Chance to Compete Act of 2023

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 159, the Chance to Compete Act.

The bipartisan Chance to Compete Act was introduced by Representative Foxx, who I see is here with us, and Representative Connolly. I thank them both for their hard work on it.

The bill aims to make evaluations more useful in assessing the skills of candidates for Federal positions and to alleviate inefficiencies that have long hampered the hiring process.

The bill turns away from current reliance on self-assessment and attainment of educational degrees to determine candidate qualifications in the hiring process. Instead, subject matter experts and agencies would design assessments that test specific knowledge for a position for which the agency is hiring.

This overhaul would better match qualified applicants with positions and expand opportunities to candidates with more diverse professional and educational backgrounds.

The Chance to Compete Act aligns with the Office of Personnel Management's guidance of last May to facilitate an executive order to modernize the process of hiring Federal job candidates.

Establishing hiring methods that are more skills-based will improve agency managers' ability to hire people who possess the knowledge and experience to do the job and to hire from a wider array of qualified applicants.

The bill also directs OPM to create an online platform for sharing candidate assessments between agencies and maintain a portal for hiring managers to find candidates who have already demonstrated their qualifications for certain positions but were not yet hired.

Under this legislation, agencies may assemble talent teams to support this assessment of candidates in the hiring process. The OPM Director would be required to submit annual progress reports to Congress on use of the new assessments. After 5 years, the GAO would conduct a study of the implementation of the Federal job assessment reforms and their impacts on the hiring process.

This bill streamlines the hiring process for agencies and will shorten the time it takes to bring new, well-qualified employees on board.

I thank Dr. Foxx for her leadership in introducing it. The bill is the result of constructive collaboration by several members of our committee from both sides of the aisle, including Mr. Connolly.

Mr. Speaker, I urge everyone to support passage of this bipartisan legislation. It is an auspicious way for us to begin on the Oversight Committee. I salute the chairman for his wisdom in bringing this forward, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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