The American Governance team is excited to launch a new project: Plain Job Titles Please.
It's easy for the government to make resolutions, but hard to follow through. So we made a counter to help them out. It counts the number of days since a federal agency last tried to hire an “IT Specialist.”
This measures something that the government is working to fix: lousy job titles. Today, Uncle Sam asks for IT Specialists to work with AWS, when any sensible organization would ask for a Cloud Engineer. The federal government's HR departments don't have recruiters—they have Human Resource Specialists. These job titles tell us nothing about the work being done.
Vague job titles are unfair to applicants and civil servants. Qualified professionals outside of government don't apply because they can't make sense of the postings. Talented civil servants don't get hired by the private sector because their job titles are inscrutable to corporate America. The system rewards fluency with jargon and discourages public service.
The administration decided to overhaul this system with its Executive Order 14170 on federal hiring. In September 2025, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) responded by issuing guidance that instructed agencies to stop using “generic or jargon-laden” job titles and to replace them with titles that are “descriptive, organizational, or functional in nature.”
HR departments were told to audit and revise job titles accordingly. But have they? To see whether agencies are meeting their obligations under the executive order, our counter measures minimal compliance with the plain language guidance.
Clearer job titles matter on their own. The ultimate goal, however, is building a government that can recruit and invest in top-notch employees. Issuing new policy is the first step, but the challenge is following through and ensuring that agencies improve their day-to-day HR practices.
That follow-through is what Plain Job Titles Please measures: how long agencies can go without trying to hire an “IT Specialist.”
Take a look at the site here.
