While data is limited, the broader AI workforce and pipeline appears to have the same demographic underrepresentation issues that STEM careers experience, lacking diversity in terms of gender, race and ethnicity. And just like the private sector, the government has historically struggled with diversity in STEM roles.

Aware of that landscape, the Biden administration says it’s making efforts to promote diversity in AI hiring, including encouraging agencies to target their outreach for open positions, underscoring the need for “AI-enabling” jobs, and engaging with groups aimed at diversifying technologists. Ultimately, what hangs in the balance of those actions is having a workforce that will bring a variety of experiences and perspectives to the table when managing the application of the booming technology — something the administration, experts, and advocates have stressed.

“If we don’t have a diverse group of people building something that needs to serve a larger group of people, we’re going to do ourselves a disservice, and there’s going to be a lot of unhappy people that can’t benefit from something that should be able to be accessible to all,” said Lisa Mae Brunson, founder of Wonder Women Tech, an organization aimed at helping advance women, people of color, and other underrepresented communities in tech and science fields. 

Already, the federal government is hiring for artificial intelligence positions and seeing interest in open roles. Since President Joe Biden’s October executive order on AI, more than 150 people have been hired in AI and AI-enabling roles, according to a report to the White House by the AI Tech and Talent Task Force. As of March, applications for AI and AI-enabling roles in 2024 have doubled when compared to similar periods in the previous two years, the report said.

That report also underscored the need for diversity, noting that the task force has “prioritized recruiting from a diverse pool of qualified candidates,” consistent with previous Biden executive orders that established the White House Gender Policy Council and outlined actions to promote diversity in federal government hiring.

According to the task force, those efforts recognize “the need for technical experts who can work to mitigate bias in AI systems and the overall underrepresentation of women, people of color, first-generation professionals and immigrants, individuals with disabilities, and LGBTQI+ individuals in the STEM field as a whole.”

Active recruiting 

As AI hiring efforts move forward, officials are stressing the importance of recruitment. 

Kyleigh Russ, a senior adviser to the Office of Personnel Management’s deputy director, told FedScoop the administration is trying to get away from a passive “post and pray” method of hiring — meaning the job gets posted and agencies hope the right person applies. Instead, agencies are encouraged to shift to “active recruiting.” 

Often the volume of applications isn’t the problem for federal government positions, Russ said, but there is a desire to make sure the right people and a diverse group of people are applying.

Active recruiting could mean reaching out to someone on LinkedIn, recruiting directly from minority-serving institutions, or engaging in events like its recent virtual job fair. 

Russ described the push for active recruiting as a “change in practice” and said OPM is working on a training program that will address active recruiting. That program, which it’s collaborating on with the U.S. Digital Service and the Office of Performance and Personnel Management, will be aimed at teaching human resources how to recruit and hire technologists, as it’s a specialized field with “unique challenges,” Russ said. 

During a panel about women in AI last month at Scoop News Group’s AI Talks, USDS Administrator Mina Hsiang pointed to the concept of telling stories about use cases and problems they’re trying to solve as a tool for hiring. 

“Different people want to solve different problems that they see in their communities or in their lives,” Hsiang said. “And so the more that we can connect this to problems that people care about, and show how these are relevant pieces of that, the more people will be motivated to sort of move into those fields.”

Hiring a diverse federal workforce across the government has been an important issue for the Biden administration since its early days. In June 2021, the White House issued an executive order to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal workforce. That order directed agencies to assess the state of diversity, equity and inclusion in their workforces, and took steps to advance things like pay equity. 

AI-enabling

The administration is also highlighting the difference between AI and AI-enabling jobs, which includes roles that are less technical and broadens the pool of candidates. 

Roles that fall into the enabling category include things like data scientists, data analysis, and technical recruiters, Russ said. She noted that the administration has been stressing that it’s looking for both categories of roles in its recruiting campaign and specifically with the recent Tech to Gov job fair. 

That April 18 virtual fair, which is similar to others Tech to Gov has held before, yielded registrations from over 1,300 people representing all 50 states, according to numbers provided by the nonpartisan and nonprofit Tech Talent Project that coordinates the Tech to Gov coalition. The event focused on senior-level technologist roles at the roughly 15 federal agencies and four state agencies that participated. 

Jennifer Anastasoff, executive director of the Tech Talent Project, similarly underscored that both AI and AI-enabling roles are needed. For government hires, Anastasoff said it isn’t required “that every one of the folks who’s inside is someone who has deep expertise in the most technical of technical AI.”

“What we need are folks who can really help make sure that all of our systems — technically, data and otherwise — are really focused on the people who are supposed to be receiving those services,” said Anastasoff, who was a founding member of USDS. 

Anastasoff said the administration’s work with Tech to Gov shows a “level of commitment” to diversity in the technology workforce, as the coalition’s members are interested in that issue. Tech to Gov’s members include organizations like the U.S. Digital Response, Coding it Forward, and AnitaB.org. 

There’s also more work planned with groups trying to diversify tech. Deputy Federal Chief Information Officer Drew Myklegard told FedScoop the administration is planning a hiring push at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration, a conference for women and non-binary people in technology that’s organized by AnitaB.org.

“It’s 30,000 individuals that come together who are excited, young, extremely diverse,” Myklegard said, “and we think we have a very compelling pitch why they should come and work for the government in AI.”

Additionally, there’s action being taken to support a diverse pipeline of AI professionals outside government. The National Science Foundation, for example, has a program targeted at diversifying the AI research community, including funding research and education at minority-serving institutions. Biden’s AI executive order directed NSF to continue its support of AI-related education and workforce development in an effort to “foster a diverse AI-ready workforce.” 

“We know that the existing research institutions, and some of the other institutions, are building curriculum, but this curriculum has to be everywhere because talent and ideas are anxious to engage, and that’s a deep commitment from NSF,” Sethuraman Panchanathan, the agency’s director, told FedScoop.

Diversity data

The growth of the AI workforce comes as STEM careers more broadly have historically struggled with diversity — both in the private sector and the federal government.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for example, found that women made up less than 30% of federal STEM jobs in fiscal year 2019. A November 2023 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that while the shares of scientists in the federal government grew more racially and ethnically diverse between 2017 and 2022, there were decreases in certain groups and inequities were still present in the STEM workforce at specific agencies. 

When it comes to the federal AI workforce, specifically, there aren’t yet figures. The government, through OPM, is still in the process of getting a head count of federal AI and AI-enabling employees. A recent publication from OPM that describes and defines those AI roles will aid those efforts to get a sense of the workforce within the government. Russ said that will likely include demographic data.

Data on the AI workforce is a challenge outside of government as well. Nestor Maslej, a research manager at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence who manages the AI Index, said there isn’t as much data on diversity in AI compared to economic or technical performance data, and emphasized the need to address that.

“Although things are getting better, we really would want to kind of create a world in which there is more data — there is much more reporting,” Maslej said. “Because I think data is the first step in actually understanding what’s going on, what the landscape is like, and what kind of changes are required.” 

Stanford’s most recent AI Index report, for example, uses data on computer science graduates to paint a picture of the AI workforce pipeline. That data shows that men represent roughly 3 in 4 bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD computer science graduates in North America. Those students are predominantly white, though Asian graduates also make up a substantial portion in each degree type as well.

If people are able to see that the government has a diverse and representative AI workforce, Maslej said it could generate more confidence from the public in its regulation of that technology.

Looking forward

While the hiring push is still in its early stages, there are some suggestions on how to improve efforts.

Wonder Woman Tech’s Brunson said she’d like to see the administration be more vocal about a commitment to diversity with its AI hires, especially as the tech industry has seen a rollback of some diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Brunson said she now doesn’t have the resources to be able to tell people looking for jobs where to go, and many people who are interested are trying to teach themselves about AI. “Where is there an opportunity … to train up these diverse candidates so that the future of AI talent looks different than what it looks like today?” Brunson said. 

But there is also optimism that diverse hiring is achievable. Seth Dobrin, founder and CEO of Qantm AI and the author of a forthcoming book on AI strategy, talent and culture, said that while the talent pool of people building AI models isn’t particularly diverse, the pool that the Biden administration will likely hire from is separate from that. He said that in his experience “it’s not as bleak as some of these studies show.” 

Dobrin, who was IBM’s first global chief AI officer, emphasized the importance of intentionally crafting job postings and descriptions so they are more inclusive to diversity. 

“It’s not hiring for a lowest common denominator,” he said. “It’s making sure that you craft your job descriptions appropriately, that you don’t interview until you have a diverse pool of candidates, and then you hire the best person from that pool.”

FedScoop reporter Caroline Nihill contributed to this story.

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Federal CIO Clare Martorana has “imbued” the idea of “iterative policy” within administration officials, Myklegard said in an interview Thursday with FedScoop at Scoop News Group’s AITalks. “We’re not going to get it right the first time.” 

As the inventories, which were established under a Trump-era executive order, enter the third year of collection, Myklegard said agencies have a better idea of what they’re buying, and communication — as well as the skills for collecting and sorting the data — are improving. 

On the same day OMB released its recent memo outlining a governance strategy for artificial intelligence in the federal government, it also released new, expansive draft guidance for agencies’ 2024 AI use case inventories. 

Those inventories have, in the past, suffered from inconsistencies and even errors. While they’re required to be published publicly and annually by certain agencies, the disclosures have varied widely in terms of things like the type of information contained, format, and collection method.

Now, the Biden administration is seeking to change that. Under the draft, information about each use case would be now collected via a form and agencies would be required to post a “machine-readable” comma-separated value (CSV) format inventory of the public uses to their website, in addition to other changes. The White House is currently soliciting feedback on that draft guidance, though a deadline for those comments isn’t clear.

In the meantime, agencies are getting to work on a host of other requirements OMB outlined in the new AI governance memo. According to Myklegard, the volume of comments was the highest the administration had seen on an OMB memo.

“We were really surprised. It’s the most comments we’ve received from any memo that we’ve put out,” Myklegard said during remarks on stage at AI Talks. He added that “between those we really feel like we were able to hear you.”

The memo received roughly 196 public comments, according to Regulations.gov. The same number for OMB’s previous guidance on the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) process, for example, was 161.

Among the changes in the final version of that memo were several public disclosure requirements, including requiring civilian agencies and the Defense Department to report aggregate metrics about AI uses not published in an inventory, and requiring agencies to report information about the new determinations and waivers they can issue for uses that are assumed to be rights- and safety-impacting under the memo. 

Myklegard told FedScoop those changes are an example of the iterative process that OMB is trying to take. When OMB seeks public input on memos, which Myklegard said hasn’t happened often in the past, “we realize areas in our memos that we either missed and need to address, or need to clarify more, and that was just this case.”

Another addition to the memo was encouragement for agencies to name an “AI Talent Lead.” That individual will serve “for at least the duration of the AI Talent Task Force” and be responsible for tracking AI hiring in their agency, providing data to the Office of Personnel Management and OMB, and reporting to agency leadership, according to the memo.

In response to a question about how that role came about, Myklegard pointed to the White House chief of staff’s desire to look for talent internally and the U.S. Digital Service’s leadership on that effort.

“It just got to a point that we felt we needed to formalize and … give agencies the ability to put that position out,” Myklegard said. The administration hopes “there’s downstream effects” of things like shared position descriptions (PDs), he added.

He specifically pointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s hiring efforts as an example of what the administration would like to see governmentwide. CIO Eric Hysen has already hired multiple people with “good AI-specific skillsets” from the commercial sector, which is typically “unheard of” in government, he said.

In February, DHS launched a unique effort to hire 50 AI and machine learning experts and establish an AI Corps. The Biden administration has since said it plans to hire 100 AI professionals across the government by this summer. 

“We’re hoping that every agency can look to what Eric and his team did around hiring and adopt those same skills and best practices, because frankly, it’s really hard,” Myklegard said. 

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While the comment period has so far been fruitful, the points and questions brought to the agency’s attention have also been “challenging,” Drew Myklegard, the deputy federal CIO, said during a fireside chat Thursday at CyberTalks. And because of that, OMB needs additional time to take those into account and continue to converse with the public.

OMB issued the draft FedRAMP guidance late last month, broadly pushing to scale FedRAMP-approved products and adoption across government, enhance security and more widely automate FedRAMP processes.

Speaking to the extension, Myklegard said: “We’re doing that because we really think there’s a great conversation going on. We want to continue that. Some of the feedback that we got was actually really challenging.”

A notice in the Federal Register will be going out Nov. 20 extending the comment period through Dec. 22 “to allow additional time for the public to review and comment on the initial proposals.” The original deadline was Nov. 27.

Myklegard’s comments came a day after OMB and the General Services Administration — which houses the FedRAMP program management office — hosted a public engagement forum. He said “about 400 people” showed up to that, “which is a great turnout for an OMB memo.”

The deputy federal CIO shared that the topics that commenters have been most focused on have been reciprocity between FedRAMP and other cloud security authorization programs, control validation and presumption of adequacy for vendors across federal agencies.

“So ensuring that if, when a company does go through the FedRAMP process, that they can then … take that document and take it from agency to agency and it will be accepted,” Myklegard said.

He added that the public has also made OMB aware that it needs to go back to the drawing board with some language and concepts promoted in the guidance. On security and red teaming, he said, “that means a lot of different things to different companies and we need to go back and examine what exactly we want to try and achieve as outcomes with red teaming.”

Similarly, with shared infrastructure, OMB is revisiting how to motivate cloud service providers to merge their commercial offerings and government-focused offerings together “so the government gets the best product with the best features and the best security,” Myklegard said.

And finally, the administration wants to make it less burdensome for vendors to “run the gauntlet of FedRAMP,” he said, adding that OMB has received comments about possibly using open-source templates that could help with that.

“There’s a lot of room in the FedRAMP process with friction and [manual] steps that are causing too long of times from when people identify a product that they need until they can employ it,” Myklegard said of the need for the updated guidance.

Myklegard didn’t know exactly when the final guidance could drop because the extension will push that out a bit.

“Obviously, it’s gonna be a little bit longer because we’re extending the time period, but we’re gonna work diligently to get those comments included. Depending on how much change we make in the memo, it will determine how much review we have to do. We’ll put that back out to the agencies to make sure we get their feedback, because they’re going to be the ones implementing it.”

“So it’s critical that they are going to have the resources and be aligned to do that. Then you should see it like early 2024,” he said.

Editor’s Note, 11/17/2023 at 3:38 p.m.: This story has been updated with additional information on the extension that will be published in the Federal Register.

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That’s the driver behind new draft guidance OMB issued Friday meant to modernize FedRAMP by setting a plan in place to scale the program, bolster security reviews of commercial cloud providers and accelerate federal adoption of those commercial cloud platforms.

“[T]he FedRAMP framework was built for a smaller job at a simpler time, and today’s cloud challenges are different. In the last decade, the security environment has become more complex, and the diversity of cloud services has grown dramatically. There are now many thousands of cloud-based services that Federal agencies could use to serve the American people, including tools for enterprise collaboration, product development, and improving an enterprise’s own cybersecurity,” reads a blog post from OMB on the draft guidance.

As it stands today, FedRAMP — operated by a program office housed in the General Services Administration — has authorized 318 cloud services for use by federal agencies. But, “the tools that agencies need to deliver on their missions are not always included there,” the blog post reads.

Upon its final issuance, the new guidance will replace the original FedRAMP guidance published in 2011, when federal agencies began ramping up the use of cloud. That comes with “an updated vision, scope, and governance structure for the FedRAMP program that is responsive to developments in Federal cybersecurity and substantial changes to the commercial cloud marketplace that have occurred since the program was established,” reads the draft.

Specifically, the new policy defines what cloud products are subject to FedRAMP requirements, lays out requirements for agencies to use authorized services, outlines the roles and responsibilities of the FedRAMP board and program office, and instills a more transparent and consistent process for security reviews.

As part of the refreshed vision, OMB lays out four strategic goals a modernized FedRAMP should accomplish:

• Lead an information security program grounded in technical expertise and risk management;
• Rapidly increase the size of the FedRAMP marketplace by offering multiple authorization structures;
• Streamlining processes through automation; and
• Leverage shared infrastructure between the federal government and the private sector.

The new policy acknowledges the explosion in usage of software-as-a-service cloud applications across the federal government, whereas the original FedRAMP policy was largely tailored to infrastructure-as-a-service.

It also prioritizes moving agencies and vendors away from government-specific clouds to instead promote the use of providers’ existing commercial clouds, calling on the GSA to develop a plan in the next year to transition agencies away from using government-only clouds.

Deputy Federal CIO Drew Myklegard last month teased the new guidance in a discussion with FedScoop at its annual FedTalks conference, saying: “We’ve seen an exponential growth every couple of years of these SaaS providers and the tools. But what we haven’t seen is similar exponential growth in their adoption, at least like ATO-ed [authority to operate], secured and monitored by the CIOs out there of those types of products.”

The security landscape has also changed, and that requires “the Federal Government to be an early adopter of innovative new approaches to cloud security offered and used by private sector platforms” to keep a step ahead of adversaries, the draft guidance says.

Updated guidance comes after the passage of the FedRAMP Authorization Act in 2022 and the subsequent establishment of the Federal Secure Cloud Advisory Committee. That committee has been meeting regularly in recent months.

OMB engaged the committee and a variety of other stakeholders to inform the new guidance.

“In order to design policy that works, it’s critical that we engage stakeholders,” Federal CIO Clare Martorana said in a statement. “We are taking a human-centered policy design approach and soliciting input to learn about how government and industry experience the FedRAMP process and how we could evolve the program to increase its use and drive greater impact.”

Myklegard similarly said in September that OMB has “talked to a lot of agencies and their experiences with FedRAMP, and they talked about a lot of the problems. We listened to probably 30 different agencies and got a lot of great feedback. It’s going to inform the policy.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., the author of the FedRAMP Authorization Act, applauded OMB for its “collaborative efforts with the stakeholder community,” saying he looks forward to the agency’s “continued stewardship of this important law,” he said in a statement.

“Today, OMB took the first step toward updating its decade-old guidance for the FedRAMP Program. This action implements key provisions of my FedRAMP Authorization Act, including the establishment of the FedRAMP Board, the promotion of automation and engagement with industry to drive down the cost and burden of FedRAMP authorization, and the reinforcement of the presumption of adequacy. Recognizing reciprocity is smart for vendors and smart for agencies. If you are approved at one window of government, that approval should carry with you to others,” he said.

The draft guidance is open for public comment through Nov. 27.

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Drew Myklegard, deputy federal CIO, said Thursday at FedScoop’s FedTalks that the forthcoming guidance comes as the federal cloud marketplace has evolved to be more dominated by software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings.

“The landscape has changed. SaaS — and now it’s heavy, heavy SaaS — and a lot of PaaS providers really need access to the government and their mission. So now we’re pivoting and it takes a couple of years to do that, but we’re pivoting towards that market,” Myklegard said.

He continued: “We’ve seen an exponential growth every couple of years of these SaaS providers and the tools. But what we haven’t seen is similar exponential growth in their adoption, at least like ATO-ed [authority to operate], secured and monitored by the CIOs out there of those types of products.”

Myklegard said shortly after he joined the Office of Management and Budget a little more than a year ago, he began leading efforts to talk to agencies to get feedback on the state of FedRAMP, and that has informed the decision to provide updated guidance.

“We talked to a lot of agencies and their experiences with FedRAMP, and they talked about a lot of the problems,” he said. “We listened to probably 30 different agencies and got a lot of great feedback. It’s going to inform the policy that’s forthcoming in some period of time in the future,” which he doesn’t want to put a deadline on, he said.

That document will be put out for public comment to hear “where we’re missing, where we’re hitting” with the direction of the policy.

The recent passage of the FedRAMP Authorization Act, which codified the program into law, has also bolstered its effectiveness by expanding the Joint Authorization Board and providing a Federal Secure Cloud Advisory Committee in line with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, Myklegard added.

The committee has had two meetings so far with another planned for this month, he said.

“We want to make sure that we’re really close in understanding what challenges the people on the ground are facing, as well as the industry products that are coming to market,” Myklegard said.

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Drew Myklegard said Wednesday at ATARC’s Federal IT Modernization Summit that his team seeks a clear-eyed cybersecurity assessment from agencies when assessing what potential projects should receive appropriations in the White House’s annual budget request process.

“We’re looking at it a few different ways. As you have seen, we’ve had a number of serious cyber incidents over the last couple of years, and we’re transitioning to a zero-trust architecture,” Myklegard said. “How is an agency reorganizing according to all of the different areas that we’ve laid out?” 

Federal agencies have worked to adopt a zero-trust architecture since the executive order on cybersecurity in May 2021, which mandated they move to the cloud-based security posture in order to protect government systems. 

OMB also seeks evidence that an agency will take a long-term approach to transform a legacy system, rather than trying to replace a system overnight, according to the deputy federal CIO.

In this regard, Myklegard cited the problem of “catastrophic success” — when a project such as a new application achieves initial momentum but is then derailed because it cannot cope with the number of users.

He said: “One of the things that’s surprising and that we’re always looking out for is something called ‘catastrophic success’ … [t]here’s nothing worse than building a really cool app, and then it catches fire [because it doesn’t scale].”

“We’re always thinking about these things, and the more mature an agency is in thinking about these things, the more likely we are to invest,” Myklegard said.

The Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer within the Office of Management and Budget is charged with maintaining the U.S. government’s enterprise architecture, ensuring interoperability and holding individual agencies to account for their technology spending.

As part of the federal budget process, each fiscal year federal agencies create budget requests and submit them to OMB for scrutiny ahead of the presentation of the White House’s larger submission to Congress — a process that historically happens sometime in the months of February or March.

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