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Jamie Dimon has a warning: The American Dream is in trouble. And he’s putting JPMorgan Chase’s money where his mouth is.

The bank’s chairman and CEO on Tuesday unveiled the “American Dream Initiative” (ADI), a sweeping multi-year effort to expand economic opportunity across the United States. The announcement marks one of the most ambitious community investment programs in the bank’s 225-year history—and comes with a pointed message from its chief executive about the state of the country.

“The American Dream is alive, but it’s slipping out of reach for too many people—and for future generations,” Dimon said in a statement. “This slows economic growth, hurts communities and prevents many people from getting ahead.”

The initiative will span six focus areas: small business growth, affordable housing, financial health, careers and skills, healthcare access, and support for local institutions. But JPMorgan is leading with its biggest strength—small business banking—as the initial centerpiece of the program.

The nation’s largest lender to small businesses says it currently serves 7 million such firms and intends to grow that number to 10 million over the next several years. A representative for JPMorgan told Fortune that the 10 million figure is projected to be hit within five years. To get there, the bank is committing nearly $80 billion in lending to small businesses over the next decade, including direct loans and capital channeled through Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) as well as mission-driven lenders. This is above the baseline figure, JPMorgan confirmed to Fortune.

JPMorgan also plans to hire 1,000 additional small business bankers across its 5,000-branch network and nearly double its corps of Senior Business Consultants to 150, with targeted expansion in markets like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

“Small businesses are essential to economic growth and opportunity in communities across America,” said Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. “We are supporting entrepreneurs by combining local, on-the-ground engagement with the scale, capital and expertise of the nation’s leading small business bank—so they can start, grow and scale in the communities they call home.”

Through its Coaching for Impact program, JPMorgan plans to mentor and graduate nearly 115,000 small business owners in more than 80 cities over the next 10 years, marking an eight-fold increase from the program’s 2020 launch. On the financial literacy front, the bank aims to reach roughly 5 million customers, students, and small business owners with financial education, up from 1 million over the past five years.

The ADI also takes aim at the regulatory burden. JPMorgan says it will advocate for policies to eliminate $100 billion in red tape costs under the SBA’s Made in America Manufacturing Initiative.

Alabama is among the first markets getting a deeper investment. The bank has operated in the state for more than 50 years and plans to triple its Chase branch count there to 35 by 2030, including new locations in Decatur, Foley, and Trussville. It will also open its first Community Center in the state, designed to host financial workshops, skills training, and small business pop-ups.

“JPMorgan Chase has been helping Alabamians pursue their American Dream for more than 50 years, and we know we have a role to play in the decades ahead,” said Brian Lamb, the firm’s head of Specialized Industries.

Nearly a decade of JPMorgan initiatives

The American Dream Initiative is also positioned as a complement to JPMorgan’s previously announced $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative, which targets investments in manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, and healthcare—industries the firm views as critical to America’s long-term competitiveness. Together, the two programs reflect Dimon’s thesis that national economic strength and broad-based community opportunity are inseparable goals.

The American Dream Initiative is the latest chapter in a long JPMorgan playbook of large-scale, branded community investment programs—each one bigger than the last. It arguably started with Detroit, when JPMorgan made a landmark $200 million investment in the city’s economic recovery when it filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2013. The firm later described it as “one of our most comprehensive and integrated business and philanthropic investments to date,” and the model it developed there became the blueprint for everything that followed. The Detroit bet combined lending, philanthropy, and policy advocacy under one roof, exactly the structure ADI now deploys nationally.

In 2018, JPMorgan scaled the Detroit model into AdvancingCities, a $500 million, five-year initiative to drive inclusive economic growth in cities that had been left behind. The program awarded multimillion-dollar grants to cities including Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, Louisville, and Baton Rouge, with investments focused on small business lending, affordable housing, and workforce development. The firm relaunched AdvancingCities again in 2025, suggesting the model has enough institutional support to persist across cycles.

JPMorgan’s most politically charged initiative came in October 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, when the firm pledged $30 billion over five years to close the racial wealth gap among Black, Hispanic, and Latino communities. By early 2024, Dimon reported the firm had surpassed $30 billion in progress and announced plans to embed the programs into regular business lines, essentially graduating the initiative into standard operations. Admittedly, a large portion of that $30 billion was driven by existing products like homeownership refinancing and affordable rental housing preservation, and ADI may take similar form today.

The bank, which held $4.4 trillion in assets as of Dec. 31, said it will continue announcing new investments, partnerships, and policy solutions across all six focus areas in the months ahead.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

If someone told you that your current trajectory was taking you toward “slow agony,” you might sit up and take notice. Yet this is exactly the warning many have ignored following the publication of the Draghi report.

Formally known as The Future of European Competitiveness, the report was published in September 2024 and authored by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. Its findings are stark. Draghi, who also served as Italy’s prime minister, states that, without radical reform, the European Union is set to slip into economic and geopolitical decline.

However dire the warnings, they came as little surprise to European business leaders, many of whom have been grappling with stringent regulations, economic turbulence, and the demands of the AI age for years now.

Something must change. But in a market comprising more than 44 countries, and hundreds of companies that have been operating for over a century, making the necessary changes at speed is no easy thing.

Competitiveness crunch

Draghi’s report highlights several reasons why Europe’s competitiveness is faltering.

Although it focuses solely on the European Union, many of the bloc’s problems overlap with those of non-member countries, such as the U.K. The first major issue is Europe’s rapidly widening innovation gap. As the United States and China make leaps forward in high‑tech sectors such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, many of Europe’s brightest startups are choosing to set up shop elsewhere, frustrated by the lack of funding. Recent research by Amazon Web Services (AWS) shows that as many as four in 10 European startups would consider relocating outside Europe to scale.

But the picture is more nuanced than a straightforward decline. “We see European AI adoption reaching a tipping point,” says Tanuja Randery, vice president and managing director of AWS EMEA. “We’ve reached a milestone with over half of European businesses using AI.” The issue, she explains, is not whether companies are adopting AI but how they are using it: “There are some companies that are experimenting deeply, embedding advanced AI into their processes—then you have those who are simply experimenting at the edge.” The challenge for Europe, she says, is that progress on deeper adoption “hasn’t really moved—it’s stayed pretty flat.”

Another reality plaguing the AI industry is the extremely high cost of energy in Europe. Electricity on the continent can be two to three times as expensive as it is in the U.S., with natural gas prices up to five times as high.

The situation is exacerbated by Europe’s vast and fragmented energy networks, with thousands of different providers across each of its countries, making it almost impossible to distribute renewable energy efficiently.

Then there is the subject of much heated debate: regulation. Draghi states that EU regulatory barriers constrain growth and advocates for simplification of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and EU AI Act; fewer reporting requirements for businesses; and a shift to more innovation‑friendly regulation.

Regulation meets reality

This is an opinion heartily shared by many European business leaders, including Erik Ekudden, chief technology officer at telecoms giant Ericsson.

“The EU set out with strong ambition in the area of consumer protection, but some of these regulatory tools are not helping,” Ekudden says. “You need to lead with innovation; you can’t lead with regulation. We have to dial back this inclination to regulate something before it’s even been innovated.” The ubiquity and strictness of regulation has real business impacts. AWS research found that, currently, 42% of IT budgets are spent on compliance alone.

For Ekudden and his colleagues at Ericsson, the issue is not just over‑regulation but a lack of consolidation across Europe. The existence of so many regional telecoms operators may be precisely what is preventing competitiveness on a global stage.

“In the U.S., there are basically three main operators,” explains Per Narvinger, Ericsson’s executive vice president of business area networks. “In India, there are two very dominant ones and two more. In China you have three. In Europe—I lose count.”

He points out that, like mobile networks, AI is an industry of scale. To train algorithms, you need a massive amount of data, and in a market as fragmented as Europe, “it will be both complicated and expensive for every small operator to do the same as large operators in other continents.”

For Yael Selfin, chief economist at KPMG U.K., this tension reflects something philosophically important and deeper than policy missteps. “Europe values stability, protection, and quality of life, whereas in the U.S. profit growth has a stronger value,” she says. “These values drive some of this discrepancy.”

What enables growth?

There are those, however, who do not see regulation as a stifling force. Shail Deep, chief operating officer for EMEA and APAC at global financial data and technology company Experian, believes that regulation is what enables great innovation.

“The first reaction [to regulation] is often, ‘Oh, there are more guardrails; how are we supposed to innovate?’” she says. “But if you think about regulation first, then when we start innovating, we can move faster… We won’t have to keep returning to square one because there were risks associated with a project which were not initially considered.”

For Deep, regulation such as the EU AI Act has brought vital clarity to companies in high‑risk industries, where consumer trust is paramount. “It gives our clients confidence in terms of how AI is being used,” she says. “We have a lot more explainability about our solutions.” This, too, has a direct business impact. “If clients trust us, there is more adoption of our solutions.”

She points to other areas across financial services where European regulation has allowed for greater clarity and safer innovation, including open banking and buy‑now, pay‑later systems.

Speed is, of course, the crux of the matter when discussing European competitiveness. Although Deep believes regulation has largely been a force for good, she does think it could move faster. “Sometimes we come up with guidelines by having these long consultative periods, which take two to three years. We need to regulate faster.”

Competing the European way

The picture for European business is by no means bleak, however. The heritage some see as a drawback speaks to endurance and resilience. Ericsson is celebrating its 150th birthday this year, while Experian’s roots stretch back nearly two centuries. The average age of a Fortune 500 Europe brand is 109 years old. No company can survive that long without understanding the power of the pivot. The key here, again, is speed.

“In periods of rapid change, there is a lot of opportunity for companies that adapt fast, both in the adoption of technology and in entering new markets,” says Selfin.

Some, particularly those in heavily regulated industries, are embracing an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” philosophy. The European pharmaceuticals sector is one of the continent’s most successful, employing around 900,000 people and generating a trade surplus of €200 billion. Many of pharma’s biggest players, including AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk, and Novartis, have opted to design for regulation, not around it, and have been working with the EU on reforms.

The result of this collaboration is new legislation, which comes into force in 2026. The new rules are designed to profit both business and society by fostering greater innovation, improving patient access to medicine, and tackling major public health challenges. Perhaps the most business‑critical element is the introduction of EU pharmaceutical regulatory sandboxes, which will allow developers to test disruptive products not currently covered by existing regulation.

Looking beyond consolidation

For many organizations, the simple truth of the matter is that success for European businesses requires them to look outside Europe. “Individual European markets are relatively small,” says Selfin. “If you really want to scale, you need to look beyond.”

It is true too, however, that the diversity of European countries can create opportunities not only through merger‑led consolidation but also by creating mutually beneficial partnerships.

The European Commission’s Battery Alliance aims to create “an innovative, competitive, and sustainable battery value chain in Europe,” uniting businesses across the supply chain, from raw material suppliers to manufacturers.

Then there are longer‑lived examples. Airbus’s consortium model was established in 1970, bringing together aerospace players from France, Germany, Spain, and the U.K. to challenge U.S. aviation dominance. The result has been eight commercial aircraft models capable of competing with those of Boeing, which in turn has sent Airbus to No. 41 on the most recent Fortune 500 Europe list.

Building for many Europes

Europe’s fragmentation can also offer untold opportunities for innovation and creativity. Deep explains there is often one solution for all of Experian’s North American clients but multiple offerings for customers in different European countries. “Some of the solutions that work in Italy don’t get the same response in Spain,” she says. “That’s why we have such a rich portfolio of products and solutions that we offer to clients.” Indeed, Italy has proved to be one of Experian’s most innovative markets because of how the country has implemented EU regulations. “It puts clients on the same page as us regarding what is permissible,” she says. “This makes the cocreation of products much easier and helps us to move faster.”

Brands can also use Europe’s many markets as a testing ground for ideas which may resonate in non‑European regions. Ikea has long adapted its product range and store experience to meet local needs. When designing for the often‑cramped reality of living in cities such as Paris or London, it created a blueprint for space‑saving furniture that works just as well in tiny Tokyo apartments or modest New York City walk‑ups.

Above all, it is worth remembering the potential inherent in Europe’s businesses, whichever strategies individual players embrace to stay competitive.

Experts agree that Europe is well placed in terms of skills, technical knowledge, and businesses—both small and large—which continue to innovate in spite of the challenges. Randery’s view reflects this optimism. “Europe’s got a ton of momentum and a ton of opportunity,” she says. “But I’ll tell you this—we’ve got to act now.” The real question, then, is not whether Europe can escape Draghi’s “slow agony,” but whether it can accelerate without abandoning the stability that has long defined its strength.

Brain drain

Percentage of European startups saying they would leave Europe for the following reasons:

This article appears in the April/May 2026: Europe issue of Fortune with the headline “Is Europe too slow for the AI age?”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

In 2025, Olympian Eileen Gu was one of the world’s highest-paid female athletes. Bringing in a reported $23.1 million, she was in the top five, she confirms with a wink.

After February’s Milan-Cortina Olympics, the 22-year-old athlete, who competes for China, became the most decorated Olympic freeskier in history, with six Olympic medals to her name.

Gu was recently honored by the women’s media platform the Shift as a woman shifting culture—in Gu’s case, in sports. At the Shift’s inaugural gala at Harvard Art Museums, she told Fortune what advice she would give to other women seeking to reach similar professional—and financial—heights in their own fields.

“Redefine what the boundary lines are,” she said. “Sometimes we think that the only options are being a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond, but my advice is to create your own pond. For me, that took the form of doing sports, skiing, and education all at the same time and doing it in a way that no one’s done before.”

“Women are naturally multifaceted,” she added. “Find what makes you you and amplify that and create your own pond.”

Gu also reflected on advice she would give her younger self. Not taking herself so seriously is her top piece of wisdom for young Eileen.

“I was always kind of a precocious young child, but in a way that manifested as always thinking that I was older than I was. When I was 8 or 9, I was like, ‘I’m too old to be doing this.’ But you’re never too old or too young or too anything to be doing anything.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Most Americans can’t pass the U.S. citizenship test. Surveys put that number at roughly two in three. What’s more alarming: most Members of Congress are barely more informed about the document they swore an oath to protect.

That ignorance has a price tag—$39 trillion and climbing.

What the Framers Actually Built

The Constitution ratified in 1789 is a short, deliberately limited document. Its preamble runs just 52 words. Seven articles and ten amendments follow. 

The Framers—55 delegates, most educated in Latin, Greek, and classical rhetoric—weren’t building a government to run people’s lives. They were building a cage for government power.

About 20% of the Constitution itemizes things that the federal and state governments may not do. Only 10% is concerned with positive grants of power. The remaining 70% is structural: who holds power and how it must be exercised.

Separation of powers wasn’t a governing philosophy—it was a shield for citizens against the state.

The Amendment Escape Valve Congress Is Ignoring

The familiar route: Article V includes Congress to pass passing a proposed amendment with by at least a two-thirds vote in each chamber, then 38 states ratify it. All 27 existing amendments went this way.

The lesser-known route: if two-thirds of states (34) apply, Congress shall call a convention to propose amendments. Those amendments still require ratification by 38 states— so there’s no risk of a runaway rewrite of the founding document.

39 States Asked. Congress Looked Away.

Here’s where congressional failure becomes indefensible. By 1979, 39 states had active applications for Congress to call an Article V convention to propose a fiscal responsibility amendment, but Congress failed to act.A majority of the 50 states still have active applications that remain in limbo. The Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation (FFSF) has documented this (we both serve as board members). 

The state-created National Federalism Commission confirmed it in September 2025. Those findings were entered into the Congressional Record at a December 2025 hearing before the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. Congress has still done nothing.

Since 1979, total federal debt has exploded from under $1 trillion to over $39 trillion and continues to rise rapidly That’s the direct cost of this abdication.

A Bill Exists. Use It.

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington’s H.Con.Res.15 would call exactly the kind of limited Article V convention the states have been requesting for nearly five decades—one narrowly focused on a fiscal responsibility amendment.

Members of Congress took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Article V doesn’t give them discretion here—calling a convention when 34 states apply is a nondiscretionary duty. Ignoring it isn’t just bad governance. It’s a breach of constitutional obligation. It’s time to keep the oath.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The humble org chart isn’t usually blamed for holding back innovation. But as companies push their employees to adopt AI, LinkedIn executive Aneesh Raman thinks the relationships that structure most workplaces are what’s holding things back.

“The org chart was built in the industrial age to bring order, predictability, and stability to rapidly growing organizations,” says Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer and co-author of a new book on the future of work. “Companies need to let that go, as it’s going to hold back innovation.”

Instead of waiting for top-down transformation programs, Raman argues, executives will need to get comfortable with workers figuring out AI on their own, even if those experiments cut across departments and job descriptions. “Where you’re going to see the real returns on AI isn’t just a new workflow around AI, but rather new work around human capability,” he says.

Raman, a former CNN war correspondent and Obama speechwriter, is the co-author of Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI, alongside Linkedin CEO Ryan Roslansky. The book draws on LinkedIn data and case studies of early adopters to offer what he calls a “how-to-human-with-AI” playbook that tries to counter the “fatalism” that dominates most conversations about AI’s effect on employment.

Courtesy of LinkedIn

He urges workers to think about their work, and how AI relates to it, in three categories. The first bucket covers activities AI already does today, like generating code, running quick analyses, or writing a first draft to inspire someone else’s writing. The second bucket are experiments to create something new with AI. The final bucket involves using the time saved from the first bucket, and the lessons learned from the second bucket, to start using AI as a group.  “What are you doing with other people?” he asks.

“It’s going to be a worker-led transition, and so companies are going to have to figure out how to let individuals start to move into this new era in their day-to-day work,” Raman says. “We have more autonomy than we often think in terms of pushing for what we want to do that might push our work to the next level.”

What skills will matter in the AI workforce?

LinkedIn is in the middle of a pivot to what it calls a “skills-first approach” to hiring and employment. In theory, employers are looking for specific skills and capabilities—and proof that potential hires have those skills—instead of just looking at a list of job titles on a resume. LinkedIn is also integrating AI into its own product, such as a new AI agent to help with hiring.

But as AI’s capacity to automate knowledge work grows, there’s still confusion over what skills employees will need. Take coding: For more than a decade, universities and policymakers told young people that learning to code was the surest path to a high-paying job. That advice looks less certain in the age of “vibe-coding”: Claude developer Anthropic now sees computer and math careers as leading the way in terms of current and possible coverage by AI.

Raman, for his part, thinks computer science isn’t obsolete. Instead, employers need to look at the broader skills a degree like computer science provides. “A computer science degree doesn’t just teach coding alone. It teaches complex thinking, organizational design, and structures of systems” he points out. 

Workers, at least in the U.S., aren’t convinced they will come out ahead. A CBS News poll released last week reported that two thirds of Americans believe that AI will decrease the number of jobs; around the same share don’t believe that tech companies will use AI in appropriate ways.

AI could get more traction in Asia, where populations are more comfortable with AI. A Pew Research Center survey from October found lower rates of concern among Asia-based respondents than Western ones. For example, just 16% of South Koreans reported being “more concerned than excited” about AI, the lowest share among the 25 countries Pew surveyed; the U.S., in contrast, had the highest share, at 50% reporting concern.

More recently, Chinese consumers have flocked to install OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent framework, on their devices, and local governments are rushing to support “one-person companies,” or AI startups trying to build new products. 

 “There’s a hunger in Asia, not just among companies but also among workers, to learn about these tools and put them to use,” Raman says. “There’s an entrepreneurial culture in a lot of countries in Asia.”

Time to adapt

Still, Raman is sympathetic to workers concerned about automation. “There was a career ladder, and there was extreme clarity about what you had to do to get on each rung of that ladder,” he says.

But he’s optimistic that, ultimately, employees will be better off as AI starts to dismantle the ways companies traditionally organize and reward their talent. “Very few people have ever had real control over their career,” he says. “Because of AI, I think we’re about to have the first generations at work that have more control over their career than any who’ve come before.”

But what if someone doesn’t want to be an innovator at their job? What if someone wants to do their responsibilities and earn a stable wage?

Raman’s answer to those people is direct: “Nobody is coming to save any individual but themselves.” 

Change is coming, like it or not. “It’s just a question of when this change hits you, and how hard it hits you,” he says. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When Nordstrom went private last year, the move was seen by industry analysts as a way to let the founding family make the changes needed to rejuvenate its sagging department store business without being hemmed in by Wall Street’s short-term focus on profits.

Nearly a year later, co-CEOs Peter and Erik Nordstrom, great grandsons of the retailer’s founder, say they don’t miss the distraction of being a public company. Indeed they hint that Nordstrom won’t return to the stock market anytime soon—if at all.

As reported by Fortune last week, Nordstrom’s revenue rose 7% in 2025 to $15.9 billion, slipping past a high watermark from 2019 and finally recovering from the hit to sales from the COVID pandemic and turmoil in the luxury market.

How going private gave Nordstrom freedom from Wall Street

While the chaos at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus have given it a huge opening, Nordstrom has also helped its own cause by upgrading stores, spending a lot of money on merging databases, and expanding its inventory. All that costs money, and the shareholder focus on profits and margins would probably have hurt Nordstrom shares if it were still a public company. Wall Street generally sees department stores as a mature business, and will let such companies invest only so much to reinvent themselves.

“When you’re a public company, your scorecard is your stock price, and that has a lot to do with the results you generate,” Pete Nordstrom says. “If the investment community doesn’t think very highly of department stores, which they don’t, your multiple goes down.” As a company leader, responding to that takes time away from tending to the core business, he adds: “You end up spending a lot of time on things that aren’t exactly what your business is.”

Like other luxury retail businesses, Nordstrom hit a rough patch coming out of COVID as people stopped buying nicer clothes for in-person events and going to the office. What’s more, its Rack discount chain struggled to define its market niche, and its expansion to Canada turned into an expensive failure.

To be able to re-engineer the 125-year-old family business as they saw fit, the Nordstroms. tried in 2017 to go private but failed, before ultimately succeeding in 2025. In a $6.25 billion deal that took the company off the stock market after 54 years, the Nordstroms teamed up with Mexico’s El Puerto de Liverpool department store, an operator of multiple chains. The Nordstrom family now owns a majority 50.1% stake.

Still, being private isn’t a license to let laxness creep in. And Nordstrom faces other strictures: The company took on some debt, for example, which requires the company to hit certain milestones.

Why Nordstrom’s family owners aren’t in a rush for an IPO

“We do think being private on the edges helps us with improved focus as some noise gets removed,” says Erik. But he added: “I’ve never complained about being a public company. The main upside for us is that it was a forcing mechanism to get our story very clear.”

There are other advantages to being public: It can make attracting talent easier thanks to more easily traded shares that can be offered as a bonus. It also makes raising money easier and could be a way for the Nordstroms and their Mexican partners to cash in on the improvements the business is seeing. And indeed, if Nordstrom keeps up its strong performance, it is inevitable that investment bankers will knock on the door, telling the family and Liverpool what a bonanze the IPO could generate. So while Nordstrom is not even one year into being private, many expect this large and successful of a company to eventually go public again at some point.

Stacey Widlitz, president of consulting firm SW Retail Advisers, suggests that if the chain manages to address its problems while it has the leeway to do so, a Nordstrom IPO is a real possibility: “If they get all these things right and have the right leadership, there is no reason why in several years, we won’t see them go back to the public market.”

Pete Nordstrom feels differently. When asked if the family would take Nordstrom public again, he says flatly, “I doubt it.” Though, he quickly adds, “never say never.” The fundamental question, Pete says, is “to what end?”

“Our goal is not financial engineering,” he says. “Our goal is to serve customers well in an enduring and compelling way.”

And as he mentions more than once, there’s a responsibility to the family’s legacy. Nobody wants to be “the generation of Nordstroms that screwed it up.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

A year after firing thousands of probationary employees, the Trump administration indicated it needs more early-career workers to sustain the federal workforce.

“We’ve got close to half of our population that’s within 10 years of retirement age,” Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), told Fortune. “So if you just did nothing else, you’ve got this major demographic challenge of a large number of people who will likely either retire or certainly be retirement-eligible over the near term, without us actually replenishing the pipeline of early-career people coming in.”

On Monday, OPM launched the Early Career Talent Network, a recruitment push for entry-level workers to join the federal payroll. Spanning across finance, human resources, engineering, project management and procurement roles, it will offer young workers the chance to dip their toes into government work, without the commitment of decades in the public sector, according to Kupor.

Early-career individuals—those with five to seven years of experience—make up only about 7% of the 2 million civilian federal workforce, compared to more than 20% of the broader U.S. workforce, he said.

The recruitment push comes as Gen Z has entered into a stagnant labor market that’s particularly punishing to early-career individuals. According to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 reached 5.6% at the end of 2025, above the 4.2% overall unemployment rate at the time and up from 4.2% unemployment for college graduates in mid-2023.

The hiring spree is a departure from the Trump administration’s early efforts to reduce the federal workforce, particularly entry-level employees. In the first days of his second term, President Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk to spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash contracts and cull headcounts, with the initial goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget. 

OPM was effectively DOGE’s executing arm. From January 2025 to January 2026, the federal workforce saw 386,826 workers depart from the government, including about 17,000 from reductions in force. Thousands of those employees were probationary, meaning they held their position for less than one year. The vast majority of the individuals who left the federal workforce either resigned or retired.

About 122,000 employees also joined the federal workforce, a 55% decrease from 2024, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. As a result, the federal workforce has seen a net reduction of 264,000.

Musk claimed DOGE saved $200 billion, but a Cato Institute report in December calculated that a 10% cut in the workforce would result in a savings of only about $40 billion. 

Even DOGE employee Nate Cavanaugh said in a January deposition that DOGE failed to reduce the federal deficit.

The federal workforce, transformed

Kupor said he sees the cuts and hirings as part of the same mission: “We’re reshaping the workforce to make sure that we have the right talent for the right roles.”

“A huge push is around technology, for example,” he added. “That’s an area where we don’t have all the skills we need to do the modernization efforts that we’d like.”

In December, the Trump administration launched the U.S. Tech Force, an initiative hiring 1,000 engineers and specialists to work with private-sector tech companies to build out AI infrastructure within the federal government. The employment program has a two-year duration for each cohort and is geared toward early-career professionals. 

That came after DOGE’s gutting last year of the U.S. Digital Corps and the General Services Administration’s 18F program meant to improve the government’s technological efficiency.  

Kupor said the U.S. Tech Corps is a way to scale up and learn from previous initiatives. OPM launched a similar recruitment program with NASA earlier this month.

“We need people with modern software development. We need people with modern AI understanding. We need data science,” he said.

But many federal workers see the transformed government workforce differently, with some saying the headcount cuts have made it harder for existing employees to complete their jobs efficiently.

“This is going to be probably the roughest filing season we’ve had since the pandemic,” one IRS employee told Fortune, adding that the agency has been short-staffed and that ongoing burnout from greater workloads had the potential to impact the quality of internal reviews.

A 2025 Best Places to Work in Federal Government survey found a precipitous drop in job satisfaction as well as lower confidence that the workplace was free of favoritism and political coercion. The survey based its questions on OPM’s previous Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which it did not administer last year. Kupor said the survey had a smaller sample size, about 11,000 federal employees, and its results should not be generalized.

Instead of administering the FEVS survey, OPM offered quarterly “pulse” surveys. The survey item with the highest mean score was “Understand Work Alignment with Agency Goals,” while the lowest was “Recommend agency as good place to work.”

An anonymous OPM employee not authorized to speak to the press told Fortune a handful of employees admitted to answering pulse survey responses more positively than they really felt, expressing concerns around lack of trust and that their responses were being surveilled. The employee said other employees didn’t complete the survey because of methodological limitations, such as no questions with open-ended responses.

Kupor said he understands not all employees will be on board with the mission of the administration.

“There’s no question that when you do the changes in the order of magnitude, we’re doing it fully understandable that there are some people who are not fully bought off on those changes,” he said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

India imports nearly 90% of its crude oil—largely from Russia and the Middle East. With geopolitical trouble making both of those sources less reliable and leaving it vulnerable, the world’s most populous country is inviting more foreign investment to help it boost its domestic oil and gas supplies, a top energy executive from India told Fortune.

While India is acquiring more alternative supplies to help it ride out the war in Iran, it typically imports most of its oil from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Russia. At present, those Russian barrels are flowing only under a temporary waiver from the U.S., after President Trump had used higher tariffs to get India to stop buying from Russia.

As part of reforms to open the country up to more domestic oil and gas exploration, India is seeking to attract $100 billion in investment by 2030. Recently, the chairman of India’s top private oil and gas producer, Cairn, made the trek to Houston for the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference with government officials to meet with many of the top American companies specializing in shale and offshore drilling.

Billionaire industrialist Anil Agarwal, who chairs mining giant Vedanta Resources and its subsidiary, Cairn Oil & Gas, said he personally made the trip “with a shopping list to spend $5 billion.”

India remains “vulnerable” and lacking in energy security until it can produce at least 50% of its own oil, Agarwal told Fortune. He believes India can grow to produce enough oil to meet 30% of its domestic demand within a few years. He wants to help create a “mini Houston” in India.

“It’s a greater opportunity to be an explorer in India because India is fundamentally oil rich, as far as the reserves are concerned,” he said. “But you have to do the exploration, make investment, and this is the great opportunity to develop the hydrocarbons in India.”

India may have surpassed China as the world’s most populous nation, but it produces less than 1% of the world’s oil and gas. India also imports more than half of its natural gas.

Cairn has ambitious plans to increase its production capacity from roughly 110,000 barrels of oil per day to 500,000 barrels daily over the next several years. Close to 70% of the vast country has never been explored for potential oil or gas reserves.

India is becoming friendlier to domestic oil and gas production and foreign investment, with legal reforms eliminating some barriers, and Cairn aims to take advantage, Agarwal said. More than 70% of India’s industry is still comprised of state-owned companies. “That mindset is changing,” Agarwal said, arguing that businesses should be run by businesspeople.

Cairn already works with top U.S. oilfield services companies, including Halliburton and Baker Hughes, but the company also is looking for exploration joint venture partners. The government’s current round of bids for onshore and offshore exploration blocks has been extended to the end of May.

Lots of opportunities remain with newer technologies, including the onshore Digboi, Assam region, which was the birthplace of India’s oil sector, but has little activity today. “There is hardly any production there,” Agarwal said.

India counts quadruple the population of the U.S. and rising, and its middle class is growing. “This will be the highest [energy] demand in the world,” he said.

Agarwal sees aligned entrepreneurial spirits between the U.S. and India. “The collaboration between America and India is very strong. We think alike, we work alike, and we can adjust with each other and trust each other,” he said. “America is very important for us. America can give us all the technology.”

India and Vedanta also are eager to partner more with the U.S. on critical minerals to help the U.S. build up supply from partners outside of China. Vedanta is strong in the production of copper, zinc, rare earths, and much more.

“I use the words, ‘Drill, baby, drill’ for the hydrocarbons, and I use the words, ‘Dig baby dig,’ for the minerals,” Agarwal said with a laugh.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com