The government has a workforce crisis. One of its best-kept secrets can fix it.
The federal government is facing a workforce crisis. Current employees are aging, and young people are less motivated by public service. In cybersecurity, for instance, the government needs some 40,000 cybersecurity professionals to protect the country against malicious actors. More generally, the White House recently announced ambitious goals to boost government hiring of AI talent. But with less than 1 percent of PhDs who specialize in artificial intelligence heading into public service, this “talent surge” might turn into nothing more than a talent blip.
There is a way to combat this. One of the federal government’s best-kept secrets is an obscure 53-year-old statute that provides for filling talent gaps, training federal workers in new skills and promoting scientific innovation, all at a very low price.
The Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) facilitates a talent exchange between levels of government and between government and universities. It enables swift assignment of skilled professionals to fill various needs, typically in science and technology. Whether the issue is climate change, pandemic preparedness or governance of technology, the IPA can get expertise to where it is needed most.
But myths and misperceptions about the statute abound. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) launched a “sweeping review” of the IPA across a wide range of federal agencies after a media exposé alleged that the statute enabled former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to capture U.S. technology policy. The actual story of the IPA stands in marked contrast to such assertions.
In a comprehensive forthcoming study, we show the remarkable ways in which the IPA has solved urgent problems.
Half of the staff at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, a model for public innovation that lays claim to having helped develop GPS systems, the internet and mRNA vaccines, serves under the IPA. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, was stood up by — you guessed it — staff assigned under IPA programs. The National Science Foundation (NSF) brings in top researchers under the statute to shape the country’s scientific frontier. And the General Services Administration (GSA) has used the IPA extensively to promote rigorous policy evaluation across government.
In short, the IPA has worked extraordinarily well. In contrast to headline-grabbing allegations, IPA assignees operate overwhelmingly in lower levels of government that require specialized expertise. They serve for a limited time, typically less than two years. They also follow ethics mandates applicable to all federal workers.
The statute also allows the government to pull in experts who otherwise wouldn’t go into public service.
Academics working at the forefront of their fields can contribute part-time to critical agency projects. Even for fulltime assignees, the two-year limit and faster hiring process allows people to step in and out of government with ease and without losing their more permanent positions.
Although short-term, these experts can make long-lasting improvements and build up the skills of bureaucrats who remain.
Assignees under the IPA also save the government money. Some are not paid by the government at all; their home institutions pay their salaries. The government reimburses the salaries (up to government levels) of others, and the cost is far lower than using contractors. The price tag of GSA’s IPA talent is about one-quarter to one-third the cost of equivalent contractors.
Talent exchanges through the IPA were recognized early on as “non-coercive, decentralized, highly simplified, and flexible,” according to one public administration dean — words not often used to describe the government.
We should raise the IPA from obscurity and embrace its model for public-private partnership to tackle the most urgent problems of our time.
How can we do this? First, we should create an IPA hub to enable all agencies to take advantage of the program for emerging technology and science. Many large agencies — from NASA to NSF to the IRS (where one of us, Daniel, serves unpaid under the IPA) — have modeled what can be done with the statute, but others have been tied up in knots. Here, we can borrow a page from the GSA, which established a cost-effective IPA hub for policy evaluation. We should help all interested agencies build in-house expertise through the IPA.
Second, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) should use its rulemaking authority to promote the IPA, remove barriers to its use and dispel myths surrounding it. In the 1990s, the OPM delegated IPA responsibilities to individual agencies, letting a thousand flowers bloom. That catalyzed innovation, but it also led to some agency misconceptions about the IPA program. The OPM website listing “myth busters,” which few read and even fewer rely on, is insufficient for combating these misperceptions. One agency, for instance, told us this past year that IPA assignees must be full-time, directly contradicting actual policies.
This is exactly the kind of thing that the OPM can clear up with regulations.
When it was introduced in 1969, Sen. Edmund Muskie described the IPA as “landmark legislation … equal in its potential effect upon the quality of administration” as the statute that created the civil service. That might have been an overstatement.
But the potential is there. And given the urgent issues that require scientific and technical talent — from mitigating climate change to taming the risks of AI — it is high time to celebrate and double down on that vision.