The Pentagon is going to Silicon Valley for its next recruits
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
- The Pentagon has a new pitch for young adults: skip the Army, and write code instead.
- Undersecretary of Defense Emil Michael said on the No Priors podcast that he hopes students leave college for "a two-year stint" in government.
- The program follows others, like DOGE, that encourage young adults to serve in the government.
The Defense Department is rethinking what it means to serve your country, and it no longer necessarily involves a uniform.
Through a new initiative called the US Tech Force, the federal government is recruiting college students and Silicon Valley's brightest to spend two years modernizing government systems, working as engineers, data scientists, and technical leaders.
"We're hoping to get thousands of people out of college for a two-year stint — sort of make it, this is your service to the country as a technologist rather than as a soldier," Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and the agency's chief technology officer, said last week on the No Priors podcast, a tech show hosted by venture capitalists Sarah Guo and Elad Gil. Michael previously worked as Uber's chief business officer.
"We're going to try to make that a badge of honor," he added.
The Office of Personnel Management, which is headed by former VC Scott Kupor, is coordinating the early-career program in partnership with other agencies, including the Department of Defense. Salaries will likely range from around $130,000 to $195,000, Kupor said in December.
The program, announced in December, joins a long history of initiatives by Silicon Valley technologists to pluck students out of classrooms and into boardrooms. Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency famously brought a youthful energy and move-fast-and-break-things ethos to Capitol Hill. Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship implored high schoolers to "skip the indoctrination" of college and "get the Palantir Degree."
Michael told Guo he is personally doing some of the candidate hunting, spending what he calls "recruiting Tuesdays," dialing his investor buddies for people "on the bench" and technologists in his network who recently left a job: "I'm like, 'Hey, do you have a year to spare doing the coolest stuff you could possibly imagine?'"