On July 13, we celebrate thirty years of marriage.

This is a story about the partnership that undergirded my career.

It is November 2021, and I am seated at the witness table for my Senate confirmation hearing.

I am anxious.

I am prepared.

I am wearing an old favorite suit instead of the expensive one I bought especially for the occasion. It is black with lots of silver buttons, something between a uniform and a suit of armor.

I look good, and I feel good.

That is exactly why I chose it.

And just over my right shoulder, there he is.

As he has been for decades.

Watching my back.

What Does Your Husband Do?

If I had a dollar for every time I have been asked that question, I would be a rich woman.

People ask in professional settings, at conferences, and in rooms where they may be sizing me up as much as making conversation.

I understand the impulse.

We are often trained to locate a woman’s success by looking at the man beside her.

Is he threatened by her accomplishments or supportive of them?

Is he ambitious in his own right?

Is he comfortable standing beside a woman whose workplaces her in the public eye?

It sounds like a small question.

It almost never is.

So here is the honest answer, the one I have been giving in scenes rather than sentences for thirty years.

My husband moved across the country from Miami to Seattle so I could pursue an opportunity. He still tells people that he traded grilling outside in shorts year-round for forty-five consecutive days of rain. I have my doubts about the exact number, but the point stands.

He endured another cross-country move when I joined USDA in Washington, DC.

Years later, when I was asked to lead an agency until the President could appoint a permanent leader, he was the one who told me that our family had my back. Our youngest child was only seven years old.

When I was later selected to lead a much larger agency, he was there again, making room for another demanding chapter.

Then, in 2021, he sat beside me through the federal vetting process that accompanied my Senate confirmation. There were late night conversations with the ethics officer and detailed reviews of his finances and employment history.

Then came the evening we learned that his employer in the defense industry might one day seek a USDA award and that he could be asked to consider leaving his job because of mine. While farfetched, I suppose the probability was not zero.

That was not his confirmation.

It was mine.

But he carried the burden alongside me without complaint and without ever making me feel the full weight of what my opportunity might require of him.

That is what my husband does.

What the Research Tells Us

I have spent my career in institutions that trust data more readily than sentiment, so I went looking for what the research says about partners and professional success.

The findings are more specific than simply saying that support matters.

A study of mid-career professionals examined perceived organizational support, spousal support, career adaptability, and career outcomes over a two-year period. The researchers found that spousal support was indirectly associated with both subjective and objective career success through career adaptability, the capacity to remain confident, curious, and flexible while navigating change.

Put plainly, a marriage does not carry you across the finish line.

It can help build the capacity that allows you to run the race.

A study published in 2025 found that employees whose spouses demonstrated strong emotion regulation ability were more likely to develop positive relationships with their supervisors. The researchers identified two important pathways: stronger psychological capital, including hope, confidence, optimism, and resilience, and greater knowledge of how to manage emotions.

The steadiness at home becomes steadiness in the room.

It is not merely a metaphor.

It is measurable.

Other research has explored how the goals of one spouse can affect the career and health outcomes of the other. The findings suggest that a partner’s ambitions, priorities, and choices can meaningfully influence both people, even when the effects are not always identical.

A separate longitudinal study found that more effective coordination around each partner’s individual goals predicted better goal attainment one year later. That attainment, in turn, was associated with greater life satisfaction for both partners.

The alignment that matters is not about having identical personalities, careers, or ambitions.

It is about knowing what each person is trying to build and finding a way to move forward together.

It is about whether two people are rowing in the same direction.

Alignment, Not Agreement

We did not begin our marriage perfectly aligned.

We began as two people shaped by very different experiences who had to learn each other’s grammar.

He grew up as the fifth of seven children, raised by both parents in a stable and steady household.

I grew up in a single parent home with very humble beginnings.

Those are not small differences.

They shape what you expect family life to look like. They influence what you believe is normal to worry about and what you may never have had to consider at all.

One of our earliest arguments after marriage was about butter.

Yes, unfortunately, it is true.

He insisted that butter belonged in a butter dish when served, not simply placed on the table wrapped in paper.

He had done nothing wrong. He was simply doing what his family had always done.

I turned it into a fight.

The truth, which took me years to admit, was that I felt ashamed. I was not sure we had ever owned a butter dish when I was growing up, and I did not know how to say that.

So, I argued about the butter instead.

That disagreement taught me what alignment actually requires.

A shared understanding of what we were building together, worked out one honest and sometimes uncomfortable negotiation at a time.

And yes, the butter has been served in a dish for the past thirty years.

Learning How to Support Each Other

My early years as a faculty member were not easy.

I was the only woman in my department and one of only a few women in the entire college.

I had to develop sharp elbows.

My husband taught me how to manage conflict with difficult colleagues. The lesson was simple:

Present the facts and the details of your position without becoming visibly angry.

Stay grounded.

Stay clear.

Do not hand anyone your emotions and allow them to use those emotions against you.

That advice, offered early in my career, has served me for thirty years in rooms where losing my composure could have cost me dearly.

It did not come from an executive leadership seminar.

It came from a man who took the time to learn how I needed him to show up for me.

That learning took time.

It required honesty.

It also required a willingness to be corrected.

He eventually learned, for example, that when I shared a challenge with him, I was not necessarily asking him to solve it.

Asking an engineer not to fix something is a very large request.

Sometimes I simply needed a trusted sounding board.

I needed someone who would listen closely, ask a thoughtful question, and give me room to hear myself think.

He learned to do that.

And I learned to tell him what I needed.

That may be one of the quiet secrets of a lasting partnership.

You do not simply love the person standing in front of you.

You keep learning how to love the person they are becoming.

What He Built

He has been a true partner in raising our children.

He puts on a tuxedo and makes conversation at events he did not select and was never required to attend.

He has listened to speeches, endured receptions, posed for photographs, and stood beside me through moments that were public for me but deeply personal for both of us.

I have been able to pursue every professional goal I set for myself with the support of a partner who never tried to clip my wings.

I know what that is worth because I understand what the alternative can cost.

But our partnership has never moved in only one direction.

He built his own engineering career during the same years that he was making room for mine.

Supporting my ambition did not require him to abandon his own.

We did not always move at the same speed or carry the same burden. But over time, we learned when one of us needed to step forward and when the other needed to make room.

Over thirty years, what he created was not a supporting role.

It was a foundation.

Back at the Table

I am seated at the witness table in November.

The room is controlled and still.

Senators sit across from me. Staff members are behind me. History, expectation, and scrutiny seem to be coming from every direction.

And just over my right shoulder is the man who moved from Miami to Seattle and still talks about the rain.

The man who moved again when USDA called.

The man who told me our family had my back when our youngest was seven and the demands of leadership were pulling me in every direction.

The man who taught me to present my facts without surrendering my composure.

The man who carried a vetting process that was not his and never made me feel guilty for what it asked of him.

The man who has spent thirty years answering through his actions the question people keep asking me instead of asking him.

What does my husband do?

He stands beside me.

He tells me the truth.

He reminds me who I am.

He makes room for my ambition without shrinking his own.

He watches my back.

Every career chapter I have built, I have built with him in it.

That is not a small thing.

It is, in fact, everything.

Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young served as USDA Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, confirmed by the Senate 95 to 4. She led USDA’s Agricultural Research Service from 2014 to 2022.

She writes about leadership, visibility, and the cost of being first, drawing on stories and lessons from inside the federal science enterprise. Her first leadership book is forthcoming.

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Notes

1. Ocampo et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2018

2. Ocampo et al., Journal of Business Research, 2025

3. Wright et al., Journal of Research in Personality, 2023

4. Rosta Filep et al., International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 2023

The PACK Leadership Series, Essay Two

Author’s note: An earlier version of this essay first appeared on Medium in 2025. The version below is substantially expanded, with new material, new framing, and the deeper argument I had not yet developed at the time.

Everyone wants to be agile. Fewer people want to do what agility actually requires.

The popular version of agility sounds like this: stay flexible, embrace change, pivot fast, fail forward. It shows up in leadership retreats and annual reviews and business books, and it sounds different when you are the one responsible for what comes next. It gets treated as a disposition, a comfort with uncertainty that the naturally adaptable simply possess and the rest of us should aspire to.

That version of agility is incomplete. And for leaders operating at real scale, under real pressure, it can be dangerous.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched institutions move fast without a foundation. A leader arrives, or a directive comes down, and the signal is: change now. Reorganize. Restructure. Reposition. The pivot happens before the trust infrastructure is in place to carry it. Before anyone has listened long enough to understand what is actually there. The result is not agility. It is disruption that looks like agility from the outside and feels like abandonment from the inside. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. The people who remain spend their energy on survival rather than mission. The change that was supposed to move the organization forward ends up costing it years.

That is not a leadership failure of courage or vision. It is a failure of sequence. The pivot came before the preparation. And without the foundation, there was nothing to pivot from.

Here is what the popular version leaves out: agility without preparation is just reaction. It is being swept along and calling it a choice. The leaders who adapt most effectively under pressure are not the ones who are most comfortable with change. They are the ones who have built something substantial enough underneath them that they can afford to let go of what is no longer working. The foundation is what makes the pivot possible. Without it, you are not being agile. You are simply losing your footing and hoping the fall looks intentional.

I learned this on a high jump pit in Raleigh, North Carolina. And I learned it again when I walked into the USDA Agricultural Research Service as its new Administrator and realized that everything I had built to lead well was not going to be enough.

The lesson both times was the same: agility is not what you do instead of preparing. It is what preparation makes possible.

The Jump That Started Everything

It started at a Field Day.

Elementary school, Augusta, Georgia. Someone set up a high jump bar, and when my turn came, I cleared it. Not because I had trained for it. Not because anyone had taught me anything. I just went up, and I cleared it, and something in my body understood that this was something I could do.

That accidental discovery followed me to high school, where it stopped being accidental. I trained. I competed. I won. The scissor-jump became my signature: a simple, clean technique where you approach the bar face-forward, kick one leg over and follow with the other, and land on your feet. It suited me. I was committed, I was competitive, and I had the kind of natural talent that, at the high school level, can take you a long way before you ever have to question your method.

By the time I entered college, I had medals. I had a record of success. I had a technique I had practiced so many times it had stopped feeling like a technique and started feeling like me.

What happened next wasn’t about a jump. It was about identity.

When I chose NC State over Georgia Tech, athletics was part of the calculation. The engineering program at Georgia Tech had a co-op structure that would have required me to step away from track for extended periods. NC State offered both an academic scholarship through the pulp and paper program and a Division I athletic scholarship. Together, they meant I could be a full-time student and keep competing. The decision felt practical at the time. What I didn’t understand yet was that I was choosing the place that would require me to become someone new.

I arrived on that campus having already built a story about myself. I was a state-level high jumper. I was disciplined. I had earned my way in. And I had every reason to believe that what had worked in high school would work here.

It didn’t take long to learn otherwise.

My coach watched me jump, and delivered the news directly: the scissor-jump wasn’t going to cut it at the collegiate level. Not in the ACC. Not against athletes who had also been the best wherever they came from. If I wanted to compete, I had to learn the Fosbury Flop.

For anyone unfamiliar: the Fosbury Flop requires you to approach the bar and then, at the moment of takeoff, arch your back and go over headfirst, facing the sky. You rotate in midair, clear the bar with your shoulders, and land on your upper back. It is, in every physical sense, the opposite of what I had been doing. Where the scissor-jump was upright and forward-facing, the Flop required me to throw myself backward and trust that my body would find its way on the way down.

I did not trust it.

Not at first.

The Painful, Necessary Work of Unlearning

What no one tells you about unlearning a technique you’ve spent years building is how personal it feels. The scissor-jump hadn’t been a strategy I was executing. It had been me. It carried my history. Every medal I had won, I had won with that approach. Setting it aside felt less like a tactical adjustment and more like being asked to show up as someone I didn’t recognize yet.

I landed on the bar. Repeatedly. I can still feel that sting, across my back and across my pride. There were practices where I looked less capable than I had been at seventeen years old, which is a particular kind of humbling that doesn’t have a name but that anyone who has ever tried to unlearn something real will recognize immediately.

There were days when quitting felt easier than changing. Days when the familiar technique, even knowing it wasn’t enough anymore, felt safer than the unfamiliar one. Days when my confidence rattled as loudly as the bar hitting the track.

But high jump is honest in a way that most things aren’t. You either clear the bar or you don’t. The height doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t account for how hard you’ve been working or how uncomfortable the transition has been.

So, I kept going.

Slowly, and then all at once, something shifted. I stopped fighting the technique and started trusting it. I stopped trying to make the Flop feel like the scissor-jump and let it become its own thing. What followed wasn’t improvement. It was transformation. I became a three-time ACC high-jump champion using a technique I hadn’t arrived with, one I had earned only because I was willing to be bad at something for long enough to get good at it.

The scissor-jump wasn’t wrong. It had carried me exactly as far as it could. What the next level required was something I didn’t have yet, and the only way to get it was to let go of the thing I already had.

That is the lesson. That is what agility actually costs.

The Room You Cannot Fill

Thirty years after I learned the Fosbury Flop on a track in Raleigh, I had to learn it again.

This time, the bar was not measured in inches. It was measured in geography, in scale, in the weight of walking into a room where few knew your name.

For most of my federal career, I had built my leadership on a foundation of proximity. My career had been built mostly inside a single agency, one location, fewer than 400 employees. Later, when serving as Acting Director, I could call every one of them into a single room. I knew their names. They knew mine. The trust I carried was not abstract. It was personal and accumulated, built face to face over years of shared work in shared hallways. That intimacy was not incidental to how I led. It was the method.

In 2014, when I was named Administrator of the USDA Agricultural Research Service, I stepped into a different world entirely.

ARS had more than 6,000 employees across more than 90 locations, spread across rural communities, university campuses, farm towns, and research stations in the United States and abroad. There was no room large enough to hold them all. There was no meeting I could call that would reach everyone. And unlike the agency where I had begun, where my history preceded me into every conversation, I arrived at ARS as a stranger. An outsider. A first: the first woman, the first person of color to hold the Administrator post, and, at the time of my appointment, the youngest person to do so.

The employees did not know me. I did not yet know them. And the techniques I had relied on for years, the gathered room, the recognized face, the inherited trust, had no application here.

I understood, with the same clarity my college coach had delivered decades earlier, that the scissor-jump was done.

Walking into those early ARS locations, I was acutely aware of one thing: I was going to get exactly one chance to make a first impression, and I was visibly, unmistakably different from any leader this agency had seen before. The rooms read that before I said a word. What I had to decide, in real time and without a rehearsal, was how I was going to show up. Whether to manage the difference or lead from it. Whether to project authority I had not yet earned, or show up as exactly who I was and trust that it would be enough.

I chose authenticity. Not as a strategy. As the only viable option. You cannot sustain a performance across 90 locations and 6,000 people. What you can sustain is yourself.

The instinct, when you arrive somewhere new with a strong record, is to lead from that record. To let your credentials speak. To project confidence and assume it will be received as authority. I had earned the right to that instinct. I had the degrees, the federal experiences, the track record of institutional leadership. Every room I had walked into before this one had, eventually, come to recognize what I brought.

But ARS was not that room.

What this institution required was not a display of what I already knew. It required a demonstration that I was willing to learn what I didn’t yet have. And the only way to do that, I realized, was to go backward over the bar. To throw myself into the unfamiliar and trust the process before I knew whether it would hold.

So instead of leading from the front, I started by listening from the road.

Here is where agility enters, and where it separates itself from preparation.

Preparation had given me the discipline to listen. But agility was what I had to exercise when the listening revealed something I had not anticipated and could not have planned for. Across the locations I visited, I heard a consistent frustration that cut across geography, seniority, and scientific discipline: the performance review process was broken. Employees receiving identical ratings were being rewarded at wildly different levels, not because of anything they had done, but because of the resources available at their particular location. The same performance could earn one employee a time-off award and another employee thousands of dollars.

No listening tour plan had prepared me for that specific finding. And no prior playbook told me exactly what to do with it. What agility required in that moment was the capacity to take in information I had not gone looking for, recognize it as structural rather than local, and make a judgment call about whether to address it as a priority before I had fully settled into the role.

I worked with leadership to build a transparent, equitable, and reproducible agency-wide performance review process that addressed the inconsistencies directly. The decision did not come from a strategic plan I had arrived with. It came from what the institution showed me when I was willing to look. Preparation made the listening possible. Agility turned what I heard into action.

It was not natural. Not at first. The posture of a sponge, of deliberate absorption before action, ran against every instinct that had made me effective before. I was accustomed to being the person in the room who already knew the culture. Now I was the person who had to earn the right to understand it.

But something shifted as the listening deepened. The visits did more than gather intelligence. They built trust. Every location I traveled to, every conversation I sat inside, sent a signal that this Administrator was willing to make the effort. That the people in these labs and stations were worth the miles. That their knowledge mattered to the direction that was coming.

What I heard on that listening tour became the foundation of the strategy I eventually built for the agency. The priorities that emerged were not mine alone. They were drawn from what the institution already knew about itself, shaped by a leader who had been willing to learn before she led.

It held.

The technique I had not yet trusted turned out to be the one the agency needed.

The trust that grew from those early visits became the infrastructure that carried everything that followed: the budget growth, the policy initiatives, the culture shift that an agency of that size and history required. None of it would have been possible if I had arrived at ARS trying to lead the way I had led before.

The technique I had spent years building did not disappear. It became the ground the new approach stood on. The accumulated trust from my previous agency, the discipline of showing up and staying present, those were assets. What changed was the form they had to take. In a room you can fill, presence is physical. Across 90 locations and 6,000 people, presence becomes intentional travel, direct conversation, and the willingness to be changed by what you hear.

The bar had risen. I rose with it.

That is what agility actually looks like at scale. Not a pivot strategy. Not a rebranding. The specific, unglamorous willingness to set aside what has worked, enter unfamiliar territory without a guarantee, and trust that the foundation you have built will hold you while you find your footing.

Clearing a Higher Bar

The bar does not get lower. In high jump competitions, in federal agencies, in any institution worth leading, the bar keeps rising. That is not a problem to solve. It is the condition of the work.

What changes, if you let it, is your relationship to the rising.

When I stood at that NC State podium in 2022 and introduced the PACK framework to thousands of graduating students, I placed Agility second for a reason. Preparation comes first because agility without a foundation is just instability with good branding. But preparation alone is not enough. The discipline you built to reach one level will not be sufficient for the next one. At some point, every leader faces the moment the bar moves and the old technique stops clearing it.

That moment is not a crisis. It is an invitation.

The challenge, of course, is recognizing that moment when you are inside it.

In my experience coaching leaders, the hardest thing to distinguish is the difference between a problem that requires more effort inside your current approach and a problem that requires a different approach entirely. Difficulty alone is not the signal. Hard moments happen inside techniques that are still working. The signal is something more specific: you find yourself applying the same solution repeatedly to a problem that keeps returning. The fix works temporarily and then the problem resurfaces in a slightly different form. When that pattern appears, the question worth asking is not how do I do this better but whether this is still the right thing to be doing.

That is the diagnostic. Not how hard it is. Whether the same effort, applied again, would produce a different result. If the honest answer is no, the technique is the problem. The bar has moved.

The scissor-jump carried me to championships. The leadership method I had built before ARS made the listening tour credible. What you have built is never wasted. It becomes the ground the next version of your leadership stands on.

But you have to be willing to build the next version.

That willingness is agility. Not the comfort with change that the retreats and the business books describe. The specific, costly, unglamorous willingness to look at what has worked, acknowledge that it is no longer enough, and do the hard thing of becoming someone who can clear a higher bar.

Talent may get you into the room. Preparation carries you through it. Agility is what lifts you when the ceiling rises and the room you worked so hard to enter is no longer where you are meant to stay.

The next version of you may require a new technique.

Be open to it. Be willing to struggle through it. And trust that what you have already built will not disappear. It will hold you while you learn.

The bar is going to keep rising.

That is not something to fear.

It is something to prepare for.

The PACK Leadership Series

This essay is part of a four-part leadership framework I introduced in my 2022 commencement address at NC State. PACK stands for Preparation, Agility, Cup, and Kindness. The first essay is available here on Substack: “Moving Without the Ball: Preparation as a Leadership Practice.”

Dispatches from the Table focuses on topics closer to the news, on food security, science policy, the federal workforce, and what leadership looks like when the pressure is real and the stakes are national. This is the first piece in that series. An earlier version of this essay first appeared on Medium in April 2026, and a related argument appeared in a LinkedIn post the same month.

Three weeks ago, I published The Leaders We Are Quietly Undermining, a piece on what is happening to early-career federal employees. The responses have not stopped.

One reader wrote that the experience itself is unmistakable. Another, a middle manager, told me she had not been able to complete a performance plan for a year and a half. A third pushed back on the original framing itself, arguing that what is happening is not quiet at all. The undermining, she wrote, is loud. The system that was supposed to evaluate people had stopped functioning, while the language of performance was used to justify firing them, and the institutional damage of that misuse has not been undone.

What I described in the original piece was real. But it is not the whole story. The conversations that followed have made clear that the problem is structural, not just rhetorical.

This is the longer version of the argument. The data, the observations, the patterns I saw across decades of leading federal talent pipelines, and what the moment requires from the leaders still in the system.

The future we knew was coming

In my roles leading federal agencies and organizations, I spent significant time focused on one question: who would lead next.

The data was unambiguous. The percentage of employees eligible to retire increased each year. The average age of farmers continued to rise. Across the system, experience was concentrating at the top while the pipeline behind it remained uncertain.

There was no ambiguity about what needed to be done. We had to invest in developing the next generation of professionals, not just to replace what would be lost, but to prepare them for challenges that would demand even more from them.

We were not preparing for a distant future. We were preparing for one that was already arriving.

That future looks different now than it did a year ago.

When the signal is misaligned

We talk a great deal about developing leaders. We invest in training, mentorship, and coaching. Leadership principles can be taught in programs. Leadership itself is not formed in programs. It is formed in moments. And some of the most defining moments are the ones no one designed at all. They arrive as shocks.

In 2025, thousands of early-career federal employees were dismissed under the label of performance. Many were still within their probationary period. Some had not yet received formal evaluations. In at least one major agency, a federal court later required corrections, confirming that some of these dismissals were not performance-based.

Probationary periods exist for a reason. They are designed to evaluate performance in practice. Their credibility depends on whether that evaluation actually occurs. That is why accuracy matters.

When performance language was applied in cases where performance had not been evaluated, or where performance was not the true driver of the decision, the signal became distorted. And a distorted signal did not just harm the person who received it. It traveled through everyone watching.

I saw this across decades of managing and observing federal talent pipelines. There was no moment where someone said: I no longer trust this system; I am stepping back. It was quieter than that. A hand that used to go up stopped going up. A name that should have been on a leadership track was not there.

When I looked more closely, the pattern was consistent. Capable people were not leaving. They were not complaining. They were simply making a private calculation about whether visibility was worth what it might cost and deciding it was not.

That is what a false signal produces. Not rebellion. Not attrition you can measure in exit interviews. It produces a slow, invisible withdrawal of exactly the people you most need to step forward.

The institution rarely notices in real time. The pipeline does not empty overnight. It just gradually stops reflecting the full range of capability that was always there and starts reflecting instead what people have learned is safe to offer.

When feedback becomes identity

Early in a career, feedback does more than inform. It shapes identity.

A performance-based dismissal can influence how an individual interprets their competence, their potential, and their place in the profession. Even when the label is inaccurate, it is rarely experienced that way in the moment. It is internalized.

I was not good enough.

I missed something.

I am not ready.

Those beliefs do not stay confined to a single role. They travel.

When individual experiences become system patterns

I watched one of them. She came through a major organizational disruption and stayed.

She kept her head down and did the work and did not leave. But something had shifted. She began routing her decisions through other people, asking colleagues to review work she was fully capable of judging herself. She stopped raising her hand in rooms where she used to speak first. Over time, she built a reputation as someone who said no to every new idea. Not because she lacked imagination, but because she had learned that taking risk carried cost.

She had not lost her ability. She had lost her willingness to use it in the open.

That is what I mean when I say these signals travel. They do not just affect whether someone stays or goes. They reshape how someone operates, sometimes for years, sometimes permanently. The loss is not always visible on an org chart. It shows up in the meetings where no one pushes back, in the proposals that never get written, in the leadership roles that someone quietly decides are not worth the exposure.

We rarely measure it. But it accumulates, slowly, across thousands of careers. The institutions that should be measuring it have not yet developed the tools to do so.

This is not unique to government. Variations of this dynamic exist across sectors. But the federal workforce carries a distinct responsibility. It develops leaders who drive progress in science, policy, and the broad national systems that shape economic resilience, public wellbeing, and national security.

In 2025, the federal workforce saw a disproportionate reduction in employees with less than two years of experience and those under 35, driven in significant part by the dismissals described above. According to a Pew Research Center analysis of Office of Personnel Management data, workers under 35 made up 18 percent of the federal workforce at the end of 2024. By the end of 2025, that figure had dropped to 16.8 percent. Employees with less than two years of service fell from 16.2 percent of the workforce to 10.3 percent, most of them still in their probationary period and without full civil service protections.

When tens of thousands of early-career professionals are affected at the same time, the impact is not isolated. It is systemic.

Every system teaches something.

When performance labels are applied without alignment to actual performance, the lessons land hard: outcomes are not reliably tied to effort or ability, evaluation systems cannot be trusted, and caution is safer than initiative.

These are not the conditions under which strong leaders are formed. They are the conditions under which individuals learn to protect themselves.

When the system itself stops working

The original piece argued that performance language is being applied in cases where performance has not been evaluated. That is true. But it understates what is happening.

A federal middle manager, in response to the original piece, described an environment in which performance evaluation itself had stopped. She had not been able to complete a performance plan for a year and a half. No one had asked what her team did. No one had asked whether she had under-performers. No one had asked whether she could eliminate vacancies. The basic evaluative work that allows a manager to know who is performing well and who is not has been suspended.

She is not the only one. Conversations with current and former federal managers across multiple agencies have surfaced similar accounts. Performance plans delayed or abandoned. Reviews deferred. Position descriptions not updated to reflect actual work. The human-resources infrastructure that supports honest evaluation has been thinned in ways that make accurate performance management increasingly difficult.

And yet the language of performance is still in use.

This is the deeper distortion. It is not only that some people were dismissed under performance labels when their performance had not been the issue. It is that the system that defines performance, evaluates performance, and documents performance has been substantially weakened, while the consequences attached to performance language have continued unchanged.

A label without an underlying process is no longer a label. It is a verdict delivered by a court that has stopped hearing evidence.

The leaders still inside that system are being asked to manage people, develop pipelines, and signal accountability without the tools that made those things possible. The early-career employees inside that system are being asked to perform inside an evaluation framework that no longer functions. Both groups are being told to trust signals that the institution itself can no longer reliably produce.

Since the original mass terminations, the legal and regulatory landscape has changed. Federal courts ruled the early 2025 firings unlawful. Agencies were required to send notices telling fired probationary employees that their terminations had nothing to do with their performance. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration confirmed that ninety-nine percent of IRS probationary employees fired with performance ratings on record had been rated fully successful or better. Executive Order 14284 and the resulting Civil Service Rule XI, both implemented in 2025, now permit agencies to terminate probationary employees on broad grounds of agency needs and the efficiency of the service, without requiring a performance justification at all. The mechanism has shifted. The damage to the people affected and to the leaders watching has not.

That is a different problem than the one I described three weeks ago. It is also a more dangerous one. Misaligned signals can be corrected. A broken signal-producing system has to be rebuilt.

What this moment requires

Some of this damage cannot be undone. The early-career employees who were fired and labeled performance failures will not all return. The middle managers who have spent eighteen months without functioning evaluation processes will not all recover their authority overnight. The capable people who have learned to stop raising their hands will not all start raising them again.

What can be done is the slower work. The leaders who remain in the system, in agencies, in academic partners, in organizations that still rely on federal science and policy, have a choice about what they reinforce.

That means being precise about why employment decisions are made and honest when performance is not the real reason. It means distinguishing clearly, in writing and in conversation, between a workforce reduction and a performance failure. It means understanding that the people watching how you treat the people you let go are learning something about whether this institution is worth their full investment.

Not every leader has the same room to maneuver. Senior officials have one kind of latitude. Middle managers have another. Front-line supervisors have less. The argument here is not that any single leader can fix the broader breakdown alone. It is that leaders at every level can choose, within whatever discretion they have, whether to repeat misaligned language or to push back against it.

The procedural fixes matter. Documentation, clear communication, accurate language. But those are floors, not ceilings. The harder work is cultural. It requires leaders who are willing to say, plainly, that what happened was not a performance problem if it was not a performance problem, that the institution made a structural decision, and that the people affected were not found wanting.

Most of all, leaders can refuse to use performance language as a substitute for the harder conversations.

That kind of honesty is hard. It is not optional, not if you want the people who remain to lead with confidence rather than caution.

What gets rebuilt is not just the agencies. It is the willingness of capable people to stay visible inside them. That is the work in front of us now.

In the next Dispatch, I will write about what this moment asks of the professionals on the other side of those decisions, the ones who left institutions carrying labels that did not match the work they did. The leader does not end with the role.

Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young served as USDA Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, confirmed by the Senate 95 to 4. She led USDA’s Agricultural Research Service from 2014 to 2022.

She writes about leadership, visibility, and the cost of being first, drawing on stories and lessons from inside the federal science enterprise. Her first leadership book is forthcoming.

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Seven months of waiting

On November 17, 2021, I sat for my confirmation hearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee in a wood-paneled room on Capitol Hill. I had been nominated by the President to serve as Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics at USDA. The hearing went well. The committee voted me out. And then, for reasons that had almost nothing to do with me and almost everything to do with a Senate calendar jammed with bigger fights, my full floor vote stalled.

For nearly seven months, I waited with no guarantee of confirmation. I could not legally make decisions or speak on behalf of the office I had been formally nominated to lead. I was, in every practical sense, a leader in limbo.

What do you do with seven months like that?

You prepare.

Not the visible kind of preparation people applaud. The quieter kind. I read every USDA budget document, research portfolio summary, and strategic plan I could ethically access. I made lists of the people I would call on Day One, the meetings I would request in Week One, the questions I would ask in Month One that I knew I would not have time to ask in Month Three. I built a 90-day plan for a job I had not been confirmed to do. Then I revised it. Then I revised it again.

When the Senate finally voted on June 7, 2022, by a margin of 95 to 4, I did not walk in empty-handed. I walked in with a plan. None of that was magic. All of it was the seven months.

But the seven months were not where my preparation began.

I had been preparing for that hearing, and for the role behind it, long before the President nominated me. Over the years, I led three of the organizations I would oversee. I knew the policy environments they operated in, and the people who shaped decisions across the federal scientific enterprise. I had spent decades, if I am honest, preparing for rooms like the one on Capitol Hill, even when no one had told me I would ever be in one.

The seven months of waiting were the most visible chapter of a much longer story. And the lesson of that longer story is what this essay is about.

Preparation is not what most people think it is

Most people describe preparation as an individual habit. Reading materials. Rehearsing remarks. Reviewing data. Anticipating questions. Those things matter, but they are the surface of preparation, not its depth.

The deeper preparation is what I call moving without the ball. The phrase comes from a sport I played growing up. In high school, I was a center on my basketball team. In that position, you are typically the player without the ball, but you play a crucial role in shaping the play. You read positioning. You anticipate movement. You stay in motion to create options for the ball handler. And most importantly, you stay ready to receive the ball and make the play when it comes your way.

A career works the same way. Most of us spend more time off the ball than on it. We spend years between the moments that look, on the outside, like our defining ones. The seven months I waited for the Senate vote was a season of moving without the ball. The years before I was nominated were a season of moving without the ball.

What you do in those seasons is not a pause. It is the work.

My colleagues and I have a shorter way of saying this: if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. It is the kind of line you hear in the offices and on calls where people keep each other moving. It is also the most honest thing I know about leadership preparation.

The Buick and the breakthrough

In 1985, my mother and I packed our family’s old Buick Regal and set out for Raleigh. Six and a half hours of hope and highway stood between us and my first day at NC State. Somewhere near South of the Border, South Carolina, the car broke down.

That could have been the end of the story. It wasn’t.

My mother, tired, stretched thin, with no safety net, taught me that strength is not what you summon in the moment. It is what you build over time. She had not anticipated the breakdown. She had prepared for the possibility that something, somewhere on a 350-mile trip with a teenager headed to college, was going to go sideways.

That trip wasn’t just a journey to college. It was a preview of the calm determination I would need many times after, including in a Senate waiting room thirty-seven years later.

The Buick on the side of the road in 1985 was, in its own way, a small lesson in moving without the ball.

Leaders do not rise to the occasion. They reveal their preparation.

People like to say that leaders rise to the occasion. In high-stakes environments, I have found the opposite to be more accurate: leaders reveal their preparation.

When uncertainty increases, leaders rely on the knowledge, habits, relationships, and judgment they have already developed. They do not suddenly acquire systems understanding under pressure. They show whether they built it beforehand.

By the time I led a multi-billion-dollar federal research enterprise, I had spent years studying how scientific, policy, budgetary, and institutional systems actually work. How decisions move. How information travels. How influence operates. How different stakeholders define risk and value.

A task-oriented approach helps you complete an assignment. A systems-oriented approach helps you lead. In large public institutions, no major decision stands alone. A research priority connects to appropriations, workforce capacity, producer needs, university partnerships, regulatory considerations, public trust, and global competitiveness. The leaders I have watched succeed under pressure understood those connections before pressure arrived.

The work no one sees is the work that shapes visible performance. People see the hearing, the announcement, the strategy document, the partnership. They do not see the briefings, the stakeholder calls, the scenario planning, the relationships built years before they were needed.

When I led the U.S. delegation to the G20 Meeting of Agricultural Chief Scientists, what made negotiation possible was not the day-of preparation. It was years of understanding the scientific priorities, economic pressures, and political realities that different countries bring to the table. When we launched the Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate, the public announcement was the visible part. The work was the partner alignment, the credible commitments, and the trust that had to exist before any nation would sign on.

In each case, preparation did not support strategy. Preparation was strategy.

What preparation actually costs

Here is the part most leadership writing leaves out.

Preparation costs you something. It costs you the comfortable belief that things will work out if you just stay ready in a vague, hopeful way. It costs you the energy you would otherwise spend resenting how slow the process is, or how unfair the wait, or how arbitrary the politics. It costs you the right to be surprised when the moment finally arrives, because you have been working toward it the whole time.

It also costs you the fantasy of being plucked.

Many of us were raised on stories of people who were discovered. Lifted up. Given a chance because someone saw something in them. Those stories are real. I have my own. But the seat I eventually sat in did not come because someone discovered me. It came because, when the moment finally arrived, I had been ready for years.

Being noticed without being prepared is luck that fades. Being prepared before being noticed is building capacity. And earned capacity, in time, takes its seat at the table.

A note for the road you are on right now

If you are in a season of waiting, a job you have not yet been given, a role you are working toward, a moment that is taking longer to arrive than you thought, I want to tell you something I wish I had heard more often.

The waiting is not wasted.

I know it does not feel that way. I know there are days when the silence from the room you are trying to enter is louder than any answer. I know “be patient” is among the least useful pieces of advice anyone gives a person who has already been patient for a long time.

But the waiting is where preparation happens. Not the visible preparation that everyone applauds. The quieter preparation. The lists nobody sees. The reading nobody assigns. The 90-day plans for jobs you have not been given.

Do that work. Build that binder. When the moment turns toward you, and it will turn, you will not be standing there empty-handed.

Three things to take with you

Prepare before the opportunity arrives. Formal opportunities often appear suddenly. Readiness does not. Build knowledge, judgment, and relationships before someone asks for them.

Study the system, not just the assignment. Task completion makes you reliable. Systems understanding makes you strategic. Pay attention to incentives, decision points, relationships, language, power, and timing.

Treat invisible work as leadership work. Reading, listening, relationship-building, scenario planning, and context development may not show up on a scorecard. They shape the quality of every visible performance.

Preparation is the foundation of PACK

Preparation comes first in the PACK leadership framework, Preparation, Agility, Cup, Kindness, because it gives the other three a foundation.

Agility works better when preparation grounds it. Without preparation, agility becomes improvisation without direction.

Cup, the discipline of staying open to learning, produces more value when preparation provides context. Without preparation, openness becomes unfocused exploration.

Kindness carries more weight when preparation gives it structure. Without preparation, kindness becomes warmth without a plan.

Preparation gives leadership depth. It allows leaders to engage complexity with more than confidence. It allows them to engage with readiness.

So, if you take only one thing from this essay, take this:

Preparation is not what you do for the job.

Preparation is the job.

Or as we have always said. Stay ready.

Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young served as USDA Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, confirmed by the Senate 95 to 4. She led USDA’s Agricultural Research Service from 2014 to 2022.

She writes about leadership, visibility, and the cost of being first, drawing on stories and lessons from inside the federal science enterprise. Her first leadership book is forthcoming.

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In June 2022, I stood in a packed room at USDA headquarters and was sworn in as the Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics. My family was there. My mother was there. Colleagues filled the room and joined online from across the country and around the world.

The full Senate vote had come only days earlier: 95 to 4. What most people in that room did not know is that the vote had been delayed for nearly seven months after my confirmation hearing in the Senate Agriculture Committee room on Capitol Hill. Seven months of waiting. Seven months of preparing for a job I had not yet been allowed to start.

When I finally raised my right hand, I thought about the longer road. The little girl from Augusta, Georgia. The 1985 Buick Regal that broke down on the way to NC State, and the mother, now sitting a few feet from me, who had refused to let a stalled engine end the trip. The years of preparation. The rooms I had walked into where no one looked like me. The moments I had been the first, and the only.

The gap between what people see and what it actually took. That is what I want to write about here.

What this newsletter is

I spent more than two decades in federal science leadership. I led the Agricultural Research Service, a 6,000-person agency, from 2014 to 2022. I served as USDA’s Chief Scientist. I represented the United States at the G20. I sat at tables where decisions about food, science, and the future of this country got made.

I am also a Black woman who was often the first, and sometimes the only, in those rooms.

Both of those sentences are true at the same time. This newsletter is what happens when I write from that intersection.

You’ll find two kinds of pieces here.

The first is a recurring series I call PACK. It’s a leadership framework I introduced in the fall of 2022, just months after I was sworn in, when I returned to my alma mater, NC State, to deliver the commencement address. I was still in the seat, still mid-storm, when I tried to put into four words what had actually carried me there. P for Preparation. A for Agility. C for Cup, meaning stay open to learning. K for Kindness. Four ideas, simple enough to carry into any room. I’ll be expanding each of them here, with stories from inside the federal science enterprise that I have not told publicly before. PACK is also the spine of a leadership book I’m currently writing.

The second is what I’m calling Dispatches from the Table. Shorter pieces, written closer to the news, on food security, science policy, the federal workforce, and what leadership looks like when the pressure is real and the stakes are national. These are the conversations I used to have in conference rooms. I’m bringing them out into the open.

Why now

Public discourse has rarely felt heavier. Institutions are being tested. Trust is thin. The people I worry about most, the early-career scientists, the first-generation leaders, the women and people of color stepping into rooms that were not built for them, are being asked to lead through conditions no one prepared them for.

I do not have all the answers. But I have been in those rooms. I know what it costs to walk in, and I know what it takes to stay. I want to share what I learned, plainly and without performance, in the hope that some of it travels with you when you need it.

What you can expect

I’ll publish about twice a month. The PACK essays will be longer, the Dispatches shorter. You can subscribe for free, and everything I write here will stay free for now.

If you’ve followed my work on Medium, you’ll recognize some of the voice and a few of the stories. What you’ll find here is sharper, more candid, and more grounded in the rooms where I actually did the work.

If you’re new, welcome. Start wherever you like. The first PACK essay, on preparation, drops next week.

My mother was the one who refused to let a broken-down Buick end the trip. That stubbornness, that quiet refusal to turn back, has shaped every room I’ve walked into since.

This newsletter is what happens when I keep going.

I hope, in some small way, it helps you keep going too.

That’s what this newsletter is. A way of moving forward, together, while we wait for the ball.

Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young served as USDA Chief Scientist and Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics, confirmed by the Senate 95 to 4. She led USDA’s Agricultural Research Service from 2014 to 2022.

She writes about leadership, visibility, and the cost of being first, drawing on stories from inside the federal science enterprise that have rarely been told. Her first leadership book, built around the PACK framework, is forthcoming.

Subscribe to receive new essays twice a month. Free, no spam, unsubscribe anytime.

Book Dr. Chavonda Jacobs-Young for Speaking, Events and Appearances | APB Speakers