After broad workforce cuts, Treasury unit looks to add new IT talent
The Treasury Department is looking to hire more IT staffers while continuing to break down internal technology silos and pushing artificial intelligence across the board, an agency official said Friday.
Colleen Heller-Stein, administrator of the Treasury Common Services Center, said during ACT-IAC’s Workforce Innovation Summit Friday that her division is “actively recruiting IT professionals” and that she expects “that team will continue to grow.”
The TCSC provides IT engineering, IT operations, human resources, acquisition and travel services for the entire agency.
Heller-Stein rejoined Treasury three weeks ago to oversee the unit’s multi-billion-dollar portfolio after a two-and-a-half year stint at the Office of Personnel Management. Prior to OPM, she spent more than 13 years in various HR roles at Treasury.
She returned to an agency that has lost 33,000 staffers since the beginning of the second Trump administration, according to OPM workforce data, including nearly 2,200 employees in IT management roles. Treasury has been one of the hardest-hit agencies by staff reductions since January 2025.
In her fireside chat Friday, Heller-Stein appeared to nod to that fact along with an evolving tech focus across the department, telling Oracle executive and former Department of Defense official Elise Van Winkle that “there has been change layered on top of change on top of change, in particular over the last two years.”
“So I think first just acknowledging that” is important for “someone stepping into a role where folks were sort of merged together over the course of a year,” Heller-Stein said. “Owning that upfront, I think, is really important, and keeping that kind of top of mind as we’re then asking people to do more and be more open and change more.”
Part of that change is simply staff composition. Treasury “has leaned in very heavily on Tech Force,” she said, referring to OPM’s initiative to recruit early-career tech talent to the federal government for two-year positions.
Another part of that change is acknowledging that AI is “not a CIO problem or a CIO issue” but “an everybody issue,” Heller-Stein said, meaning all staffers should get comfortable with the technology.
“We used to joke a lot about, you know, we have silos of excellence, but we need to really come together,” she said. “I see really just an opportunity to kind of force that to happen because of emerging technology opportunities.”
Some of those opportunities will come from encouraging collaboration, she said. And with Treasury Common Services Center, that should be easy given its mix of IT professionals, engineers, HR experts and more. As a team, Heller-Stein said they’re working to avoid layering technology onto processes that don’t “work already.”
More “meaningful changes” could be on the horizon with TCSC’s IT recruitment efforts and Tech Force additions. There should be plenty of fresh perspectives, though in talking with early-career technologists, Heller-Stein said she’s noticed some “mixed feelings” about AI — or at least more pointed questions about how they’d be expected to use those tools.
“I’ve not heard or experienced people, like, not wanting a job because of that,” she said. “But I think agencies need to be ready for questions from incoming applicants, particularly from a younger generation.”
As Treasury rebuilds its staff, Heller-Stein said it will be important to articulate the benefits of AI to the workforce and emphasize the importance of keeping a human in the loop. The agency’s incoming tech talent and industry partners will have “no shortage of interesting problems to solve,” she said.
“The federal government is the largest puzzle I have ever worked on, and it keeps me coming back every day,” she added. “And it takes a lot of hands to put that puzzle together.”
