Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Cybersecurity, IT, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, called out the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Wednesday for what she called its slow work in implementing the 2020 AI in Government Act.
The Federal workforce cannot be AI ready with the management agency’s failure to identify AI talent gaps across the Federal government, the chairwoman said during a Jan. 17 hearing.
“It’s critical the Federal government have an appropriate AI workforce,” Rep. Mace said during her opening statement. “We had the Defense Department’s chief AI officer testify before this subcommittee, and it’s clear DoD is at least making progress in this space. But the Office of Personnel Management is another story.”
“It was tasked three years ago by Congress with identifying AI talent gaps across the Federal civilian AI workforce, and with creating a new AI job series for Federal workers,” she continued, adding, “It has done neither. We’re still waiting.”
The Trump-era AI in Government Act tasked OPM with identifying core skills and competencies for AI-related Federal positions – which the agency delivered in July 2023, just over one year late.
The legislation required OPM, within 18 months, to establish an occupational series to include AI-focused jobs. The agency was also tasked with coming up with an estimate of the number of Federal employees in AI-related jobs, and to break those figures down agency by agency. Finally, the AI in Government Act required OPM to provide a two-year and five-year timeline of how many Federal employees with AI-related jobs agencies will need.
OPM has done none of that, Rep. Mace pointed out during the subcommittee’s AI-ready workforce hearing.
Despite OPM’s slow work to implement the three-year-old AI legislation, the hearing’s experts offered other solutions to bolster the Federal government’s AI workforce – including the encouragement of skills-based hiring for the more than 700,000 open cyber jobs across the country.
“Non-degree programs are essential to broaden access and to scale up,” Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University William Scherlis said. “AI offers tremendous opportunity and tremendous challenges, many of which are not obvious. Success with AI depends on unique skills and expertise. There are many kinds of AI roles and applications, which means many kinds of workforce needs.”
Costis Toregas, the director of The George Washington University’s (GWU) Cyber Security and Privacy Research Institute, noted that education and training for AI is critical, but impossible with a lack of instructors who are able to teach the topic to the next generation.
“My north star would be to make sure that we develop faculty because that’s key,” Toregas said. “If we don’t have faculty at the high school level, the community college and university level, we will lose the battle 10 years from now, because they’re being diverted in other fields, and we desperately need educators. So that’s where the focus has to be.”
To fill the gap in educators, Toregas proposed that “experimentation and boldness are the key.” For example, GWU was awarded a Federal grant to study the intersection of AI and law. This combination of different disciplines, Toregas said, can inspire teachers who don’t necessarily have a tech background to become interested in AI.
“A second simple example is the networking of professionals together,” Toregas added. “The National Science Foundation … has funded something called the National Center for Training and Education in Cybersecurity. They assemble more than 300 universities and community colleges, they develop common curricula, and they help faculty careers.”
“The same model can be used in the AI field,” he continued, adding, “There is no reason why we can’t begin to develop multiple solutions as opposed to one good program here, one good program there. We can develop a network of programs.”
