard the term OPM before.

Scott Kupor 2:39 No. [laughs]

Katherine Boyle 2:39 Um, so maybe, maybe just give us an overview. What does OPM do? And then when you were thinking about, as you said, talent is so important-

Scott Kupor 2:45 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 2:45 ... um, but it's something that I think a lot of normal Americans don't think about, like the talent in the federal government, what does that even mean?

Scott Kupor 2:50 Yeah.

Katherine Boyle 2:50 So maybe talk about your, your thesis and philosophy of how you can help reshape that.

Scott Kupor 2:54 Absolutely. So, um, it's not surprising that people don't know what OPM is. As I've said publicly before, I didn't know what OPM was either until-

Katherine Boyle 3:00 [laughs]

Scott Kupor 3:00 ... uh, the transition team started talking to me about these opportunities.

Katherine Boyle 3:02 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 3:03 So it stands for Office of Personnel Management, as you mentioned. I think the very simple way to think about it is we are the kind of talent organization for the federal government, so our job is everything to hopefully bring the right talent in, to make sure we have, uh, policies around, you know, what are the hiring standards for government? What are we gonna do on performance management? The goal, in my mind, is very simple, which is how do we attract and retain the very best people in the country and, you know, make sure that we can deploy their efforts on behalf of the American people. So that's at a very high level kind of how to think about it. Um, just to kind of level set again for the organization, we've got about roughly-- We started the year about 2.4 million f- civilian employees, so we don't have responsibility for uniformed military, but there's about 2.4 million civilian employees. We've done a lot of work over the course of this year, a lot of which was catalyzed by Elon and the DOGE team. As a result, we expect probably that we'll end up with somewhere around 2.1 million employees at the end of the year, so roughly about a 300,000, uh, reduction. Um, and, uh, you know, as, as, you know, those are-- A lot of those came from kind of the voluntary programs that DOGE had put together, these deferred resignation programs and other stuff. So despite the fact that obviously anytime you're talking about people losing jobs, it's obviously a real serious issue, the good news is I think we were able to design programs that gave people the option, if they just didn't wanna be a part of the go-forward organization, to be able to kind of, you know, self-select and, uh, you know, volunteer to kinda go do other things.

Katherine Boyle 4:18 Absolutely. And we'll certainly get more into kind of organizational design-

Scott Kupor 4:21 Awesome. That'd be great

Katherine Boyle 4:21 ... and how you remake something that, that big. Um, Greg, I wanna come to you because y- you have a very different background of having worked at Palantir, um, a veteran, um, you know, do- done a host of different things, but really always focused on technology. What was it that made you say, "Okay, now I'm gonna bring this private sector technology expertise into, into government"?

Greg Barbaccia 4:40 Yeah, like Scott mentioned, right administration, right timing. Uh, it's certainly in the zeitgeist lately that this is a time for change. This is a administration that wants to lean forward and isn't afraid of upsetting some of the ecosystem that's out there. So I saw this as a real opportunity, um, especially where I'm at in my career, to make some different change, so I jumped at the opportunity.

Katherine Boyle 5:01 Mm-hmm. And then when, when you hear the word chief information officer, I think a lot of people probably think very different things-

Greg Barbaccia 5:06 Mm-hmm

Katherine Boyle 5:06 ... about what that could mean. What, what are your, your tasks, your roles, and what, what does a, what does a CIO do inside the federal government?

Greg Barbaccia 5:12 Yeah, so it is not directly analogous to what you would see in the private sector. Um, I am responsible for technology policy and budgeting decisions across the entire, um, executive federal branch. So one of the big priorities of the administration is one government effort, so how do we move forward as one government? Um, a lot of the issues we've had in the past were individual agencies do things in silos, so how do I galvanize the CIO community to move the administration priorities together as one?

Katherine Boyle 5:42 Yeah. Yeah.

Katherine Boyle 5:43 One question I always ask people when they come from government into Andreessen Horowitz is, what has surprised you most? Because I always see this sort of culture shock on people's faces-

Greg Barbaccia 5:51 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 5:51 ... of having left the government after 20 years and, and coming to work for, for us. It's a very different culture. So I wanna ask you all the same question.

Greg Barbaccia 5:57 [laughs]

Katherine Boyle 5:57 Maybe let's start with you, you, Greg. What was the thing-- You know, you've been in the seat how many days now?

Greg Barbaccia 6:02 Uh, 230 something. I don't know [laughs]

Katherine Boyle 6:04 So, so what-

Scott Kupor 6:05 Who's counting? I mean, who's counting?

Katherine Boyle 6:05 Yeah, yeah. But it, it is by days, right? Every day counts. So what has surprised you most? In those first days, fi- first 100 days, what was the thing you wrote down and said, "I just can't believe that this is how it works," or, "This is like, this was not what I was expecting"?

Greg Barbaccia 6:18 The compliance and regulatory regime is incredibly complex. Coming from Silicon Valley, where we move fast and break things, you do not have that opportunity in the United States government at this level, so that was a surprise. To satisfy some cliches, often things do take an act of Congress, and oftentimes we do need a fed- m- to make a federal case out of something, uh, so that was, uh, very eye-opening for me.

Katherine Boyle 6:44 Yeah. And Scott, you've been in seat 100 and-

Scott Kupor 6:46 Yeah, about 110 days or so-

Katherine Boyle 6:48 Yeah

Scott Kupor 6:48 ... right now, so. So shorter-

Greg Barbaccia 6:49 We're all shorter than Greg. Yeah. We're, we're getting there

Katherine Boyle 6:50 So first 100 days, what's been the thing that shocked you the most?

Scott Kupor 6:53 You know, a, a little, I wanna give a little nuance at least to at least what I've observed, uh, that Greg was talking about, and maybe this is the same thing, which is there's no question, right? There is a different ri- uh, you know, kind of compliance and, you know, regulatory environment for sure. And, and look, a lot of those are good reason. But what was most interesting to me from a culture and people perspective is just this over-obsession with risk, right? And so I, I sat in a couple meetings my first, uh, you know, couple days. I was like, "Why do we do that this way," right? And the answer was, "Well, if we don't do it this way, we might get sued, and then something might happen." And I asked people, I was like, "Okay, how many times have we actually been sued," right? Like, how many times has that actually happened? And, and the honest answer is, like, blank stares. Nobody actually knows, and nobody actually tracks it. But we've kind of just embedded in the culture this idea that risk is like this pass-fail thing. Like, you either have risk or you don't have risk, and if you have risk, God forbid, like, you should ever go there, basically.

Katherine Boyle 7:39 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 7:40 And so that to me was, like, the most eye-opening thing. And, and I guess I wasn't... I shouldn't have been surprised by it, but it was just almost like a cult of obsession, basically-

Katherine Boyle 7:47 Yeah

Scott Kupor 7:48 ... that anything that involved some element of risk, that was, like, the primary thing we were trying to do was mitigate risk.

Katherine Boyle 7:53 Mm.

Scott Kupor 7:53 There was no concept of either how big or how small is that risk, and then, then certainly no concept of the world that, you know, you and I, you live in and I used to live in, which is kind of how unbounded is the upside-

Katherine Boyle 8:04 Yeah

Scott Kupor 8:04 ... relative to that risk. Like, that conversation just never happens, and that was just super eye-opening for me.

Katherine Boyle 8:08 Have you reflected on why that is? I mean, uh, there's always been the joke that Washington is a town of lawyers, right?

Scott Kupor 8:13 Yeah.

Katherine Boyle 8:14 So everything is a, is a legal issue. It's not a business issue. It's not a... You can't look at it from any other lens. You're a lawyer.

Scott Kupor 8:19 Yeah.

Katherine Boyle 8:19 Um, uh, what, what is your sort of takeaway as to how we've gotten to the point where we never look at upside and we only look at let's just make sure that we don't fail?

Scott Kupor 8:27 I think there's, I think there's a couple issues. So one is, I think that's right. Look, there's a ton of lawyers that run around here and that make a living basically scaring people into-

Katherine Boyle 8:33 Yeah

Scott Kupor 8:33 ... worrying about risk. And look, as a, yes, as a former lawyer myself-

Katherine Boyle 8:36 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 8:37 [laughs]

Scott Kupor 8:37 ... uh, you know, it's the Full Employment Act for lawyers here in DC, there's no question.

Katherine Boyle 8:39 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 8:39 And some of my best friends are lawyers, so I don't mean that in any, you know, uh, derogatory way. Um, I think the other thing is part of it is the political system. So if we just forget about, like, the executive branch, people like us, if you go to the other side, right, down this way towards the Hill, um, the problem is anytime somebody makes a mistake, the opposite party basically wants to use that mistake as an example for why their entire position is wrong, right?

Katherine Boyle 9:01 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 9:01 So the one I love to, uh, talk about is, you know, in our conference room in, uh, Menlo Park, we have a Solyndra, uh, a- an old Solyndra pa- I don't even know what it is, a p- panel or something that Mark kind of somehow picked up at one point in time. And if you remember the whole debacle over Solyndra, right? This was in the, um, Obama administration.

Katherine Boyle 9:18 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 9:18 You know, they did this big loan. It turns out Solyndra goes bankrupt, and everyone was like, "Look, Obama's an idiot. This is terrible," right? "The government should never be doing this stuff." Now, probably the government probably shouldn't have been doing that, and so, uh, but the point is, nobody ever said, "Okay," like, "what are the other 50 projects maybe that we've done? If we think clean energy's important, what are the other 50 things we've done? And yes, like, some are gonna fail, and some are gonna succeed, okay, and then hopefully some succeed wildly." But there's no concept, I would say, of a portfolio.

Katherine Boyle 9:42 Yes.

Scott Kupor 9:43 Everything is a one-off project, and when a one-off project fails, then whichever party didn't sponsor it says, "Those guys are idiots. This is why you should never vote for them. This is why you should never trust them." So I think that's, that's a bigger part of it. Um, y- you know, uh, uh, you asked me, like, what's been different. The other thing is, like, the number of oversight agencies and the amount of activity this government spends. I mean, Greg, I'm sure you deal with it, too, but, you know, every day I have a report from the GAO, or I have a report from the OIG, or I have a report from, you know, God knows who or some Democrat on my committee who, you know, doesn't like what we're doing. And they're all well-intentioned, right? They're all intended to be oversight, but then you've created this culture of oversight which therefore then means, like, we should never take any risks because nobody wants to, like, see their department show up in a GAO report, basically. So we've just overdone this concept of risk, um, as a way to actually, you know, kind of direct behavior.

Katherine Boyle 10:31 Totally. And, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, too. Where do you see sort of the misunderstanding or miscalibration of risk going wrong in terms of working with technology or bringing technology into, to the federal government?

Greg Barbaccia 10:41 Like Scott mentioned, uh, for me specifically, I have more auditors auditing my team than I have team members.

Scott Kupor 10:47 [laughs]

Katherine Boyle 10:48 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 10:48 Uh, and that's, uh, not hyperbole.

Katherine Boyle 10:50 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 10:50 Yeah.

Greg Barbaccia 10:51 Um, in the private sector, lawyers are focused on how do we enable the business in a way that's responsible, and how do we give our leadership a sober analysis of risk? In the government, it is very hard to lose your job and very hard to get fired, and one of the only ways that happens is when you get sued and also, like Scott mentioned, when you get dragged up to the Hill, um, and all these victory laps the, um, party that's not in power at the moment takes. So that, uh, you know, just encircles everything we do.

Katherine Boyle 11:21 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 11:21 Yeah, and but, but, you know, I would just add, and, and, you know, again, Katherine, you know this from the world that you live in today, likeI'm, I'm not sitting here, and I don't think Greg is, like, none of us are saying we should go do the Silicon Valley risk here, right?

Katherine Boyle 11:30 Of course.

Scott Kupor 11:30 No one's saying, like, let's just throw caution to the wind, let's just do... Like, we do need to make sure people get their Social Security checks and people, you know-

Katherine Boyle 11:35 Yes

Scott Kupor 11:35 ... actually, we have a national defense system that works. But we're so far on the other side that, like, just some modicum of saying, I've been using the term internally in my team, measured risk is what I've been telling people. Like, that's an objective for the organization. And what I'm just trying to get them slowly to say is, "Look, like, there's no such thing as 100% on any test."

Katherine Boyle 11:51 Uh-huh.

Scott Kupor 11:52 "Everything has some risk. Let's just understand it." And yes, if the c- if it's catastrophic, and if we get it wrong, and that means, like, the national security of the government is in play, then we probably shouldn't do that, okay? But, like, the vast majority of things we do don't involve sovereignty or national security-

Katherine Boyle 12:05 Yes

Scott Kupor 12:06 ... or does somebody actually get a Social Security check?

Katherine Boyle 12:08 Yeah. No, that, that is a good point that not everything is a crisis-

Scott Kupor 12:10 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 12:10 ... and this is a town that specializes in crisis. [laughs]

Scott Kupor 12:12 Yes, we love a crisis, yes. Exactly.

Katherine Boyle 12:13 But you, you actually...

Katherine Boyle 12:14 You, you said something very interesting. I th- I believe it was on, um, on, on either, uh, uh, ABC or NBC, but you said that only 4% of federal employees are ranked below expectations, 60% are ranked at meeting expectations. And, you know, going back to this, this culture of we can't fire anyone or we can't actually talk about anyone's performance-

Scott Kupor 12:34 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 12:34 ... maybe talk a little bit about how coming into an organization where everyone is a superstar-

Scott Kupor 12:38 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 12:38 ... and no one is bad at their job, how do you kind of shuffle through, okay, these are, these are the high performers-

Scott Kupor 12:43 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 12:43 ... and these are low performers, given that, that everyone is ranked on a, on a, on a gra- a, a grading curve, as you've said?

Scott Kupor 12:48 Yeah. So let me actually give you... Let me give you some new numbers 'cause it's actually even worse-

Katherine Boyle 12:53 Agreed

Scott Kupor 12:53 ... than we said.

Katherine Boyle 12:53 Oh, goodness. Okay. [laughs]

Scott Kupor 12:53 The good news is it's worse, so, uh, the narrative still plays, right?

Katherine Boyle 12:56 Yes. Uh-huh.

Scott Kupor 12:57 Which is... Okay, so just to take one step back, everybody in the government gets ranked... Well, not everybody. Most people get ranked one through five in their annual review. Five is the best score, one is the, you know, worst, and three means you're meeting expectations, right? You're doing what you're supposed to do. So fours and fives, so the very, very top, is roughly 65 to 70% of people get a four or a five. Ninety-- When you add threes, fours, and five, that's 99.7%, okay? So 99.7% are a three or higher, 0.3%, therefore, is a one or a two. Now, look, in a 2.3 or 2.4 or 2.1 million workforce, you might expect, like, it's probably the case that not everyone is above median, and you would expect that there's enough of a population that you would have some normalized type of distribution, right?

Katherine Boyle 13:40 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 13:40 That's, that's just not the case. So, um, one of the things that we're doing, we just put out guidance on this, at least with respect to what are called the SES, which are the most senior level people in government, is we are effectively doing a modicum of a forced distribution. And so we put out guidance that says only 30% of the people can be ranked a four or five.

Katherine Boyle 13:58 Okay.

Scott Kupor 13:59 Um, we didn't put any guidance as to what the others are, but we're really trying to kind of slowly change the culture to say, you know what? Like, everybody actually can be measured against one another, and it's not a competition issue. It's... You know, I gave an example in a blog post. I wrote, look, if you are the head of sales in a private company, and you do 105% of your quota, you probably are gonna do better than the CIO in that company who, you know, achieved 90% of her objectives. Like, and that's reasonable and fair, and you all did a good job. Like, everybody gets a, you know, nice congratulations and a nice, you know, certification, but that's not what we're talking about here, right?

Katherine Boyle 14:29 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 14:29 And so we've just got this massive grade inflation, and as a result, what's really important is two things that follow that. One is the compensation and reward system that is messed up because if everybody's great, then that means bonuses just get peanut buttered out. There's no differentiation. Promotions just get peanut buttered out. And you've got this opposite problem, which is the people who probably should be ones or twos don't actually ever get ranked that way, and some of that is what Greg said, which is just, it's really hard to fire people. So you can understand the managerial behavior is if it's gonna take me 12, 18, 24 months of appeals to do something, I don't wanna do it. But as a result, therefore, sometimes people say it's better to keep a warm body in a job than it is actually to go through the process of, you know, removing them-

Katherine Boyle 15:08 Yeah

Scott Kupor 15:08 ... which just makes no sense. And so one of the things we're trying to do is we just wanna create a high-performance culture because the only way that we attract and retain great people is great people wanna be surrounded by great people, and they wanna work in an environment where their activities are rewarded and where they can be promoted, you know, because of their merit as opposed to, you know, how many years they sat in a seat, so-

Katherine Boyle 15:26 Totally

Scott Kupor 15:26 ... it's a fundamental cultural change. It's gonna take a lot of heavy lifting to get done, but we're starting at the margins, you know, to kind of figure out a way to actually incent the right behavior.

Katherine Boyle 15:34 And what's been the reaction? I mean, i- in some ways you would, you would expect that there'd be some people who would be kind of shocked by this, but others who say, "Finally. [laughs] Finally a high performer."

Scott Kupor 15:42 It... I, I think that's exactly right. Yeah. So it's a very, um... I, I hear both things. So, um, look, um, there's no question that if you survey the government and you ask people, uh, there, there w- there was this thing called FEVS that the government does every year. Uh, we, we didn't do it this year just because, like, we missed the timing for it. It's basically an employee survey, right? One of the questions they ask in FEVS is, "Does my manager actually manage performance effectively, and in particular, does my manager kind of, you know, hold people accountable to behavior?" You get extremely low scores on that. So there's no secret. Like, it's not a secret. I think most people, if you ask them, will say, "Yes, there are people in my organization who everybody knows," and it's true in any organization, right? It's unfortunately true even in a smaller organization like a16z. Like, everybody actually knows who the people are who are really carrying their weight, and also people know who's, you know, the small group of people who are kind of just dialing in, basically, right?

Katherine Boyle 16:27 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 16:27 So it's no secret. So you hear that from people, and, and that's good, and so there are some people who say this is a good thing. The other concerns I've got on the other end is, well, these are all really high-performing people, and so it's unfair to kind of, you know, not, you know, give everybody a high grade. Also, you know, gee, are we gonna create competition among these executives? And my answer to all those has been... I mean, on the first question, it's like, look, it's not unfair. This is the world, and the reality is, is, like, we're not all, you know, kind of equal in terms of our contributions in an organization, so, like, we just need to get over that fallacy and recognize it.

Katherine Boyle 16:58 Of course.

Scott Kupor 16:58 And it's not... I'm not worried about competition either because, look, if we want teamwork, which I think we do, then you incent people for teamwork, right? As part of your annual review, I know this, right? At, at Andreessen Horowitz, like, one of our goals is we believe teams beat individuals.

Katherine Boyle 17:10 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 17:10 And so one of the things that we review Catherine on every year is, like, are you working in isolation, or are you leveraging the full strengths of the team to win deals or to do other stuff? And so therefore, your behavior obviously reflects that if you wanna be in the top, you know, performance.

Katherine Boyle 17:22 Of course.

Scott Kupor 17:22 It's the same thing with government, right?

Katherine Boyle 17:24 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 17:24 What's the behavior we want? Let's create an incentive structure around it. Let's actually measure people for it. Let's put it in their reviews. And if we do that, like, I think we get the behavior that we want.

Katherine Boyle 17:31 Absolutely. Greg, I wanna come to

Katherine Boyle 17:33 you on this question because talent is changing so quickly in the private sector, particularly tech around AI, around all of these new, I, I would say, kind of paradigm shifts that are happening at once. When you think about recruiting those people or bringing those people into, to, to your world and, and bringing more, I would say, technologically advanced people into the government, what, what have been some of the learnings or, or how do you think about how talent impacts your org?

Greg Barbaccia 17:56 I think about what incentivized people to go to high-performing organizations in general. We give them the tools that they need to be successful, we trust them to have the freedom to innovate, and we need to give them access to problems that are, uh, sufficiently difficult and interesting to them. While it's very hard for the government to compete with Silicon Valley on compensation and, uh, things like equity, and this is something Scott and I, uh, talk about at length, we do rule on mission. You get access to some of the world's hardest problems in the government. You get agency to affect potentially over 300 million people, and you get access to things that outweigh your tenure at the organization, something that if you went to a large company, it would take you perhaps a decade to get to such, uh, valuable work on behalf of the company. You could come into government and very quickly do something that every citizen and taxpayer would feel, so that's something we're optimizing on right now.

Katherine Boyle 18:54 Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Kupor 18:54 Yeah. Greg, uh, Greg and I have been spending a lot of time on this, and I would just augment, uh, a couple things. One is I think there's kind of... Look, there's a, there's, there's compensation-- Look, we're never gonna solve the compensation problem with the private sector, but as Greg said, look, like I, I think that's okay. I think there is a, there is a class of people who care about public service and, and, you know, who recognize that this has value. I think part of the problem we have on attracting talent is, uh, number one, that we don't tell the right n- we don't sell the right narrative, quite frankly. So, um, I'll, I'll give you an example. When I-- One of my first meetings I had when I started here, uh, somebody on my team who's, you know, a career, uh, government person said, "Hey, you guys," meaning I think she was, uh, this was the collectively DOGE, uh-

Greg Barbaccia 19:31 Mm-hmm

Scott Kupor 19:32 ... uh, was the you guys. She's like, "You guys are destroying kind of the message we've always said about government, which is the beauty of government is we attract people because you have, you know, effectively lifetime employment, you have tenure." And, you know, I said two things. I said, "One is, look, I hate to break the story to you, but, like, that's just a myth. Like, there's no such thing as lifetime employment. Like, nobody has that, and that's just, you know, maybe that was true in the 1950s and 1960s. It's not true." But I said, "Look, like, y- that's totally the wrong message. Like, the message we want is exactly what Greg said, which is if you wanna come here and solve, like, really hard problems and do something really cutting edge, and oh, by the way, you wanna serve your country, like, that's the mission we want to tell young people on the technology side," and we've never told that story basically until we've had people like Greg sitting in the seat, and now we have, we have a good cohort of kind of technology people who can kind of do that.

Katherine Boyle 20:14 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 20:14 Um, the other, you know, one of the other problems we have, and Greg [chuckles] and I have talked about this too, is the other problem we have with getting, you know, engineers here is many jobs in, in the engineering organizations are managing contractors, right? And so if you're some, like, you know, super smart person, you know, whatever, coming out of, you know, MIT, computer science or something, like, you actually wanna do something cool. You don't wanna actually manage some external contractors.

Katherine Boyle 20:34 Yes.

Scott Kupor 20:34 And so we've got this endemic problem, which is we're missing talent, therefore we go to contractors, therefore we can't actually recruit talent because the job is to manage contractors, so, like, we have to break this mold-

Katherine Boyle 20:44 Yeah

Scott Kupor 20:45 ... and actually bring s- bring p- people in. And, and w- uh, Greg and I are working on an initiative which, you know, I'm very excited about, which I, I'm very confident we're gonna pull off to really target on how do we get, like, particularly early-stage technology people into the government and make them effective in actually solving, you know, the most complex problems that we have.

Katherine Boyle 21:00 Totally. And that, that was gonna be sort of my next question is, you know, w- we're sort of obsessed with pools of talent in Silicon Valley.

Scott Kupor 21:05 Absolutely.

Katherine Boyle 21:05 It's like, where's the, where's the next pool of talent, or where's the next great place to recruit from that other people haven't discovered? Are there sort of untapped pockets or, or pools of talent where you're saying across America, these people would be fantastic in exactly what you just described? Maybe they don't know we exist, or maybe, you know, maybe they're early in career and they haven't even thought about it, or maybe they're, they're more senior in career and they just haven't thought about making the leap into government. Like, how are you getting the message out, and kind of what pools are you attacking first?

Scott Kupor 21:30 Yeah. So, um, at least from my perspective, and Greg may have a different view, is the pool I'm trying to attack first is the early talent pool.

Greg Barbaccia 21:36 Mm-hmm.

Katherine Boyle 21:36 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 21:36 And there are a couple reasons for that. One is just, look, as you well know, AI, all this stuff is moving really fast, and so, look, we need people who are really, really conversant with this stuff. And it's not that people who aren't early career can't do this, but, you know, we do know that, look, adoption of technology sometimes takes new people and, you know, who have, you know, very open minds on things. So, uh, we wanna do that. The other thing is we have a super, uh, particular early talent problem broadly in the government. So just to give you a sense, 7% of government employees are under the age of 30.

Katherine Boyle 22:04 Wow.

Scott Kupor 22:04 That compares with close to a quarter of the normal workforce outside of government. And by the way, on the other side, we have 45 almost percent of people over the age of 50, which compares to about 33% in the non-federal workforce. So, you know, and again, this is not an ageism, uh, comment, but, like, look, if we're gonna lead on AI, if we're gonna lead in new technologies, we need people who are probably at an earlier stage in their career where they're willing to take some of those risks.

Katherine Boyle 22:26 Yes.

Scott Kupor 22:26 Um, so that's kinda thing number one I think we need to do is just kind of really go after that. So the program that, you know, Greg and I have been working on, uh, which we're hoping to roll out soon, is to target, okay, how do we get early career people in, number one? Number two is we have a technical management problem also in the government, so a significant portion of people in technical organizations are not actually technical, and they're managing people who are technical, and therefore they're just not, quite frankly, able to provide career, career development, other things that happen. So one of the things I think

Scott Kupor 22:54 we can lean on the private sector more is to basically help us with that problem, which is let's go to all the great technology companies and say, "You know what? Show us your, like, directors, senior directors, VPs. Let's put them on, like, a two-year secondment, for example, in the government and have them come be managers of early career technology teams, and let's start this greater kind of connectivity between the public and the private sector."

Katherine Boyle 23:15 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 23:15 I think this is the other challenge we have with young talent, at least having talked to a bunch of people, is we've created this false dichotomy, which is you're either a career public service person or you're a career private sector person.

Katherine Boyle 23:24 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 23:25 And I just think that's a silly dichotomy, right? The reality is, look, most people change jobs all the time, and we should make it fluid, right? And I think there's huge value to the government, and there's huge value to the private sector by us having a lot more co-mingling of that.

Katherine Boyle 23:36 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 23:36 And soLook, I would love to have young engineers come here for two or three or four years and quite frankly then go to the private sector and realize that the private sector values the experience they have, they value the knowledge, and if they wanna maximize their earnings, great, go maximize your earnings in the private sector, basically. That's totally fine. But this idea that at 22 years old you have to decide, like, am I gonna go be a 40-year career, you know, civil servant, or am I gonna go be a 40-year private sector person? I, I just think that's an outdated mode of thinking about employment.

Katherine Boyle 24:01 Absolutely. Yeah, Greg, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because this concept

Katherine Boyle 24:04 of a tour of duty-

Scott Kupor 24:05 Mm-hmm

Katherine Boyle 24:05 ... I mean, sometimes you, you talk to people in Silicon Valley and they say, "Okay, if I leave my, you know, my, my fast-moving job right now or where I'm seeing cutting age- cut- cutting-edge AI, and then I go into government, there's no guarantee I'll be able to go back. There's no guarantee those years will be, you know, the best years [chuckles] of my life where I've learned something." W- what is your pitch, or how do you kind of implement sort of a, a tour of duty? Have you thought about sort of how you can bring people in for a couple years and, and kind of give status to that where then they'll be very attractive to the private sector coming out?

Greg Barbaccia 24:32 Absolutely. I think, uh, the new grad younger talent's a, a phenomenal idea. I've been thinking a lot lately about people who just had perhaps their first exit-

Scott Kupor 24:39 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

Greg Barbaccia 24:40 ... or had some success, um, for a few years in the private sector come to the government and see how you do because it is a totally different operating environment. Everything you do after working in tech in the government will be, uh, easier, I, I assure you.

Katherine Boyle 24:55 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 24:56 Um, and you will learn how to operate in environments of, uh, opacity that probably you don't see in the private sector. And I wanted to touch on something Scott mentioned, this technology management problem. This is a very real problem. Um, first we have it from a screening talent, uh, perspective, that people who are screening resumes for technologists in the government perhaps don't have the background to know what exactly we need, what exactly we're looking for. Oftentimes, they're the same people screening resumes for a bunch of different roles under their purview. And then this also translates to contracts. So people ask, "How do these big contract sprawls happen? How do we get all these tech projects that don't make any sense?" If you work- walk through the White House complex, it looks like a Suburban dealership. There's Suburbans everywhere.

Katherine Boyle 25:42 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 25:42 But every American has an intrinsic understanding of how much a Chevy Suburban should cost.

Katherine Boyle 25:48 Yeah.

Greg Barbaccia 25:48 So if I were to hand you a contract for a fleet of Suburbans, and they were $900,000 each, you would say, "This is objectively insane."

Katherine Boyle 25:55 Yeah.

Greg Barbaccia 25:55 "That is not how much a vehicle costs."

Katherine Boyle 25:57 Yeah.

Greg Barbaccia 25:58 Uh, but we are missing that crucial, uh, talent in the government. This is why the people who are charged with approving contracts oftentimes do not understand the technology problem deeply. They don't understand what is an appropriate solution. They don't understand how long it should take to solve that, how many people we need to solve it, what type of person we need to deploy at the problem, if we're speaking about contractors. This is how these large, uh, Beltway bandits, as they call them, or systems integrators, get these in- indefinite, uh, term contracts that don't make any sense when you're-

Scott Kupor 26:33 Yeah

Greg Barbaccia 26:33 ... trying to apply the problem. So these middle managers coming from tech is really interesting. We need the people who understand the roles and what they're doing to help adjudicate the talent that's coming in and also the contracts. Otherwise, the sprawl is just gonna be an indefinite problem.

Scott Kupor 26:47 Yeah.

Katherine Boyle 26:48 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 26:48 Greg, uh, if I could add one thing, Greg knows this, but, uh, Katherine, just for you and for the listeners, like, so as Greg mentioned, this all starts even at the very front end of, like, you know, evaluating talent. So we literally have, again, people who are non-functional experts evaluating people's resumes. Those-- And their evaluation to date, until very recently, has been, I would call, self-assessment, which is the candidate says, "I have the following skills."

Greg Barbaccia 27:12 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 27:12 And the, the HR person says, "Great, those are the following skills that turns out are on this job description." Well, it's not by accident that it turns out... Like, these people are smart enough. It's not by accident that it turns out their skills exactly match what's on the job description. But, uh, we do not actually verify those. So we do not do, like, a software coding test to hire. Uh, you know, probably like you would go-- you would probably fire one of your CEOs in any-

Katherine Boyle 27:32 Yeah

Scott Kupor 27:32 ... of your companies-

Greg Barbaccia 27:33 Uh-huh

Scott Kupor 27:33 ... if you found that they were hiring engineers without actually assessing their technical talent for real.

Katherine Boyle 27:38 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 27:38 So, and, and again, this goes back to what we talked about from a risk perspective. So there's a historical reason for this, which is literally 40 years ago, we used to have a civil service exam.

Katherine Boyle 27:46 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 27:47 Um, and, uh, because of, uh, it, there was, it was basically taken away very end of the Carter administration, beginning of the Reagan administration, because, uh, it was deemed to have disparate impact. So, you know, there was lower scores for minority candidates on it. And so the government entered into a consent decree and said, "We will, you know, henceforth no longer do these things."

Katherine Boyle 28:04 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 28:05 And that literally has sat on the books for 43 years until luckily, actually, one of the first things that, you know, we did in this administration is we were able to kind of exit that consent decree, and then we've given guidance now as part of our merit hiring plan that everybody who's gonna apply for a job in the government has to have some functional assessment done, right?

Katherine Boyle 28:22 Mm.

Scott Kupor 28:22 So, like, if you're a software engineer, we're gonna give you a coding job. If you're applying for an HR job, we're gonna, like, figure out what is the right kind of way to actually test your skills. So you've got this just, like, compounding problem, which is you have people hiring people who don't have their own expertise to evaluate them, and there's no check on that, and that just compounds the problem that Greg's talking about, and then those people get promoted, and now you have non-technical people sitting in managerial roles. And so, like, we have to, like, just dismantle each brick one by one in order to actually solve the hiring problem.

Katherine Boyle 28:48 Totally. Totally. And it's interesting because I,

Katherine Boyle 28:50 I'm... What, what you're talking about, it, it's, it's, it's, in many ways, it's an opportunity with AI-

Scott Kupor 28:54 Yeah. Yeah

Katherine Boyle 28:54 ... because I, I'm, I'm going back to a couple years ago, and this was, you know, at Andreessen Horowitz, but also I think across Silicon Valley, there was the earth-shattering moment of ChatGPT's release in 20- late 2022.

Scott Kupor 29:04 Yep.

Katherine Boyle 29:04 And I think everyone woke up and said, "We have to completely reorient our organizations, completely change our thinking, because AI is the next, you know, 10, 15 years at least of, of how we're going to be thinking about building companies." And that's, you know, it's three years later. It's not too late for the federal government to have that, that moment too. But I... But this, you know, how do you even evaluate these companies? As you said, if you're someone who's never worked with AI-

Scott Kupor 29:25 Right

Katherine Boyle 29:25 ... or never even really understood [chuckles] the term, how are you gonna know, um, which companies to work with? May- maybe talk a little bit about sort of the tactical way that you reorient a, a culture to say, "Okay, AI is gonna be very important for the federal government. We're gonna have to learn new things. We're gonna have to hire different types of people. We're gonna have to, um, work with different companies where maybe we can't pronounce the names as well."

Scott Kupor 29:44 [chuckles]

Katherine Boyle 29:44 Like, may- like, like just talk about how you tactically, um, implement that culture, um, for, for what you're doing.

Greg Barbaccia 29:50 Certainly, the government loves process and ritual.

Katherine Boyle 29:53 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 29:54 Um, so we're slowly moving towards, hey, we don't have to do these same mundane, repetitive tasks 'cause we could automate these things. So, you know, this goes back to, uh, early days of Silicon Valley, the process versus the product. So, uh, in the government, oftentimes you celebrate the fact that you checked all the boxes and you completed a process, uh, disconnected from the reality of did this move the needle for whatever outcome-

Scott Kupor 30:17 Yeah

Greg Barbaccia 30:17 ... we're trying to drive for our mission. So reorienting the culture of the employees in the government to say, uh-Your success of your job is now based on the outcomes we're driving for the mission and, uh, being focused on that. So we are going to use this technology to kind of change what you were doing all day. Instead of just going through these tasks, we're now gonna automate everything that we can do in a whatever way is responsible to the, the mission being driven, and now you're gonna do higher value work, uh, for the taxpayer. And what's important is we did this in the past. We moved, uh, from budgeting from ledgers to Excel, and, you know, eventually we moved away from post into email. So instead of doing all these things physically, we did them digitally. Now it's time for another modernization. So to get peop- people comfortable with their roles are intrinsically changing because of this technology, um, in a way we haven't seen in at least a few generations.

Scott Kupor 31:12 Yeah. I think there's a, a, I think there's kind of... We have to attack it from a couple angles, right? One is, and Gr- you know, a huge kudos to Greg, to David Saks, to Sriram, to all the people, and the president for his leadership here, which is we now have at least a tops down directive, right?

Greg Barbaccia 31:26 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 31:26 So the president, you know, through that report, the AI report, basically said, "Look, this is a critical agenda for the U.S. government." And so for people like Greg, who get to talk across, like, all the CIOs, he at least now can say, "Hey, look, like, the president's been very clear. Like, this is an important agenda item," and, and we can have his leadership do that. So I think that's awesome. I think at the micro level, I tell you, like in our organization, we're a tiny organization. We're like, you know, a couple thousand people. Um, w- it's, you have to just slowly, slowly kind of change the behavior. So one of the things we did, like literally, believe it or not, until this week, we did not have ChatGPT on anybody's actual desktop, right? And so, um, I've been, you know, pounding my CEO, CIO and pounding my CEO. We finally literally, you know, thanks to the new deal that GSA did for the, you know, the $1 a year deal, and I'm sure Greg was a part of that, too, we now have ChatGPT. Great. So what I've told everybody in my team is like, "It is your obligation to learn this." Now, you can pretend that it doesn't exist, and you can put your head in the sand, and that's fine, but, like, I'm not gonna be responsible for that 'cause the technology is gonna advance whether you use it or not.

Greg Barbaccia 32:22 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 32:22 The question for you as an employee in the government is, like, do you wanna be modern? Do you wanna actually like, you know, find ways to implement this? So I've said, "Look, like, just find little things. Like, what are you doing in your job today where you can get a 5% incremental improvement on your efficiency because you, like, queried something in ChatGPT?" Or, you know, we do a ton of rule and regulation writing. You know, everybody in the government does that. Like, what a great use case for AI, right? Again, like, let's not just... You know, look, we're not gonna have the AI write the rules, but AI can do information dissemination.

Greg Barbaccia 32:48 Mm.

Scott Kupor 32:48 It can help you, you know, kind of understand, is this really statutory really required, or is it not statutorily required?

Greg Barbaccia 32:53 Mm.

Scott Kupor 32:53 Like, there's little stuff like that where I'm like, there's no risk in that. It's okay. The good news is everything, almost everything in the government is public information anyway-

Greg Barbaccia 33:00 Mm

Scott Kupor 33:00 ... so it's not like we have to put, like, PII-

Greg Barbaccia 33:02 No

Scott Kupor 33:02 ... into all these systems. But we just have to, like, start to change behavior, like, one person at a time.

Greg Barbaccia 33:07 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 33:08 What I worry about, uh, is, like, I think, you know, Greg and team will, will, will help us with this one, but, like, if we say like, you know, we've got this big agenda to get AI, then people are gonna build these five, 10, 15-year plans, and quite frankly, nothing will ever happen. Like-

Greg Barbaccia 33:20 Yeah

Scott Kupor 33:21 ... we need, like, micro level projects at each agency with basic use cases to say, how do you just turn the dial this much on efficiency?

Greg Barbaccia 33:28 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 33:28 And then I think, like, then you can go do the five and 10 year, 15 projects.

Greg Barbaccia 33:31 Right.

Scott Kupor 33:32 But, like, the traditional mode, as Greg knows, of government is, like, everything should be tops down, like these massive white papers and all the other stuff.

Greg Barbaccia 33:37 Right.

Scott Kupor 33:37 Like, I don't think you adopt new technology through white papers. You do it through actual-

Greg Barbaccia 33:41 Totally. Using it

Scott Kupor 33:41 ... you know, individual user adoption.

Greg Barbaccia 33:42 And just understanding, like, the, the culture even deeper, I- is your sense that people use ChatGPT for recipes and travel-

Scott Kupor 33:49 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 33:49 ... planning already, and they're like, "Oh, great. Like, now we get to use it in our job, and we'll figure out new ways to use it"? Or is, is this... You know, there's a billion users on ChatGPT globally. Are... Is, is the federal government like the, the-

Scott Kupor 34:00 Part of the-

Greg Barbaccia 34:00 Part of the, part of the 5% who are like-

Scott Kupor 34:01 The ones that aren't actually doing it, yeah

Greg Barbaccia 34:01 ... "What is ChatGPT? How do I use this?"

Scott Kupor 34:04 Yeah.

Greg Barbaccia 34:04 Like, I mean, are, are there gonna need to be training programs on how to-

Scott Kupor 34:07 Mm

Greg Barbaccia 34:07 ... how to do prompts? I mean, like, maybe, maybe talk through sort of if, if that's part of the culture shock as well, that people actually don't use LLMs or, or haven't been using them in their, their life for the last few years.

Scott Kupor 34:16 I don't know if I can give you a quantitative answer on it. My gut is that there is, you know, the world that we all live in every day is still very different from the world that, you know... A billion people's good, but we know, what is there, seven billion people-

Greg Barbaccia 34:28 Yeah

Scott Kupor 34:28 ... in the world or something. So there's still-

Greg Barbaccia 34:29 Yeah

Scott Kupor 34:29 ... you know, 80% of the people plus who don't actually use these things.

Greg Barbaccia 34:32 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 34:33 So my sense is there's a little bit of that. Um, training's a real issue. So again, like, uh, this is, I'll give you another, like, great example. So, like, when we first rolled it out, um, or were about to roll it out, um, our team wanted to, like, literally put a three-page memo on how you should use it, what the risks are, and we literally were gonna have, like, people sign this acknowledgement. And I was like, "No," like, "time out." Like, that's the last thing we'll do to ever get people to adopt it. How about, like, tell me the three bullets that you care about, right? Like, don't put PII in this thing-

Greg Barbaccia 34:59 Mm

Scott Kupor 34:59 ... if you're worried about it. Don't just take its answer for granted because it might hallucinate. Like, those are probably good things we should tell people, right?

Greg Barbaccia 35:05 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 35:05 But, like, we're gonna put a two or three bullet email out, and we're not-- No one's signing a document, right? So number one is, like, we have to just, like, again, it goes back to this risk issue. Like, there's not that much risk in people using ChatGPT, quite frankly-

Greg Barbaccia 35:15 No

Scott Kupor 35:15 ... in government. Two is training, right? So the other thing we did is we said, "Okay, great." Like, here's a bunch of re- There's a ton of resources. Coursera has a bunch of free resources. OpenAI has a bunch of resources.

Greg Barbaccia 35:23 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 35:23 And so we just said, "Hey, you know what? Like, go schedule it with your manager, but everybody, you know, you're entitled to two hours a month of training using all these free resources. You can take time out of work, just clear it with your manager." But, like, we gotta give permission for people to actually do this kind of stuff.

Greg Barbaccia 35:36 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 35:36 So I don't know the quantitative answer as to-

Greg Barbaccia 35:38 Yeah

Scott Kupor 35:38 ... whether they're using it in their private lives. My guess is a lot of people are, but I think they've also been told, it's been a slap on the wrist, which is-

Greg Barbaccia 35:45 Mm

Scott Kupor 35:45 ... you know, don't do this in government because this is bad. It's dangerous. It hallucinates. You know, information will leak. All the kind of parade of horrors-

Greg Barbaccia 35:51 Mm-hmm

Scott Kupor 35:51 ... that, you know, will create a GAO report that nobody [laughs] wants to respond to, basically.

Greg Barbaccia 35:55 Totally. Yeah. And one of the frustrations with attracting talent is why I use something all day and I'm dependent on it in my personal life and, and now I can't use it at work. Why would I wanna come and do things in an antiquated fashion? So that's something we're thinking about also.

Scott Kupor 36:07 Yeah.

Greg Barbaccia 36:07 Totally.

Scott Kupor 36:07 I can tell you the people, um, so, you know, the people on my team who, you know, came from Silicon Valley who are working in my departmentWhat they were doing was just they would just, you know, on their personal phone-

Katherine Boyle 36:16 Yeah

Scott Kupor 36:16 ... they were using ChatGPT-

Katherine Boyle 36:17 Mm-hmm

Scott Kupor 36:17 ... to help them do stuff.

Katherine Boyle 36:18 But it- [laughs]

Scott Kupor 36:18 Or like, you know, now at least hopefully, you know, you can actually use your government laptop to do something that is not nefarious activity.

Katherine Boyle 36:23 Totally. Totally.

Greg Barbaccia 36:24 Chair swiveling is the term. [laughs]

Katherine Boyle 36:25 [laughs]

Scott Kupor 36:25 Is that what-

Greg Barbaccia 36:26 Yeah.

Scott Kupor 36:27 Okay. Chair swiveling. Okay, that's good. I hadn't heard that. Okay.

Katherine Boyle 36:27 That's great. That's great.

Scott Kupor 36:28 That's a good one.

Katherine Boyle 36:29 So I wanna ask one final question, then we'll go into a quick lightning round. But, you know, one of the things I- when we talk to people from our world or from private sector who, who come in to, to government, I, I always see they're working, like, 20-hour days. Like, they're, they're just working constantly, right? Like, it is, it is a race against the clock in many cases, where there's just an overwhelming amount of work to do. And a lot of people do see, see it as, "I have two, three, four years to make my impact. Um, I'm gonna do as much as possible, um, and, and hopefully I'll get a little bit done," right? But the-- but it's such a big world... You know, it's a big bite to chew, right?

Scott Kupor 37:00 Mm-hmm.

Katherine Boyle 37:00 Like, it's, it's-- there's so-- such an overwhelming amount of work to do. When, when you look ahead a couple years from now, what are-- how are you gonna measure yourselves in terms of coming from the private sector, having an impact? What are the things where you say, "If we get X, Y, and Z done, I will have considered my tour of duty to be extraordinary, and it will have changed the, the course of my organization"? I'll-- we'll start with, start with you, Scott.

Scott Kupor 37:19 [smacks lips] Yeah. I- I'd say for me, there's really, uh, kinda two things, and these are, like, my primary goals for our organization is, number one is I want operational efficiency to actually be a real first-class metric in the government, right? So you probably know this, right? But today, like, everybody's power in government is measured by how big their g- budget is and how many people they have. And so, again, we get the exact favor we incent, which is everybody wants to, like, grow their budget and grow their people. What I want people to do is say, "You know what? We're stewards of taxpayer dollars. Every single dollar we spend is someone else's money." We have this acronym inside of OPM. We say OPM stands for other people's money.

Greg Barbaccia 37:50 [laughs]

Scott Kupor 37:50 Um, and that is like-- And that means that your job is to deliver a high-quality service, but your job is always to look at, like, what continuous improvement can I be? And we should reward people actually for doing high-quality service at lower cost as opposed to reward people who do the service with, you know, by growing their budget, basically. Like, it's very simple. So number one, I would just like-- That would be number one for me. Number two for me just goes directly to the talent conversation we're having, which is if we can get in particular, and, and again, doesn't need to be exclusive, but if we can get particular early career people, whether it's tech or otherwise, we have this, we have this, as I said, we've got a youth problem broadly across government, so.

Greg Barbaccia 38:24 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 38:25 But anybody who wants to be a tech person or a financial analyst or an HR specialist, if we can actually get early people to say, early career people say, "Going to government is awesome. It's a great mission. I tackle really hard problems. I learn. I develop my career. And oh, by the way, if I wanna then go to the private sector, the private sector will recognize and reward that-

Katherine Boyle 38:41 Yes

Scott Kupor 38:42 ... service," then I think, like, look, I would be the most optimistic person in the world. Like, we will have, like, the most amazing, like, you know, you know, Pax Americana for the next, like, you know, 50 years, basically.

Katherine Boyle 38:51 Absolutely. Abso- And I think it's an amazing opportunity now too for young people. I mean, you look at the youth unemployment rates-

Scott Kupor 38:56 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 38:56 ... and, and, and what's happening when even in the private sector where it does seem like it's much harder for college students to be, to find their first job now.

Scott Kupor 39:02 Absolutely.

Katherine Boyle 39:03 If they view it as a two, three, four-year career, and then they can go into the private sector-

Scott Kupor 39:06 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 39:06 ... with some skills, that actually, that actually feels like a major opportunity to bring young people-

Scott Kupor 39:09 Yeah

Katherine Boyle 39:10 ... into government. Would love to hear your thoughts as well.

Greg Barbaccia 39:12 Uh, absolutely, making, uh, work in the government prestigious to the private sector employees, um, uh, and employers. For my technical goals, uh, focusing on the taxpayer and the citizen experience, the web of government websites-

Katherine Boyle 39:26 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 39:26 ... is insane. That is, uh, a passion, uh, project of mine. We're taking very, very-

Scott Kupor 39:30 Yes, we've been, we've been talking about this. [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 39:31 Seriously, the concept that you have to tell, um, you know, multiple different government agencies the same thing about you, your birth date, your address in a, in a bunch of different places, that's crazy. A lot of other countries have solved this in a first-class way. So we're thinking about how we could responsibly implement a consent-based, citizen-centric data sharing between agencies, uh, which would lead to a portal you could go to and see everything in one place, my benefits information, my tax return status, when my, uh, passport expires. This is one government. It's all the executive branch. Let's, you know, serve things to the taxpayer in a way that makes sense for them. That's very important to me. And also, just again, going back to this concept of one government, uh, my background in intelligence and my background at Palantir, how do we take a bunch of disparate datasets and use them to drive decision-making? Right now, we have a bunch of silos.

Scott Kupor 40:23 Mm-hmm.

Greg Barbaccia 40:23 The president signed an executive order about breaking down these silos. So using data to drive decision turns it into intelligence, so we could really make these intelligence and data-d- uh, driven decisions. That's something I'm, I'm focused on.

Katherine Boyle 40:38 Okay. Well, would be great to end with

Katherine Boyle 40:40 a lightning round. Uh, a myth about government and tech that you would like to retire or government tech that you would like to retire. Scott, let's start with you.

Scott Kupor 40:48 Look, I, I think it's a, uh... I think the myth that I'd like to retire is that the government actually cannot and should not be a leading innovator with deployment of technology.

Greg Barbaccia 40:56 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 40:56 I, I just think it's silly, and again, this whole risk mindset has totally warped everybody's views.

Katherine Boyle 41:00 Yeah. Great.

Greg Barbaccia 41:01 Uh, that the tools you'll get are terrible. I have a great laptop. It's fast. The battery works, uh, lasts a long time. I have an iPhone.

Katherine Boyle 41:08 [laughs]

Greg Barbaccia 41:09 So y- you're not gonna be on some antiquated-

Scott Kupor 41:11 Mm-hmm

Greg Barbaccia 41:11 ... uh, hardware.

Katherine Boyle 41:12 Yeah. Uh, so we've talked a lot about this, but a small process or policy tweak that you think would have the greatest outsize impact.

Scott Kupor 41:20 I, I think it's very simple, which is just, like, y- get people to forget about risk as a pass-fail thing and get people to think about risk as a spectrum of things, and also as what we talked about, is get people to think about, like, what's the upside benefit of what we're doing? I think if we made that small tweak without going crazy-

Katherine Boyle 41:35 Mm-hmm

Scott Kupor 41:35 ... I think we'd have a lot of difference.

Greg Barbaccia 41:37 Uh, rethinking the compliance things that came out before computers existed.

Katherine Boyle 41:44 One metric you track that you think others should.

Scott Kupor 41:48 I think it's operational efficiency, but.

Greg Barbaccia 41:50 Uh, rework percentage. How often are we doing the things over and over?

Katherine Boyle 41:55 Uh, a book or a resource you'd recommend to, to new builders in the public sector.

Scott Kupor 41:59 Uh, my favorite is still, uh, Only the Paranoid Survive.

Greg Barbaccia 42:02 Mm-hmm.

Scott Kupor 42:02 Uh, I think that's still applicable to everybody, whether private or public sector.

Greg Barbaccia 42:06 The Goal and the Phoenix Pro- Phoenix Project, taking, uh, you know, manufacturing lessons and applying them to technology.

Katherine Boyle 42:11 And then finally, finish the sentence: The US will win the future if we blank.

Scott Kupor 42:17 Win the AI race.

Greg Barbaccia 42:18 Remain undistracted.

Katherine Boyle 42:20 Awesome. Well, Scott, Greg, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about making government cool again and, and building for the public sector, and we so appreciate the service that you're doing for our country, so thank you.

Scott Kupor 42:30 Thank you for having us.

Greg Barbaccia 42:30 Thanks, Katherine. [upbeat music]