Staff Up Quickly and Competently

With the right talent in place at the right time, the government can indeed deliver at the pace and scale required to address the core challenges of our time.

The next administration will have a narrow political window to deliver solutions for the climate crisis, and it will be inheriting a depleted federal workforce. But that doesn’t have to be a disadvantage; it’s an opportunity to innovate. The state capacity movement is rightly focused on needed generational reforms.¹ But to address the risks we face from climate change—and, indeed, to change the perception that government is incapable of delivering results—the next administration will need to act quickly, likely before those reforms are in place.

What follows are recommendations on what the next administration can do in the interim. They include both administration-wide and program-specific considerations to ensure that any green industrial policy initiative can hire the teams it needs to deliver results.²

Administration-Wide Posture

The next administration will have a narrow window to establish the posture and institutional capacity that will shape its overall approach toward climate policy and likelihood of success.

Reshape the Workforce

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was possible in part because the government had already lost credibility on delivery. The response from the next administration must be to build a workforce that more visibly performs. But there is wide recognition that restoring the pre-DOGE organizational chart is a bad idea.³ I agree, for two reasons (among many) that should inform how the administration approaches rebuilding:

• AI has fundamentally reshaped what work requires human participation and what does not—freeing staff to focus on negotiation, judgment calls, and relationship management. Routine document review, compliance monitoring, data reconciliation, and first-pass analysis of applications are all areas where AI tools can meaningfully augment or replace manual work. There are real risks in public-sector AI deployment, ranging from data security and algorithmic bias to hallucinations requiring human quality assurance, but a rebuilding administration should set the expectation that it will deploy these tools wherever they can safely multiply the work of humans.
• Some of the folks who are gone should stay gone. Alongside the hardworking public servants who left rather than serve under the Donald Trump administration and those who were callously and wrongly terminated, the departures also included people who had stopped pushing. This is not a new observation: For years, the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) asked federal workers whether “steps are taken to deal with a poor performer who cannot or will not improve.” The positive response never topped 42 percent.⁴

Reshaping the federal workforce will be easier said than done. Federal law includes important protections for employees displaced by reductions in force. Reemployment Priority Lists (RPLs) require agencies to give priority to their own displaced employees before looking outside. The Interagency Career Transition Assistance Plan (ICTAP) extends similar priorities to employees displaced from other agencies for up to two years. These rules are an important part of the bargain federal employees make when they sign up to serve, and I don’t mean to suggest they should be circumvented in general. But it would be a shame to hire back people whose roles are truly not necessary or those who were a drag on the system, just when there is an opportunity to accelerate progress. When necessary, these protections could be bypassed through both genuine position redesign and the use of excepted service authority.⁵ Both approaches let programs hire the talent they need without being constrained by displacement priority rules. But this will be a significant and sensitive undertaking, and deciding on an administration-wide posture toward this reshaping early enough to matter will require focused attention.

Put Hiring Ownership in the Right Hands and Run

Once the hiring landscape is mapped, the posture should be aggressive. Hiring must be understood as a first-tier leadership priority, not an HR matter. This could mean declaring broad critical shortage categories to unlock hiring authorities across particular swaths of the workforce, based on what the transition teams find. It could also take the form of a “talent cabinet”—modeled on the oversight structure that then Vice President Joe Biden ran for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), where he convened weekly cabinet-level accountability meetings to track implementation.⁶ The ARRA model worked because it created a regular, high-level forum that forced agency leadership and senior staff to focus and drive progress each week.

Signaling that hiring is a priority also has implications for appointments: The people chosen to lead agencies need to be operationally minded and willing to treat hiring as a core executive function. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—the federal government’s central human resources agency, created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 to manage hiring, pay, and workforce policy—should function as an enabler, not a gatekeeper. A well-resourced OPM that can quickly evaluate and adjudicate hiring-related requests can make a meaningful difference in the speed of execution. Its turnaround times should be tracked and reported. The administration-wide posture should be maximally permissive on specialized authorities for priority programs.

Within agencies, the same principle applies: Cabinet officials and other agency heads need to treat hiring as a core priority alongside program design. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s focus on talent from day one was a real factor in the success of the CHIPS Program Office. Each agency should designate a senior official from outside of HR with explicit responsibility to work across units, unstick bottlenecks, and report on progress. And everyone in the chain, from hiring managers to interview panelists, must make time for hiring: They should not see this work as incidental to their “day jobs.”

Program-Level Design Choices That Matter

Especially for new programs, design choices can determine whether they can staff up and execute expeditiously.

Consider Funding, Hiring Authorities, and Program Placement

Our most significant advantage at the CHIPS Office was ample funding for administrative costs. At CHIPS, a 2 percent administrative set-aside on a $39 billion program yielded $780 million for staffing, contracts, and other operational infrastructure. That funding supported meaningful capacity, which was critical to our success. But while set-asides are somewhat standard, they only really work at scale. For example, a 3 percent set-aside on a smaller program, the Regional Technology and Innovation Hub Program (commonly known as Tech Hubs), yielded only $13.77 million.⁷ Based on a fully loaded estimate of $250,000 per year,⁸ that’s roughly 55 person-years. If the program ran for five years, that would allow for a team of 11 people, but that’s assuming the program forgoes all other administrative expenses. A program that isn’t adequately resourced is more likely to falter, reinforcing the general perception that government can’t execute.

Some of the other core advantages in the full suite of tools we used at CHIPS⁹ included legislative authority to hire senior talent outside standard civil service pay bands (the CHIPS-25 authority),¹⁰ direct hire authority, and excepted service appointments granted by OPM. CHIPS-25 authority gave us flexibility on compensation, direct hire authority let us short-circuit the hiring process, and excepted service created new positions outside of Title 5—the body of law governing the federal civil service—which effectively let us skip the hiring process almost entirely. These authorities helped us bring on talent in an average of 67 days, well under the government-wide average of more than 100 days in 2024.¹¹

There are also tools we didn’t use at CHIPS that deserve more attention: intergovernmental personnel agreements (IPAs) to bring in academic, state, and local expertise¹² and the Defense Production Act’s executive volunteer authority, which allows industry executives to be brought into government service in the national interest.¹³ Both may be worth considering.

Another core component beyond funding and authorities is a dedicated and scalable operations team. At CHIPS we were set up well both because our operations personnel were excellent, and because we were technically housed within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), whose operations teams were also excellent. We also benefited from their working capital fund (WCF) model—a revolving fund that allows NIST’s operations to charge programs for their shared services, like HR, IT, and procurement, sustaining itself on fee revenue rather than appropriations. The WCF model meant we could flexibly use CHIPS administrative funds to hire more staff on the operations side as well as the program side.

Congress and advocates should consider these authorities and appropriate administrative funding not as exceptions to be justified program by program, but as a package of default design considerations for any high-priority industrial policy program.¹⁴

Build a Durable Cross-Sector Team

Beyond these structural underpinnings, building a fit-for-purpose talent strategy for a new program is crucial. For an industrial policy program, hiring talent from industry to work alongside experienced civil servants is essential. At CHIPS, the deliberate combination of industry veterans and career feds across different career stages produced better outcomes, as they each brought different approaches to management, risk, and problem-solving.

But hiring from industry requires both proactive recruiting strategies¹⁵ and real ethics infrastructure.¹⁶ At CHIPS we put in significant effort to attract and retain the talent we needed from the private sector. We found that the private-sector talent we needed didn’t naturally come to us—we went to them, through personal networks and direct outreach. While sometimes early- and mid-career professionals were worried about the financial and career risks of leaving their current path, we ultimately closed them on the strength of the mission and by persuading them that they could have a meaningful impact in a short period, enabling them to later return to the private sector if they chose. After the fact, they overwhelmingly reported that they “absolutely” or “probably” would recommend a stint in government to colleagues.

We also built a robust ethics program modeled in large part on the requirements for presidential appointees. We moved vetting upstream so we understood the conflicts and divestment required before we sent an offer letter, we took a comprehensive view of potential conflicts and required divestiture of broad categories of stock, we leaned into ethics training as a day-one priority, and we borrowed conflict-of-interest procedures used in grant review processes to provide additional assurance that the team understood their obligations. Without that infrastructure, we knew we could be putting the entire enterprise at risk—a single perceived conflict of interest could distract from or even undermine our critical mission.

These were both substantial undertakings for our program, but they were necessary to build the right mix of talent and were essential to our success. Future industrial policy programs will face many of the same pressures and can learn from our experience.

Build Culture from Day One

Even with the right talent in place and an exciting and unifying mission, it’s essential to build culture intentionally. Especially in high-stakes, fast-moving teams, culture can sometimes be an afterthought. But sustained intensity without careful consideration of the shared experience risks burnout and attrition, which can undo the work you did to build the team. New programs have a unique advantage over established organizations: They can build norms that reflect both the existing qualities and the aspirations of the team from the outset. This starts at the point of hire: Set the expectation that this is a high-urgency, high-performance environment, but also one where there are norms for how everyone shows up. Then reinforce the culture actively and consistently.

At CHIPS, we spent significant leadership time on this work. We ran a listening tour across the program, crowdsourced team norms rather than imposing them from above, built them into onboarding for every new hire, and ran an annual awards program centered on the norms. Some people rolled their eyes. But when we surveyed the team after nearly two years of sustained intensity, over 90 percent said we brought urgency and purpose to the work, and a majority said we were living up to our norms across the board. I don’t think we could have retained the talent we did, or sustained the pace we did, without that foundation.

The norms also created a shared set of expectations we could manage to. When someone wasn’t showing up productively, the norms gave us language and legitimacy to address it directly—up to and including counseling people out.¹⁷

Conclusion

Some of what this piece recommends can happen on or before day one: reshaping the inherited landscape, putting operationally minded people in charge of OPM and agency hiring. Some of it requires careful program design at the legislative stage: administrative funding set-asides, hiring authorities, the decision about where to situate a new program. All of it, though, is in service of the same end: demonstrating that—with the right talent in place at the right time—the government can indeed deliver at the pace and scale required to address the core challenges of our time.