The Pipeline Is Not a Parking Lot

Repeat DASes, talent pipelines, and other Washington traditions

Hi Substack friends! I know I’ve been quiet on here between work, travel, and a bout of writer’s block. I’ll be working to clear a backlog of drafts in my queue, including the one below.

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It is that time in Washington again. Speculation about who will staff the next administration is picking up, alongside the usual crop of programs devoted to developing stronger talent pipelines. There’s no shortage of barriers to building a healthy pipeline, and most of them have been commented on at length. I want to highlight one I watched up close when I served in government and throw my own thoughts into the mix.

People in our field talk about “turns” the way politicians do (behind closed doors, of course). When a party loses and administrations turn over, a generation of staffers “miss their turn”; when a party wins, the people who supported the right candidate are owed theirs. Usually if this applies to you, you’re fairly high up in the food chain and have been biding your time for your turn to come.

Luckily for you, the national security ecosystem is structured to privilege the careers and preferences of the most senior individuals at every other cohort’s expense. Unluckily for you, every administration, think tank, and institution in our field is a pyramid, with fewer roles at the top than at the bottom. This guarantees that many people in any given cohort will miss their turn; this is the longstanding reality of working in Washington. The question is who absorbs the pain and what it does to the pipeline.

Right now, the community mostly chooses to defer the pain to the generations behind them. In the previous administration, dozens (if not hundreds) of senior individuals who felt they missed their turn after the last electoral loss returned to government at the same level and role (or if they were lucky, one tiny notch up) despite years on the outside accruing seniority.

When senior officials take roles they have outgrown either by experience or seniority, the pain travels downward. The person behind them who would have been the deputy assistant secretary is asked to be the senior advisor. The special advisor is asked to be the special assistant. The special assistant is told for the duration of a presidential term that there are no jobs and no room to grow. I heard that phrase constantly while I was in government, from people at every level: the pipeline is “backed up” and therefore *shrug* nothing can be done to support the lower ranks in their growth. This conveniently papers over the conscious hiring and staffing decisions that result in this type of environment.

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Serving in government is one of the greatest honors of a national security career. Many of us who have done it want to do it again, and many of us will spend years trying. That said, none of us are entitled to go back. The assumption that a role (any role) is owed to you, especially at the expense of the cohorts behind you, distorts how the system was designed to work. Truthfully, many of us may never return. The difficulty of swallowing this pill does not give us the right to disrupt the pipeline by cycling back through lower-ranking roles until something better opens up.

The structural reality is that there are not enough top roles to go around and this should produce a culling process where only the top talent rises. Right now, the field resolves the shortage by privileging the top levels of the bench and squeezing the cohorts below, then dismisses those same cohorts as impatient or unrealistic about their careers.

The accusation does not hold up well on inspection. Entitlement is the word that usually gets pinned on younger professionals but in my experience, the trait is easier to find at the most senior tiers. When I was in government, Gen X largely set this pattern in our field. Millennials at my level should commit to not inheriting this mindset and enforcing it on the people behind us.

This goes hand in hand with a national security culture that defaults to the most senior candidate available even when the role does not call for one, and the downstream effects are predictable. When someone takes a role beneath their experience, almost no one in the chain ends up satisfied. The person in that seat wants more authority and faster movement. The people junior to them want a shot at the next rung, which is now held by someone who should already be two rungs up. To put it bluntly, no one is happy and the entire pipeline suffers.

Of course, there’s a real policy cost too. Washington constantly laments how stale its policies and thinking have become, and this dynamic is a contributing factor inside government. When the field defaults to the most senior person available for every role, it slows the rate at which new thinking reaches the rooms where decisions get made. A pipeline backed up at the top recycles the same assumptions and personnel while crowding out young talent with new insights to offer.

None of this is an argument against senior expertise; some problems in this field benefit from someone who has dealt with them before and can dive right in without navigating a learning curve. However, our field treats seniority as king with almost few exceptions and, in the process, sacrifices those who would inject fresh thinking into stale problems.

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The question is what a healthier model would actually look like, since the current one keeps producing the same outcomes. Here are a few ideas worth considering.

The first is a one-year pledge for the most senior tier of any incoming administration. This applies to non-Senate-confirmed roles, where turnover does not have to run through a lengthy confirmation process. Administrations want stability and continuity, which is fair, but stability does not require that an overqualified person occupy a role for four years and crowd out the next cohort behind them. A standing expectation that certain senior roles turn over after the first year or two of an administration, long enough to set direction and stand up the office but short enough to leave room for someone else, would change the calculus that pulls so many people into roles they have already outgrown. Administrations can explore pairing the pledge with an apprentice model: bring the eventual successor in from day one, in the room from the start, with the transition timeline understood by everyone involved. The natural objection is that this weakens the authority of the short-term leader, but it only does so if the field treats the model as a demotion rather than as the design. A united front, a clear timeline, and leaders with the temperament not to feel threatened by their successors solve most of the problem.

The second is that none of this works without the people who run staffing. Designing a new model is easier than enforcing it on friends, and most of the people in staffing roles will have to do it with mentors, colleagues, and longtime allies on the other side of the table. Future administrations need leadership in the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) who can tell people they like that the role they want belongs to someone earlier in their career. The expectation should be stated openly and shared from the top: pipeline development takes priority over any individual’s desire to come back at the same level as last time simply because it’s the only seat on offer.

The third is to hire at the right level rather than at the highest available level. That means resisting the pull toward repeat DASes, the habit of placing former senior officials into roles they were doing several years ago because the market is tight, and the assumption that more experience is always better for the team. Some of the strongest political appointees come in through Schedule C roles in their twenties and thirties and grow into senior responsibility on the job. The field knows this and still acts as though seniority is a substitute for fit.

The fourth is to apply the same logic outside government. Think tanks, advocacy organizations, consulting firms, and the broader policy ecosystem mirror the same dynamics and produce the same consequences. A former senior official taking a director-level role at a consulting firm crowds out the next director the same way that person would have crowded out the next DAS.

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Lest you think this is directed primarily at the generations before me, all of this brings me to my own cohort. Millennials have lived the squeeze from the underside, and it hasn’t been pleasant for any of us. Roles many of us trained for went to people more senior than the work required and who were on their second or third round doing the same exact work. Wanting some of that back when “our turn” comes is understandable, but it’s exactly the pattern we should not repeat. The norm that lets people occupy roles they have outgrown (and then return to occupy them again) has to stop somewhere, and we’re the ones now moving into our most influential years. That makes it our problem to fix if we really purport to care about pipeline development.

The structural shortage at the top of national security isn’t going away. What we can and should change is whether the people who currently hold those top roles, and the people who decide who fills them, are willing to give up something so the cohorts behind them have a real shot at careers this field.