Building a Critical Talent Taskforce
What if we bulldozed the barriers between the world’s smartest people, and our most important problems?
As I’ve said before, the US should be Talent-Maxxing. But not all maxxing is created equal.
Critical industries there are a relatively small number of load-bearing jobs that have enormous positive spillovers for the rest of society. Having critical talent in those positions is especially important, and is a problem that could use a general manager.
To this end, I’d propose we spin up a Critical Talent Taskforce (CTT).
The CTT would be a (ideally independent) government organization with a single mandate: remove blockers to critical talent in an extremely narrow set of fields: medical care, AI, semiconductors, defense, and energy production1.
Within those fields, the CTT would have two responsibilities:
Identify the largest 1-2 skill bottlenecks towards moving the field forward
Propose policy changes across government to fill those gaps
Identifying skill bottlenecks
The identification work can be done annually with a small set of tools, most of which are already in use elsewhere:
Annual surveys of the most important organizations in each industry. This is the core of how Australia’s Jobs and Skills Australia builds its Skills Priority List, and how the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee builds its Shortage Occupation List.
Wage data, similar to what’s been proposed for modernizing the Department of Labor’s Schedule A list.
The goal is to be pipeline-focused: which specific set of roles needs to be filled in order to move the field forward? Not “the semiconductor industry needs more workers” but “these are the ~1-2k roles that will really move the needle.”
Proposing policy changes
Each year, the CTT publishes a plan for how it will remove the bottlenecks it identified.
Examples of policy changes the task force could recommend:
Visas to allow foreign workers to fill critical roles2.
Faster security clearance processing for shortage defense roles.
Federal regulation to address residency limits that contribute to physician shortages.
The first two would be relatively near-term actions that could potentially show impact within a year. The last would be a longer-term initiative. The CTT could make both types of recommendations.
Structuring the taskforce
Ideally the Critical Talent Taskforce would be a technocratic standalone institution modeled on the Federal Reserve. In the best case it would be given power to not only make recommendations but to take limited direct action (e.g., to issue a fixed number of visa carve-outs each year, or to grant certification waivers in its named industries). Its power could be circumscribed to a short list of industries that are unusually critical for the public good.
In the near term, a civil society organization could fill the identification gap: running the surveys, publishing the bottleneck list, lobbying for the carve-outs. But to really move the needle, we would benefit from an organization with the full authority of the federal government to bulldoze the barriers between the world’s smartest people and our most important problems.
Maybe there are a couple others that could be added to this list, but the point is that it should be a pretty small list, focusing on fields that are truly critical.
For example, the Schedule A Shortage Occupation List could have a certain number of slots each year reserved for roles recommended by the CTT.