“One of the things that I’m hoping to do a better job on is getting people from the private sector—who’ve been in the private sector their whole career—who also spend a couple years in government at some point in their career, and learn something,” Kupor told Fortune.
After two years of participation in the program, Tech Force members can apply for full-time jobs with these companies, which have committed to weighing employment for those who completed the initiative. These companies can similarly nominate their own employees to complete the program.
Kupor said he wants these opportunities to serve government roles to be effectively a way to dip one’s toes into public sector work without committing to a multi-decade career. He similarly wants federal workers to explore the private sector for a few years and decide if they want to rejoin the federal workforce.
“Maybe I’m just old fashioned,” he said. “But I think people having diversity of experience between the public and private sector is mutually beneficial to both organizations.”
About 122,000 employees also joined the federal workforce in the space between January 2025 to January 2026, but it was a 55% decrease from the number of new hires in 2024, resulting in a net reduction of 264,000 employees in 2025.
Among Kupor’s concerns with the government workforce is its older skew, with half of workers within 10 years of retirement age, he noted. Meanwhile, only 7% of the federal workforce is made up of entry-level workers compared to more than 20% in the broader U.S. workforce, according to OPM.
“If you just did nothing else, you’ve got this major demographic challenge of a large number of people who will likely either retire or certainly be retirement-eligible over the near term, without us actually replenishing the pipeline of early-career people coming in,” Kupor said.
“We have not done a good job in government—which I hope we do better—is we’ve got to balance potential risks with potential upside,” he said. “In some cases, we think, okay, if there is some modicum of risk, therefore we just ignore whether there’s upside potential. And not in all cases, but I think in many cases, the upside potential of having people with different backgrounds and different experiences is, I think, really important.”
Kupor, for his part, said OPM would put up guardrails to mitigate conflicts of interest in the U.S. Tech Force. OPM would not, for example, put a former private sector employee in the position to make a procurement decision.
“It’s worth at least thinking through those problems and taking some modicum of risk, as long as we feel like we can contain it.” he said. “The upside opportunities are very great for the organization.”
