The biggest challenge in recruiting technical talent to the government is the GS payscale. This program is being recommended to Congress, so I assume it's an at

The biggest challenge in recruiting technical talent to the government is the GS payscale. This program is being recommended to Congress, so I assume it's an attempt to indirectly increase compensation by offering free tuition to people who commit to government employment- it also is likely attempting to target college age kids, who could accept government payscales more easily than someone who already works in the private sector and has gotten used to higher compensation. Schmidt is no dummy, and I expect that this would work, but it's still a hack around the fundamental problem of IT compensation scales that are roughly 50% of private sector levels. A more straightforward solution would be to just create a new payscale (say, the Executive Technical Service) for IT professionals and other technical domains where federal compensation lags the private sector. The Senior Executive Service (the payscale for senior leadership like department and agency executives, including most political appointees) has about 8000 members- if you gave this system twice as many people and paid them all $100k more than the GS system would, you'd increase the federal budget by about $1.6 billion a year, or 0.04% of the 2019 budget, almost all of which you'd recover anyway by replacing IT contractors who generally cost the government between $250k and $350k each a year. Unfortunately, this solution would really piss off the big federal contractors, who would heavily lobby against it, which is why it doesn't happen even though more reasonable payscales have been found for federal doctors and lawyers.