The Trump administration is ramping up its push to revitalize its technology workforce, with an emphasis on brief assignments lasting just a few years.
The federal workforce experienced significant downsizing last year, largely fueled by widespread layoffs, terminations of probationary staff, and voluntary buyout offers.
To date under the Trump administration, there has been a net decrease of 278,000 federal employees across the government. Nearly 20,000 federal IT professionals have departed during this period — representing a net loss of roughly 16,700 technology specialists, factoring in new hires over the same timeframe.
Senior officials within the administration say their objective is to persuade private-sector technology professionals to serve in government for a brief tour of duty, working on challenging projects that will serve the American public and advance their own careers.
The U.S. Digital Service, established during the Obama administration in 2014 in response to the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov, was the first to adopt this model of bringing skilled professionals into government for short-term assignments. Under the Trump administration, it has been renamed the U.S. DOGE Service.
The Department of Government Efficiency, the temporary entity led by Elon Musk as a short-term effort to reduce federal staffing and expenditures, is set to formally shut down on July 4, per the executive order President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.
However, the U.S. DOGE Service will persist after DOGE officially disbands, and will continue to serve as the blueprint for the Trump administration’s ongoing technology recruitment strategy.
U.S. DOGE Service Director Amy Gleason stated at an industry conference last week that USDS is “largely carrying forward that same mission” originally launched under the U.S. Digital Service — bringing private-sector technologists into government for short, high-impact assignments.
“Our mission truly is to transform government services for the critical services Americans depend on every day,” Gleason said on June 11 at the Government Service Delivery conference. “One of the most significant things we do is recruit that top-tier talent to come in and bring their expertise to the government to serve as civil servants.”
Several former DOGE officials who still hold federal IT positions say the federal government is not doing enough to attract like-minded professionals with the skills to tackle its persistent IT challenges.
Gleason noted that the U.S. DOGE Service is engaged in projects at a dozen federal agencies and is “doing extensive work across agencies in helping them operationalize AI.”
“We hire and empower exceptional people and let them do their jobs, optimizing for results rather than appearances,” Gleason said. “Many of these projects are very demanding, high-risk endeavors, and we need to achieve small victories to build trust, and then people start to believe it’s possible. We are involved in many areas.”
During her presentation, Gleason highlighted the agency’s work identifying billions of dollars in improper Medicare payments, redesigning the Education Department’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, and introducing online passport renewal at the State Department. Some of these initiatives predated the Trump administration. Other USDS projects, such as Direct File — an IRS-run online tax filing platform launched in March 2024 — have been discontinued.
DOGE claimed the termination of 13,440 federal contracts, yielding $61 billion in savings. Gleason’s slide deck summarizing the U.S. DOGE Service’s achievements to date indicated that “hundreds of low-value contracts” had been canceled or renegotiated.
The aim of USDS is to recruit primarily private-sector talent for a two-year tour of duty in government. In most cases, those assignments can be extended for an additional two years.
“Once you’ve been in government for four years, you’re no longer bringing that private-sector perspective with you,” Gleason said.
Trump administration officials envision their technology recruitment pitch along similar lines — bringing in private-sector tech talent for a tour of duty to address complex projects before they return to their respective industries.
The Office of Personnel Management launched its governmentwide Tech Force initiative last year, focused on hiring 1,000 private-sector tech professionals for two-year assignments in federal IT roles. Tech Force made its first official hire last month.
OPM Press Secretary McLaurine Pinover told Federal News Network that approximately 250 Tech Force candidates have been hired and 100 have been onboarded so far.
OPM Director Scott Kupor said at last week’s conference that pursuing a career in the federal government is no longer about “lifelong employment.”
“That’s not just a 2025 Trump administration thing. I just don’t think that exists in any organization anymore,” Kupor said. “Look, organizations change, needs change, talent needs change, and so I think it’s unfair for us to promise something we could never deliver.”
Following Tech Force’s launch, NASA introduced its own technology hiring initiative, called NASA Force. Alongside these efforts, OPM launched its Attorney Talent Network aimed at bringing private-sector lawyers into government service.
The Defense Department is preparing to roll out its own Tech Force offshoot, tentatively named “War Force.”
Kupor said the federal government’s traditional selling point of a decades-long career is the “worst pitch I’ve ever heard” for attracting the 30-and-under demographic, which represents only 7% of the federal workforce. Previous administrations also launched initiatives to recruit younger federal workers and technology professionals.
Instead, Kupor said these tech professionals are driven by the chance to work on “amazingly complex and critically important” IT projects within government that affect millions of Americans. Federal Chief Information Officer Gregory Barbaccia said his office is collaborating with OPM on “what are the big bets for the future,” and developing a longer-term staffing and skills strategy for the federal workforce.
“The government operates really, really well in crisis mode, but we need to improve at future planning,” Barbaccia said.
Kupor said the pitch that resonates most with tech professionals is offering them the chance to do work that’s “not just good for the country, but it’s also good for your career.”
“The pitch that we’re making to people, whether it’s the Tech Force program that Greg [Barbaccia] and I have been working on, or whether it’s broadly our early career program, is ‘Come for two years,'” he said. “I’m not asking you to make a lifetime commitment. Come spend some time, and the commitment that we need to make is we’re going to train you. We’re going to give you exposure to amazing things, and if you decide you want to go to the private sector, God bless you. That’s great, and we should help facilitate that transition.”
Kevin Hennecken, senior advisor to the director at OPM, said the agency is exploring opportunities to use AI to review resumes and sort
through candidates for federal jobs more quickly — but added OPM isn’t using AI yet to carry out these tasks.
“It’s important, at least in terms of how we get especially Tech Force off the ground, that we have really thoughtful people working on that,” Hennecken said. “If you don’t hire people quickly, you’ll lose out on good talent.”
OPM is also looking to improve the productivity of the current federal workforce. Adam Starr, the agency’s CIO, said OPM is “helping empower all federal agencies to have a modern AI-ready workforce”
“It’s a scary time, a lot of people are worried about, ‘What does this mean for my job? Are you using AI to replace me?’ The message is very clear at OPM, that’s not the case,” Starr said. “There’s more work that we want to get done than we currently have the capacity to do. We’ve got a long backlog, and so, how do we improve service delivery is a big question.”
Kupor said that the federal government has “historically relied on tenure as a proxy for talent,” and that the Trump administration has placed a greater emphasis on skills-based hiring, especially for tech roles. He added that there are “critical in-house opportunities” for agencies to develop talent that it often contracts out to private-sector consultants.
Kupor said the federal government spends about $300 billion a year on full-time federal employees and about $750 billion on contractors.
“I’m not anti-contractor. It’s just that we have outsourced many things from a technology perspective, that I think are just critical to our ability to keep pace with what needs to happen. A big thing that we’re doing, and I know many other agencies are looking at, is what are those areas where we have potentially outsourced, that really should be insourced into the organization. That’s another side of the talent gap, is making sure that critical functions that really will drive performance and modernization efforts reside within the kind of purview of the FTE population,” Kupor said.
The Defense Department, which saw the largest departure of tech staff of any agency in terms of total numbers last year, is launching its own parallel tech hiring effort.
Kaydee James, chief of staff of DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, said the department is launching its own Tech Force spinoff, tentatively called “War Force,” focused on recruiting “individuals into an organization that otherwise has had challenges hiring.”
“Our biggest challenge, when you look underneath the hood, is going to be how do you get these people here, and that’s just operationally coming in from an onboarding perspective. We also have challenges — just meaning the process — on bringing people in with the right security clearances,” she added.
The Defense Department saw the largest number of staff departures of any agency last year — both in terms of total staff and total IT personnel. It lost over 61,000 employees in 2025, about 8% of its total workforce. Of those, about 3,500 were IT employees.
James, who previously served as the U.S. DOGE Service’s chief of staff, said the CDAO is seeing “explosive growth” in its use of artificial intelligence and is seeing a growing demand for tech experts to oversee its deployment.
“We actually have some gaps inside our organization right now, because we’ve moved so rapidly with our deployment of AI. We burst at the seams really quickly and we’re seeing that on the operational side now, there’s these gaping holes,” James said. “I need business relationship managers, I need people on the backend making sure that tools are up and they’re running, and that we’re thinking more logically about how we’re approaching some of the infrastructure challenges that might be going on.”
Energy Department CIO Dawn Zimmer said her agency is “trying to work with Tech Force as much as we can” to acquire in-demand tech talent. Zimmer said the department’s tech skills gaps can be addressed by having “short-term hires” tackle projects for a year or two — if not less.
“It used to be we hire for government, and they’re here for the next 25 or 30 years, doing exactly the same job. Right now, my needs are shifting, so I might need somebody for a year or two years in one capability, but that’s going to transition to a different capability down the road,” Zimmer said. “I have a wealth of resources inside of DOE, but also working with my vendor partners and professional services, can I just get someone for a week, two weeks, three weeks to fill a gap to get us over the hump, so that then we can just decide what we need next, especially on the development side?”
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