The Man Who Ran A16Z Is Now Running Federal Hiring, and His Old Friends Are First in Line

GriftMatrix Tech Oligarchy The AI Files By
Who is hiring inside your government?

Tech Force is regulatory capture with a government badge, a two-year lease, and a job fair at the end.

Wait until you hear about this nonsense. The man Trump put in charge of federal hiring is Scott Kupor. Before Trump appointed him, Kupor spent years as the managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz – one of the most powerful venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Venture capital firms make money by investing in tech companies early and cashing out when those companies get big. Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z, has had a piece of Facebook, Coinbase, and a long list of companies you’ve definitely heard of. When a16z backs a startup, it’s a signal to the entire industry that the company is worth watching. Kupor ran that operation.

Now he runs OPM – the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency, which sets the rules for federal hiring. And he just built a program where his old friends’ companies get to send their employees inside the federal agencies that regulate and contract with those same companies. OPM expects they’ll get to keep their stock. They’re supposed to take unpaid leave or quit, since federal workers generally can’t take outside pay. They spend two years on teams that report straight to agency leadership. Then they can go back.

Kupor says it’s about getting “the right talent on the right problems.” It’s called Tech Force, and it is the most openly corrupt thing this administration has done that nobody is talking about.

Here’s How It Works

OPM launched Tech Force in December 2025. The pitch is simple: place about 1,000 tech workers – mostly early-career, plus some managers on leave from partner companies – inside federal agencies for two-year stints, salaries up to $200,000, paid by taxpayers. The partner list is the entire Silicon Valley donor class: NVIDIA, Palantir, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, xAI, Robinhood, Oracle, Amazon Web Services. Twenty-nine companies so far, with more coming.

If you own stock in any of those companies, you have a financial interest in what the federal government decides about AI regulation, defense contracts, and data policy. The people Kupor is inviting inside will.

There are two hiring tracks. The first is a general application – anyone can apply, OPM does some screening. The second track is where the corruption lives: companies can nominate their own senior employees to take a leave of absence and move inside a federal agency. No competitive process – though OPM says every applicant still has to take its skills tests. The company picks who goes. And OPM says it expects those employees can keep their stock options and stock awards while making government decisions. The details? Each company works those out, case by case.

So a Palantir employee – selected by Palantir, holding Palantir stock, with a guaranteed return ticket to Palantir – could soon be sitting inside the Defense Department shaping AI policy. Palantir is the data analytics company that makes just over half its money from government contracts, including defense and intelligence. It is one of the largest defense contractors in the country.

This isn’t some far-fetched hypothetical. This is the program.

They Built This on the Grave of Something That Worked

Here’s the part that should make you genuinely angry. Before any of this, the government already had programs that brought tech talent inside federal agencies – and they were designed specifically to prevent exactly this kind of conflict.

The U.S. Digital Service and a group called 18F spent over a decade hiring engineers, designers, and data scientists as actual federal employees. No private-sector stocks. No corporate benefit packages. No company nominations. Just government workers, subject to the same ethics rules as everyone else. The 18F website said it plainly: “as federal employees, we don’t have conflicts of interest, just dedication to your mission.”

Over eleven years, 18F completed over 450 real projects – building cloud infrastructure for agencies, improving government websites for blind users, and making it easier for military members stationed overseas to vote in presidential elections.

In January 2025, Trump turned USDS into DOGE, and by February, layoffs and resignations had gutted it. Weeks before GSA shut 18F down on March 1st, Musk posted on X that it had been “deleted” – he actually used that word, about a government tech team that helped build the IRS’s free tax filing program. By June, the IRS alone had lost over 2,000 tech workers. In total, around 317,000 people left the federal workforce in 2025, including technologists who had spent years building institutional knowledge about how government systems actually work.

Nine months later, Kupor announced Tech Force as if the idea had just occurred to him.

A University of Michigan public policy professor said the quiet part out loud: part of the reason there’s a tech talent shortage in government right now is because DOGE drove out some very talented people who were already there. The administration created the emergency, then brought in the same industry that funded the emergency’s architects to help fix it.

That is the whole story.

The Conflict-of-Interest Answer Is Basically “Trust Us”

Rob Shriver, a former acting OPM director, said his first question about Tech Force was what conflict-of-interest rules are in place. Kupor told reporters they’d “run down all the various conflict issues” and didn’t think they’d get in the way of hiring people.

That’s it. The guy who used to run a venture capital firm – whose partners are now publicly cheering this program on social media – told you not to worry about conflicts of interest. That’s supposed to be enough.

The program already has over 35,000 people expressing interest, according to OPM. The $150K-$200K salary helps. So does the job fair at the end, where the same 29 partner companies get first access to everyone who just spent two years learning the inside of the federal government.

It’s a pipeline. Taxpayers fund the training, private companies collect the talent and the institutional knowledge, and the revolving door doesn’t even need to revolve – you walk in one side, spend two years learning exactly how the government makes its decisions, and walk out the other side worth a lot more to your employer than when you started.

Nobody is hiding any of this. It’s sitting right there in the press release. They’re just calling it innovation, and betting that most people won’t read far enough to understand what it actually is.

Sources

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said a Palantir employee is now sitting inside the Defense Department – when it ran, Tech Force hadn’t placed anyone yet. It also said the federal workforce shrank by 317,000 – that’s how many people left in 2025, while about 68,000 were hired; that DOGE gutted USDS in January – it was renamed DOGE then and gutted by February; and that Musk posted about 18F in March – it was weeks before 18F closed on March 1st. A few smaller details about the hires, 18F’s voting work and two quotes are fixed too. It also said Tech Force employees keep their corporate benefits – OPM says they’re supposed to take unpaid leave or quit, since federal workers generally can’t take outside pay.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so and add context – OPM’s skills tests, what Kupor told reporters about conflicts, how the tech companies take part, and where the 35,000 figure comes from. It also now says what OPM does, what OPM expects on stock, who Tech Force teams report to, and how much of Palantir’s money comes from government contracts.

Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.