OSTP’s Kratsios touts ‘incredible’ interest in Tech Force, defends Trump science and tech cuts

The White House’s top technology and science official on Wednesday defended the Trump administration’s “hard decisions” to gut agency staff last year while simultaneously trumpeting the “incredible” interest it has received in its new Tech Force recruiting initiative.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, told lawmakers that more than “35,000 Americans have put forward interest in participating in Tech Force,” a governmentwide hiring program launched last month aimed at bringing technologists into federal agencies for two-year commitments.

Appearing before the House Science, Space and Technology Research and Technology Subcommittee, Kratsios said bringing technical talent into the government is a top priority for the White House. The tech community has responded to the administration’s calls, he said, pointing specifically to the “unique … buy-in from the private sector.”

“It is a national imperative to have the very best technologists in government working on the problems that will impact American citizens,” Kratsios said. “And because of the great leadership of the president, we were able to get so many companies to step up and say, ‘Yes, I am willing to allow some of my employees to go do a tour in the government.’” 

Private-sector partners include Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google Public Sector, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Palantir, xAI and others. The first cohort of Tech Force participants is expected to number roughly 1,000.

Kratsios said the industry partnerships and applicant interest reflect an understanding that using “technology to solve these huge problems for the American people is one of the highest callings.”

“The fact that we have so many great Americans that want to step in, move their families and their lives to D.C. to solve these problems for Americans is just incredible,” he continued, “and I really want to applaud [the Office of Personnel Management] and the great team there for it.”

Many former government tech leaders, however, have a decidedly less rosy view of the effort — especially after the Trump administration slashed agency science and tech positions and eliminated tech-focused programs like the General Services Administration’s 18F team. 

One former product manager with the U.S. Digital Service told FedScoop last month that the splashy Tech Force announcement was “comical” given how many “amazingly talented” technologists were dumped by the administration last year. 

“What are they actually doing that’s different than the services that they replaced?” asked Amy Paris, the USDS alum.  

Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a former OSTP staffer in the Obama White House whose Northern Virginia district includes many federal workers, asked Kratsios how he reconciled the creation of Tech Force with the firings of technologists.

The current OSTP director said he viewed those as “separate issues,” but ultimately defended last year’s cuts as something akin to “any business” thinking about how “they can best optimize what they’re trying to deliver within their statutory mandate and what the president wants to execute.”

“I think a lot can be said about sort of the misdirection of some of these agencies as we came into office,” Kratsios continued. “The American people deserve leadership at these agencies that are willing to make the hard decisions in order to right-size these agencies for the objectives and their statutory mandate.”

Subramanyam pushed back on that rationale, noting that under the Trump administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology fired more than 400 employees. How could a reduction of that scope, at an agency like NIST, align with the president’s goals on science and technology, he asked. 

Kratsios said he couldn’t speak for the Commerce secretary, but generally speaking, agencies should be able to “field a team” that leaders believe “can best execute on what you’re trying to accomplish.” 

“We’ll agree to disagree on that last part,” Subramanyam replied.

NIST was a hot topic throughout Wednesday’s hearing, particularly with regard to its Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — which the Trump administration rebranded from the AI Safety Institute. 

Kratsios said the turn away from safety toward standards and innovation was all about focusing on “what NIST is really good at.” Legacy NIST standards, he said, “are the ones that ultimately will empower the proliferation of this technology across many industries.”

He also sees a role for CAISI to play in “promulgating advanced metrology on model evaluation” so that when models are deployed — no matter the industry — the public can trust that they have been tested and evaluated properly.

Part of NIST’s work on advanced metrology is making sure “political rhetoric” isn’t inserted into the agency’s work, Kratsios said, adding that there’s an ongoing effort to “depoliticize NIST as much as possible.” 

The White House’s AI Action Plan recommends that NIST revise its AI risk management framework to ensure the government procures models free of “ideological bias” — a provision that has confused and alarmed many tech experts.

“So our hope,” Kratsios said, is to “put [the framework] in a place where it’s promulgating standards which can benefit all scientific innovators across the country.”