By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management
December 16, 2025

OPM Senior Advisor Kevin Hennecken contributed to this post

When I learned last December I would have the chance to interview with President Trump for the role of OPM Director, I told my three daughters that I wanted to pitch the president on making government cool again. They liked the idea – to champion the opportunities for meaningful government work among early career individuals – but hated the acronym: MGCA (pronounced “ma-ga-ka”) doesn’t really roll off the tongue! So, I reluctantly agreed to table the moniker until I could come up with something better. But alas I didn’t and today MGCA is resurrected.

Our government has an early career problem. Roughly 7% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, compared with about 22% in the non-government workforce. We also have an aging employee demographic on the other end of the spectrum – 44% of federal employees are over the age of 50, compared with about 33% in the non-government workforce.

This is unhealthy – and that’s not an ageist comment.

Rather, it means we have an impending retirement challenge in government – a brain drain of highly experienced employees – that is not being replaced with early career employees. It also means newer ideas and newer experiences are not being infused into our workforce. Particularly in light of the rapid pace of technological change – fueled by artificial intelligence – the government is at risk of falling very far behind what will be required of a modern, technology-first world. If we don’t address this, we will become the last dinosaur!

Before getting to the solution to this problem, it’s worth reflecting on how we got here. Simply put, somewhere along the way we lost the narrative.

In my experience, all employees – and particularly early career – want to be inspired by a mission; they want to tackle important and challenging problems; they want to work for managers who care about their career development and will help them learn and grow in their skills; they want to be surrounded by smart, hardworking teammates; and they want to be held accountable and rewarded for their merit-based accomplishments.

While the government offers nearly all of that – and we are reforming our human resources priorities in areas we were lacking (e.g., initiatives around merit hiring and creating a high-performance culture) – we have failed to tell that narrative effectively. In its place, we have sold a narrative around job stability and permanency and created this false dichotomy that at the dawn of a career one must choose between being a lifetime civil servant or a permanent career in the private sector.

We don’t live in a static, linear world and should not impose this false choice on early career talent. There is tremendous value both for the individuals and for organizations in career paths that include government and private sector work. Fluidity and diverse experiences are a feature, not a bug, of a successful career.         

We are enabling that with the launch of the US Tech Force (Tech Force).

Tech Force is cross-government, White House-sponsored initiative to recruit early-career engineers into government and help solve some of the world’s most complex and high scale problems. These challenges include using AI to solve defense-related challenges at Department of War; building modern applications to solve the decades of tech-debt at the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration; tackling the biggest budget challenge of our current (and our future) by implementing software to reform the Medicare system; etc. And the list goes on – every major government agency has no shortage of challenges that can benefit from America’s best and brightest tech minds!

The value to the government is obvious, but what is the value to the Tech Force engineers?

• You will be part of an elite corps of 1,000 early-career engineers working for two years directly with the most senior leaders across cabinet-level government agencies to tackle our nation’s top technical challenges
• In addition to your engineering work, you will participate in career development initiatives from America’s top technology companies, speakers’ series with top tech CEOs, and unique technology training and certification programs
• At the end of your two-year term, you will be able to showcase your talents directly to these top technology companies for potential full-time private sector employment via our exclusive recruiting fair

Critical to the success of Tech Force is our partnership with America’s leading private sector employers. In addition to supporting the above programmatic elements, our partners will offer engineering managers at their companies the opportunity to lead and manage the Tech Force engineers. This unique partnership will not only ensure the successful deployment of the core engineering projects, but it will also serve as a management development opportunity for mid-career private sector executives.

What will success look like?

We are going to bootstrap a network effect to fuel the next 50+ years of government hiring by demonstrating the government offers brilliant engineers the opportunity to solve the world’s most challenging and largest scale technology projects and that the private sector values this experience by translating it into awesome post-government employment opportunities. The more engineers we recruit into Tech Force, the more critical technical problems we will solve, the more Tech Force graduates take their skills to the private sector - that’s the flywheel that will enable us to grow a definitive, world changing pipeline of early-career talent into the federal government.

And once we succeed with technology jobs, we will build out similar programs in other job categories that lend themselves well to early-career talent - e.g., program management, operations, financial analysts, human resources - and for which we can partner with the private sector.

Together we will MGCA – at least until someone can come up with a better acronym!