Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s push to bring more tech talent into the Pentagon has the backing of a key senator on Capitol Hill, who said he intends to make those hires easier in this year’s defense policy bill.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on Wednesday that he is planning to include a section in the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that makes it easier to hire top talent from Silicon Valley and other innovative, tech-focused hotbeds across the country.
He declined, however, to provide many details, and said he did not yet have a consensus from the whole Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs.
“We’re going to put it in but I can’t say exactly what it’ll look like because I’ve got to get the full committee to agree. But we are motivated, the whole committee is, to try to find ways to make it easier,” McCain told the Washington Examiner.
One possible change, he said, could speed up the process of bringing new hires into the Defense Department to better compete with the private sector, where college grads can begin work as soon as they are hired.
“For example, right now someone applies, sometimes it takes 12 months to get a clearance and all that kind of stuff, whereas when they graduate from college, they can go right out to Intel and immediately get a job. That kind of approach,” he said.
Carter has made partnerships with non-traditional defense companies a key part of his tenure as secretary of defense, including several trips to innovative hot beds like Silicon Valley, Austin and Boston.
He has also promised to reduce bureaucratic hurdles that make it needlessly difficult for start-ups to work with the Pentagon and change hiring practices to allow innovators to work for the Defense Department for a short time or a specific project before returning to the private sector.
“We’re building what I call on-ramps and off-ramps for technical talent to flow in both directions so more of America’s brightest minds can contribute to our mission of national defense, even if only for a time or a project, and so our military and civilian technologists in the innovative defense industry that support us already can interact in new ways with the entire innovative ecosystem,” he said last week in Cambridge, while announcing a new textiles hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
