Introduction: The Hire Trap
Government loves a good hiring initiative. New pathways. New authorities. New talent pipelines. New contractor vehicles designed to “bring in fresh thinking.” Yet despite decades of hiring reform, agencies still struggle with innovation, speed and execution.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The government does not suffer from a lack of talent. It suffers from a failure to use the talent it already has.
Every agency contains analysts, engineers, policy specialists, cyber professionals, designers and operators with ideas that could materially improve outcomes. Most of those ideas never see daylight. Not because they aren’t good, but because they get stuck somewhere between GS-9 and GS-13, where initiative quietly dies.
You don’t need a workforce of unicorns. You need to stop benching the ones you already have.
Where the Best Ideas Go to Die
Innovation failure in government is rarely dramatic. It’s procedural. Ideas don’t get rejected outright, they get delayed, diluted, redirected, “queued” or quietly ignored. Over time, employees learn the rules:
• Don’t outshine your role
• Don’t skip layers
• Don’t create risk
• Don’t assume leadership wants disruption
Many GS-9 to GS-13 employees enter government with energy and ideas shaped by education, military service or the private sector. Within a few years, those same employees are executing narrowly defined tasks disconnected from their broader expertise.
The problem isn’t grade level. It’s a culture of permission versus improvement.
Agencies unintentionally create environments where initiative is seen as inefficiency and curiosity looks like nonconformance. This suppresses innovation long before leadership ever sees it.
How Managers Accidentally Suppress Talent
Most suppression isn’t malicious. It’s structural, and often incentivized. Supervisors are rewarded for predictability, not experimentation. Risk remediation beats risk reduction. Performance plans reward task completion, not idea generation.
Common managerial patterns include:
• Equating control with competence
• Treating deviation as disruption
• Prioritizing clearance of work over improvement of work
• Assuming innovation is “someone else’s job”
Managers often fear that empowered employees undermine authority or slow delivery. The result is an informal culture where thinking beyond your lane is discouraged, even when leaders say otherwise.
Research on public-sector innovation consistently shows that psychological safety and managerial trust are primary determinants of idea flow, not employee capability.
The Hidden Cost of Underutilization
Underused talent doesn’t just slow innovation, it produces secondary damage:
• Employee disengagement
• Brain drain to contractors
• Quiet quitting
• Loss of institutional memory
• Overdependence on external vendors
Ironically, agencies then contract out for the very expertise they already employ, often at three to five times the cost, because internal staff are perceived as “not ready” or “too junior.” This dynamic reinforces a false narrative: that innovation must come from the outside.
In reality, contractors oftentimes bring the ideas and innovations, but employees within sustain them. Without internal ownership, transformation never sticks.
You Don’t Need a Reorg to Fix This
Good news: Unlocking talent does not require organizational restructuring, new billets or massive programs.
It requires leadership behavior. Agencies that use their talent well do a few things differently:
1. Separate Grade From Contribution
Grade levels define pay, not insight. Leaders who invite GS-11s and GS-12s into working groups, design sessions, and problem-solving forums often surface ideas that never reach formal briefings.
2. Create Safe Pilot Spaces
Innovation doesn’t need enterprise rollout. Leaders can sponsor small, time-bound pilots where employees test ideas without reputational risk.
3. Ask Better Questions
Instead of “Who should be working on this?” ask:
“Who already understands this problem deeply?”
The answer is rarely external.
4. Reward Thinking, Not Just Delivery
Performance systems rarely reward insight. Leaders can counteract this informally, through recognition, exposure and opportunity assignments.
5. Stop Defaulting Everything to Contractors — Start Using Them Strategically
Before writing a statement of work, ask: “Who inside already has 60% of this expertise?”
Then use contractors intentionally to accelerate, augment or transfer the remaining 40%, building internal capability while still benefiting from external insight. Contractors are most effective as capacity multipliers and coaches, not permanent substitutes for internal ownership.
Leadership Is a Utilization Function
Talent is not a pipeline problem. It’s a leadership problem. Leadership determines whether organizations extract full cognitive value from their people or merely transactional labor. High-performing organizations, public and private, treat employees as capacity multipliers, not task processors. They assume intelligence is distributed and design systems that surface it (Edmondson, 2018).
Government doesn’t lack smart people. It lacks mechanisms that invite them to think fully and integrate those innovations.
Conclusion: Stop Shopping. Start Using The Available Resources Fully.
Every agency already employs people who could:
• Improve mission delivery
• Reduce waste
• Strengthen cybersecurity
• Improve service design
• Accelerate policy execution
The question isn’t whether they exist. It’s whether leadership is willing to use them fully. Before launching another hiring initiative, leaders should ask:
Who have we already hired, and what are we preventing them from doing?
The fastest way to improve government performance is not another pipeline. It’s simply unlocking the bench.
Dr. Rhonda Farrell is a transformation advisor with decades of experience driving impactful change and strategic growth for DoD, IC, Joint, and commercial agencies and organizations. She has a robust background in digital transformation, organizational development, and process improvement, offering a unique perspective that combines technical expertise with a deep understanding of business dynamics. As a strategy and innovation leader, she aligns with CIO, CTO, CDO, CISO, and Chief of Staff initiatives to identify strategic gaps, realign missions, and re-engineer organizations. Based in Baltimore and a proud US Marine Corps veteran, she brings a disciplined, resilient, and mission-focused approach to her work, enabling organizations to pivot and innovate successfully.
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