Tech Capacity in Transition: Barriers and Opportunities in Tech Talent
This week, we published a white paper detailing research EPIC’s Tech Team kicked off way back in March. That work took up an urgent, and—for those who care about government capacity to deliver better outcomes to communities and the environment—a daunting question: Amid so much change across agencies, how should the public sector build—and better empower—its technical workforce?
To answer that question and the many others implicated by it, we interviewed a host of former public servants, technologists, policy experts, and workforce leaders with deep experience in federal, state, local, and industry settings—paying special attention to the technical areas that impact environmental work. Our hope was that by hearing a wide range of perspectives during a period of major change, we might find fresh takes on old challenges, uncover connections between problems and solutions, and discover models to lift up or test moving forward.
We heard plenty of nuance in interviews, but the bottom line was clear: tech capacity in government is not just a hiring or “people” challenge—it is a systems challenge. That means it touches every aspect of how agencies (and their many partners) analyze, plan, acquire, deploy—and ultimately empower or impede—the workforce that makes good delivery possible. There’s much to unpack in our findings and the pathways forward we see, but for now, here are the key take-aways:
-
There’s no shortage of tech talent—across disciplines—eager to work in mission-driven government roles. What’s missing is consistent, clear demand signals from agency leaders and workforce planners; meaning clarity about the skills needed, a shared vocabulary for describing technical roles and competencies, and actionable pathways to bring that talent into teams efficiently. Environmental and natural resource teams in particular often lack visibility into the product, design, engineering, data, and other skillsets that could dramatically improve how they deliver across mission areas. Think everything from climate resilience and adaptation, to land stewardship, conservation, restoration, wildfire response, or permitting reform—as well as to other priorities like drinking water and wetlands data, clean energy infrastructure, or environmental justice (and much more).
-
Attention is shifting to state and local settings as federal teams and tools are eliminated or threatened—which is good. But we should also notice where state and local organizations have long been leading, learning, and struggling around tech talent and innovation. State or local agency teams in particular are grappling with outdated job classifications, resource-strapped departments, and hiring systems that force leaders to work around—rather than on or through—established processes. What’s more, the gaps between what modern technical workers want in their work and career trajectories and what traditional government career approaches provide remains one of the chief hurdles to sustainable, long-term tech capacity in agencies. And that needs to change.Today, essentially over a decade into the civic tech “movement”—and with digital services teams thriving in a handful of states, cities, and localities—we see ample opportunity to learn from or adapt the best practices of everyone ranging from pioneers in this space, to policy- or career stage-specific approaches, to new initiatives focused on tech capacity across sectors. Again, urgent environmental priorities like climate, permitting, or drinking water in particular stand to benefit from this momentum—and localities can and should be sites of innovation.
-
Many Americans never see the federal digital infrastructure that underpins things like wildfire response, environmental health risks and monitoring, wetland mapping, or pollution tracking (among many others). As federal environmental datasets, tools, and teams disappear, so too have many of the public benefits and access they quietly enabled. Yet links between those benefits and the technical teams long working on behalf of all communities—the former U.S. Digital Service, GSA’s 18F, or EJScreen, for example—are simply lost on many Americans. It’s clear that a proactive storytelling effort in their wake is overdue; one focused on the value of a cluster of empowered technical staff in government working to realize better outcomes. Interviewees stressed the need for that narrative to connect technical capacity directly to those outcomes—as well as to the indispensable role government must continue to play in protecting our communities and ecosystems.
-
Recent cuts to the federal workforce and programs are only one part of the story here. Equally pressing is a deeper question: should tech capacity efforts concentrate on building (or re-building) in-house technical teams (whatever the tenor of the broader political landscape)? Or instead, things like improving procurement pathways or other auxiliary mechanisms and ensuring that agency leaders and teams for example, meaningfully adopt digital tools? The question is a big one, and what we heard variations of in interviews was all of the above. Technologists and advocates in both civic tech and environmental spaces clearly feel the need “to press multiple levers at once”—including across federal, state, and local policy settings, and notwithstanding the disruptive political and technology shifts complicating that work.
A key challenge we see, though, is that in numerous environmental domains, lines between tech users, builders, and “owners” are rarely clear; and delivery contexts or data gaps can be more ambiguous or elaborate than in traditional service delivery settings (Exhibit A: the behemoth of environmental permitting, or making drinking water data findable, accessible, and interoperable). In recent months, we’ve learned about, spoken to, or helped launch several teams with innovative approaches worth learning more about: these include the Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP), EPIC and New America’s Digital Service for the Planet (DSP) initiative, Tech Talent Project, California Alpha, U.S. Digital Response (USDR), and Coding it Forward.
-
Interviewees consistently emphasized that what public sector technologists need now is not experimentation for its own sake, but sustained support around proven approaches—particularly tech talent or innovation-focused fellowships, early-career programs, and/or cross-sector talent pipelines that have been strengthening agency tech capacity for years. (for examples on this score, see pgs. 10-16 of the paper!) That means making deliberate, long-term investments in tech and data approaches that demonstrably improve delivery and mission outcomes. In essence: retreat by philanthropic (and other) funders exacerbates the very gaps innovators and tech capacity advocates are working to close.
-
Environmental agencies and their many partners face an unprecedented workforce crisis. Our environments—and the technology we use to manage them—are rapidly changing; how we design, train, and deploy our technical workforce needs to change, too. While many practitioners across disciplines are rising to meet the moment, our workforce systems, competency models, training pathways, and basic job descriptions simply haven’t kept pace—especially in technology and data-related fields and competencies. Existing skills frameworks (e.g., federal competency models or industry accreditations) all offer important guidance, but they don’t reflect the full complexity of today’s environmental work—especially where building or using data and digital tools are concerned.
Finally, many roles or position descriptions anchored to the standard models still fragment tasks that today are deeply intertwined in practice: environmental planning and public engagement, or ecological modeling, applied data analytics, or policy communications for example. We need to prioritize designing, and then validating—in recurring feedback loops—the blended technical skillsets that should make up the environmental workforce of the future. What we’ve taken to calling the vital triad: fieldcraft-datacraft-statecraft.
What’s Next?
We hope the paper’s findings and recommendations for ways forward are useful for leaders in and around government, and we’re eager for feedback or ideas on any aspect of this work. This project raised more questions than answers; but it also validated and deepened a belief at the heart of our theory of change: that effective environmental work depends on modern, human-centered data, tools, and teams—and on the people who build and use them. In 2026, we’re ramping up efforts to find new avenues for learning and collaboration around tech talent, including by strengthening demand signals in agencies, and via partnerships with state, local, or non-government teams who share our vision. If your organization is wrestling with those questions—or building solutions of your own—we’d love to learn more. Are you a practitioner, policymaker, advocate, or researcher interested in using or contributing to this work? We also want to hear from you.
