WASHINGTON, DC— US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor joined Fox News’ Saturday in America with host Kayleigh McEnany to highlight the launch of EarlyCareers.gov, a new initiative to recruit more early career Americans into federal service and strengthen the government’s talent pipeline.

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On the need to bring more young talent into government:

“And that’s seven percent [of the federal workforce being under the age of 30] by the way, compares with about 22,23 percent in the rest of the workforce. So, you’re experience probably is not that different. And on the other end as you probably know, we have close to half of the federal employees who are over the age of 50. So, we’ve got a real crisis in my mind here and we’ve got to reach out and find ways to get young, patriotic Americans, who want to help serve their country recognize that spending time in government is good for the country and quite frankly also great for their career.”

On administration efforts to reshape the federal workforce:

“We’ve been on a mission to what I would call reshaping the workforce, right? So yes, there’s no question that there are areas that are you know over invested in and part of what I think DOGE did was, ‘Hey look, let’s go relook at what are the things that are most critical to deliver great services for the American people?’ All that being said, there are areas where we know we have talent gaps. As you mentioned, we clearly have a gap in early careers. We have a gap in technology areas but there’s other places where we need to actually, you know, build and build strength in the organization. So, think of this as making sure that we are being efficient with our dollars but also investing where we think its appropriate on behalf of the American people.”

On creating more accessible pathways through merit-based hiring:

[O]ne of the things the president has been very clear, is look we want to hire based on merit and, you know, things like college degrees or even like tenure of experience, those are kind of what I would call proxies for merit, right? And so, what we’re really trying to do is to say look, it doesn’t matter to us if you come out of high school, if you go to college, if you’re smart, if you’re qualified to do the job, we want to hire you and by the way, we want to place you at the level that’s appropriate for your skill set. So, we’re going through all the job descriptions in government and basically eliminating degree requirements and eliminating tenure requirements as much as we can. So that we can actually focus on merit.”