The modernization metric missing from every federal dashboard
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COMMENTARY | A smaller government has to be a deeper one.
Every agency has a bench. Most leaders never look at it until the starter goes down.
I learned that in the Army, where no unit is ever more than one deployment away from needing its next leader. You don't wait for the vacancy. You build the depth and capacity well before you need it. Then I spent years inside federal agencies, often watching the opposite habit: a seasoned expert retires, a job posting goes up and the clock starts from zero.
The federal bench is thinner than at any point in recent memory.
GAO reported in June that the workforce at 22 of the 24 CFO Act agencies declined by a net of nearly 256,000 employees, more than 11%, between December 2024 and January 2026. Pew Research found that employees with less than two years of service fell from 16.2% of the workforce to 10.3% in a single year, and the share under age 35 fell from 18% to 16.8%
Whatever you think about how we got here, leaders agree on where to go next. A smaller government has to be a deeper one.
OPM is pointing in that direction. Its July guidance asks agencies to make at least a third of external hires early-career talent and to put AI, data and cyber skills at the center of next year's staffing plans. Tech Force, EarlyCareers.gov and the refreshed Scholarship for Service are early bets on that future. GAO has kept strategic human capital management on its High-Risk List for more than two decades, citing skills gaps.
But a deeper bench also has to be a ready one. OPM has told agencies that "planning for technology and planning for talent are no longer separate conversations," and it is pushing for faster hiring, AI in everyday work and stronger accountability for results. Those are reasonable goals, and each depends on readiness.
The Partnership for Public Service's survey of more than 11,000 federal employees placed engagement at 32 out of 100. Gallup found the share of federal workers "struggling" rose from 37% to 47% in a year. You can debate the causes. You can't responsibly ignore the signal: strained people take fewer risks, and modernization is a series of risks.
This is not a partisan point. It's an operational one. Accountability for results and attention to people aren't opposing camps. The first depends on the second.
Building a bench that is both deeper and ready is the work of ATARC's new Workforce Modernization Alliance working group, which I co-lead. At our kickoff roundtable, held under the Chatham House Rule, leaders from large departments, small oversight offices and industry surfaced five ideas.
Watch a different clock. Some technical teams have cut time-to-hire to 45 days, with pilots aiming for five. Impressive. But the measure that matters is time-to-productivity: the gap between someone walking out the door and their successor fully carrying the mission.
Change fatigue is a performance issue, not a morale issue. When new performance systems, hiring models and AI tools arrive at once, employees default to self-protection. They avoid experiments and wait for guidance. Left unmeasured, that becomes a culture of silence that no technology investment can overcome.
Managers are the multiplier. Policy changes with a signature. Behavior changes one supervisor at a time. Mid-level managers are carrying most of the transformation, and most were never trained to lead it.
Protect the front door. As hiring goes digital, so do the threats. Recruiters are already meeting AI-generated "candidates" and coached real-time interview fraud. Speed without verification is not modernization. It's exposure. And the human touch still wins: candidates who meet an agency representative in person are far more likely to follow through to their first day.
Measure outcomes, not motion. The group wants agencies tracking time-to-productivity, not just time-to-hire, and indicators like trust, psychological safety and resilience alongside cost and cycle time. The IRS team that cut some HR actions from 40 hours to seven minutes measures its work through KPIs. Pair that rigor with readiness data, and leaders can see problems before they become failures.
What makes this working group different is not another list of recommendations. It's impact.
Members commit to sharing what failed, not just what worked, so no agency spends a year relearning a lesson another agency already paid for. Our first white paper, releasing this month, captures what we heard and where we want to go. The real product is the community of practice that comes after it.
Here's my invitation. If you run hiring, lead a team that is rebuilding its institutional memory, or invest in the tools agencies use to find and develop talent, check out our latest white paper and feel free to join us. The Workforce Modernization Alliance is open to government, industry and academic leaders through ATARC. Bring your pipeline wins and your pipeline misses. We need both. The first meeting is Dec. 1, 2026, from 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM ET.
The strongest teams I ever served on weren't the ones with the most stars. They were the ones where the next person up was ready. That's what we're building, together.
Mika J. Cross is a government workforce expert, Army veteran, former federal leader and CEO of Strategy@Work