“All part of making the government both efficient and making sure we've got the talent that we need.”

WASHINGTON, DC - US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor joined Squawk Box on CNBC to discuss the Trump Administration's efforts to recruit top tech talent and advance his vision for a more tech-driven federal government.

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On Tech Force modernization and government demographic challenges:

“Yeah, we're coming at two things. One is, as the name implies, we've got talent gaps in government, right?  So, for us to do modernization, we need people who understand modern software engineering, AI, etc. So that's part of it. The other long meta point is if you look at the demographics of the workforce, only 7% of federal employees are under the age of thirty, and close to half are over the age of fifty. So, we have this like pending major demographic problem, which is we're not replacing as people retire in government; we're not actually bringing in new talent. So, we're kind of launching a much broader effort, Tech Force being one pillar of it, to figure out how to get early career people to decide to come into government, even if just for a two- or three-year period.”

On strategic restructuring following large-scale departures:

“We are kind of reshaping the government. There's been about 300,000 net exits from the government since the beginning of the Trump administration. So, we were at about 2.3 million, and we're down to about 2 million right now. And yes, on top of that, there are places where we do need to hire. Like tech is clearly an area where we need to hire. We need to get the right people in. But that's all part about making the government both efficient and also making sure we've got the talent that we need.”

On structural barriers and accountability within current federal workforce systems:

“I have never disparaged the government workers. I think they are caught in a bad system. Yes, there's clearly people, like in any organization with two million people, who are not doing their job. We do need to make it easier to hold them accountable, and we're doing that, so we've passed a bunch of policies. At the same time, the fundamental problem is the entire government culture is one of compliance and legal oversight. It's impossible to innovate. It's impossible to do anything. And so, yes, what happens is we plod along... So, we're getting rid of tenure as a basis for promotion, and we're trying to actually get merit as a promotion opportunity.

On merit-based hiring and skill-aligned wages:

“…one of the problems why we have so few, I think, early career people is because no one wants to come into that environment where if you're not destined to be there for 40 years, it's not an interesting place to be. So, we're eliminating college degree requirements for all jobs. We're eliminating tenure-based requirements. The canonical example to me is we should be able to hire some killer engineer who maybe didn't go to college, but who could perform at the level of a top federal employee; we should pay that person at the most senior level, if they can do the job. Today, under the rules, you can't do that, and so we're changing all those rules.

“The pay is always going to be worse in the federal government… But what we can do, though, is this leveling thing, right? Which is before, if you didn't have a college degree or if you didn't have five years of work experience, we would bring you in at what's called a GS5, which is a super low level and we pay them $50,000-60,000, a year. We're never going to get good people. But if you're awesome and you can perform at the level of a GS15, like in Tech Force, we're paying people $160,000-170,000 a year. The best one can certainly make more if they go to the valley, but that's competitive if we level them appropriately for what their skills are.”