Scott Kupor's New Plan to Bring Tech Workers Into the Federal Government

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, one of the topics that we like to talk about, but we haven't talked about it for a while, public sector tech, public sector hiring. We've done a number of episodes on this. It's been a while, though, since we've revisited this question, but it raises so many fascinating things.

Tracy Alloway (0:38)

I remember the ones that we did with Jennifer Palka, which were fantastic. And we got a good sense of some of the issues facing public technology, including, I think it was 7,000 requirements in a single RFP. That was at the state level, but you hear stuff like that and it just kind of blows your mind how complex the whole process of developing new technology actually is in government.

Joe Weisenthal (1:06)

Right, so, right, and we've also, Patrick McKenzie is the other one we've talked about this with, like, these legacy systems, they have all of this cruft or whatever, and some of it's tech, and some of it's related to hiring. Everyone, I feel like, comes in to the public sector, and they're like, why can't this look more like the private sector? But I have an observation that I thought about after the last time we talked to Jennifer, which again, they're excellent conversations. Maybe we'll move the ball forward. So there are all kinds of obvious problems with the public sector, we'll get into them. That being said, and I think you had the same experience, you hear these descriptions of like say, what's broken with the hiring process? And it's like, you know what? That sounds kind of familiar. I've experienced that in the private sector too.

Scott Kupor (1:49)

Yeah.

Joe Weisenthal (1:50)

A lot of these pathologies seem to exist in large organizations.

Tracy Alloway (1:54)

I was going to say, I think it's endemic to bureaucracy.

Scott Kupor (1:58)

Right.

Tracy Alloway (1:58)

And I remember Jennifer specifically saying that like one of the main choke points is just the operational process of getting stuff approved or getting a new candidate through a hiring process that has been dictated by human resources and you have to fit into certain slots or certain categories. So it's a big deal.

Joe Weisenthal (2:19)

But the whole dealing with HR thing and their role as gatekeepers of the hiring process and-

Tracy Alloway (2:26)

Careful what you say, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (2:28)

I love our HR people here at Bloomberg. I'm just saying some of it sounded a little bit familiar. That's all I'm going to leave it at that. Some of it sounded a little bit familiar.

Tracy Alloway (2:35)

Fair.

Joe Weisenthal (2:36)

So of course, we know that the new administration, of course, lots of people from the tech world have come to it. I think probably most famously, Elon Musk and the whole Doge endeavor, which we'll get into perhaps where we stand on the verdict for that, but widely viewed is not particularly transformational, etc. Nonetheless, a lot of buy-in, a lot of people from the tech world thinking about what aspects of our most dynamic industry in America can be brought into the public sector to perhaps make it a more dynamic place, maybe more efficient, maybe more effective, and maybe a more desirable place to work for talented people.

Tracy Alloway (3:13)

Right.

The government, the Office of Personnel Management is launching a new cross-government program to recruit top technologists to modernize the federal government. I would just add, it kind of has some new urgency because the Trump administration has identified the AI race with China as this existential threat to the US. You can see stuff kind of coalescing.

Joe Weisenthal (3:40)

Totally. Well, we literally do have the perfect guess because we are going to be speaking with the director of the Office of Personnel Management in DC. We are going to be speaking with Scott Kupor. He is a former venture capitalist who is at Andreessen Horowitz. He knows all about the public world, the private world, etc. Literally, the perfect guess. Scott, thank you so much for coming on the Odd Lots podcast.

Scott Kupor (4:00)

Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (4:01)

Absolutely. Let's start from real basics. What is the job of the office, the director of the Office of Personnel Management?

Scott Kupor (4:10)

Yeah. It's a great question and I didn't know the answer to this one before I started talking to the administration about the job either. So, I think the simple way to think about it is, look, we're the talent management organization for the Federal Government. So, there's about 2.1 million federal employees roughly in the government today, and we are responsible for all policies related to people. So, how do you hire, how do you fire, performance management system, so HRIT systems, and then we're also a cross-functional organization that everything we do obviously touches all the different agencies. So, we're trying to make sure that we've got consistency of policies across the government. And the simple goal in my mind is just, how do we make sure we have the right people and the right jobs in the federal government? That's basically the forward articulation of what we do.