Under Tech Force, OPM wants to send some feds for tours of duty in industry

The Trump administration is already trying to bring talent from industry into the government via its U.S. Tech Force program, but the next step could be putting federal workers on exchanges to companies, according to remarks from an Office of Personnel Management official Thursday. During a panel at a federal technology-focused conference, Kevin Hennecken, senior advisor to the director at OPM and leader of the Trump administration’s Tech Force hiring effort, mentioned the agency’s interest in such a program as a way of helping train federal workers. Something OPM has been focused on is “creating more pathways for people to sort of experiment going to the private sector for periods of time and coming back,” Hennecken said. “I think that can also be quite helpful, just to expose them to some different ways of getting things done.” Such efforts would add another layer to the Trump administration’s current Tech Force program, which is focused on filling the government’s hiring needs with early career workers. Those workers, who have just started onboarding, will serve two-year stints before it’s up to them whether to stay in government or go to industry. A small number of management-level professionals will also temporarily join the federal workforce from the private sector as part of the program.

A National Institutes of Health contracting arm responsible for a series of large-scale IT contracting vehicles is ending all of its cross-government contracts and ceasing all functions by the end of 2028, according to a notice from the agency. All of the governmentwide acquisition vehicles (GWACs) under the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) will expire Oct. 29, which is also the last day to award new orders, the Tuesday announcement stated. That includes the office’s ongoing iterations of its Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners contracts. The functions will be moved to the General Services Administration.
The announcement comes after the Trump administration’s push to consolidate procurement led to a decision earlier this year to cancel NITAAC’s long-running and embattled next iteration of its governmentwide IT vehicle, known as CIO-SP4. That contract would have been worth roughly $50 billion, but faced numerous legal challenges and was delayed time and time again before it was ultimately scrapped.

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