Cherry-picking OSTP experts for new jobs

Harvard, the Commerce Department and the Office of Management and Budget are stealing away three senior executives from the White House's Office of Science and ...

H arvard, the Commerce Department and the Office of Management and Budget are stealing away three senior executives from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Nick Sinai, the deputy chief technology officer, is heading to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to join former federal CTO Aneesh Chopra as the inaugural recipients of the Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellowship.

Sinai, whose last day was Nov. 21, was at OSTP for three years after working at the Federal Communications Commission and as a venture capitalist at Polaris Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, which is now Tenaya Capital.

Lynn Overman left the White House after spending the last 2 1/2 years working in adviser positions. She served for the last year as the senior adviser to the CTO. She joined Commerce as its deputy chief data officer in November.

Charles Worthington is the third in the trifecta, leaving OSTP after spending the last six months as a senior adviser and the previous 10 months as a Presidential Innovation Fellow after working on working on open data initiatives at the Department of Energy.

Worthington joins OMB’s U.S. Digital Services office, where he will work on high-profile or deeply troubled IT projects across the government.

Sinai may be the biggest loss of all three because he’s leaving government service. At Harvard, he will work on a six-month residency where Sinai and Chopra will speak and lecture on “data as public infrastructure and speak widely, write, and investigate the media, policy and economic implications of providing greater public access to government data,” according to a press release from Harvard.

Overman’s role at Commerce will depend on who eventually is named the chief data officer. But her focus will be on making Commerce’s treasure trove of data easier to find and use.

This post is part of Jason Miller’s Inside the Reporter’s Notebook feature. Read more from this edition of Jason’s Notebook.

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