Federal agencies were ordered to stop using unclear job titles. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) singled out the title IT Specialist as especially bad. This counter goes up every day federal agencies avoid posting a job listing for an “IT Specialist”. But when they use the forbidden title, the counter resets to zero. A higher number is better.
It's easy for the government to make resolutions, but hard to follow through. So the American Governance team at the Foundation for American Innovation made a counter to help them out.
This counter measures something that the government is trying to fix: lousy job titles. Right now, 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're filled with Human Resource Specialists. These job titles tell us nothing about the work being done.
The system isn't just unclear, it's 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 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 measure follow-through on the Executive Order—which is the law, after all—our counter tracks minimal compliance with the plain language guidance.
This effort is ultimately about more than clearer job titles. The government needs to recruit top-notch employees and invest in them. Too often, it doesn't. The first step in fixing this is issuing new policy, but the hard part is changing how agencies actually act.
The real test is how long the government can go without trying to hire an “IT Specialist.”
We pull every Information Technology Management Series (GS-2210) job posting from USAJobs.
The counter is a very simple measure of compliance with the plain language guidance, as “IT Specialist” was specifically called out by OPM as an example of what not to use. However, there are other unclear, noncompliant 2210 titles besides “IT Specialist,” such as “Information Technology Manager” and “Computer Systems Administrator.”