As the Trump administration pushes forward with a new federal tech hiring program, former government technologists say the initiative, dubbed Tech Force, sounds all too familiar and comes just months after multiple tech units saw their teams shrink amid the federal government overhaul.
In the days following the announcement of the new initiative, former federal workers told FedScoop they welcomed another program to bring tech talent into the government, but they noted the irony of such an effort following the Trump administration’s workforce reductions.
Amy Paris, a former product manager at the U.S. Digital Service, said the Trump administration laid off, fired, or offered deferred resignations to “amazingly talented” engineers and data scientists earlier this year and is now searching for replacements with less experience.
“It’s comical,” Paris said, likening it to something out of a scripted TV show. “What are they actually doing that’s different than the services that they replaced?”
Lambert here: What’s different would be political loyalties, ethics, if any, and AI “expertise” quote-unquote.
The Office of Personnel Management announced the Tech Force initiative Dec. 15, stating it aims to help fill technology hiring gaps in federal agencies with workers who will sign onto two-year stints. The program focuses on getting early-career engineers in government and offers buy-in from private-sector companies willing to lend out more management-level workers for government gigs. Major technology companies like xAI, Meta, and Microsoft have already signed onto partnerships.
Merici Vinton, who spearheaded the launch of the IRS’s free online tax assistant tool Direct File as a member of the U.S. Digital Service, said she’s always excited to see government programs focused on bringing in technical talent. As one of the first employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Vinton herself set up the federal government’s first in-house tech and digital team.
But Vinton, who is currently an executive fellow at UC Berkeley, said the Trump administration also created workforce issues by forcing workers out of government, firing people, and ending programs. Killing Direct File at IRS put people “on notice,” she said, and many decided to leave the agency.
“It feels pretty inefficient to … get rid of a lot of great talent, only to either rehire them or to launch a new initiative to kind of replace that talent,” Vinton said.
In an interview with FedScoop on Monday, OPM Director Scott Kupor pushed back on the idea that the administration’s workforce reductions impacted the same positions Tech Force now aims to fill.
Kupor said the skills gap that the new program targets existed “well before” those workforce changes, and pointed specifically to a need for workers who understand modern software development techniques or who have a deep understanding of AI.
When asked about probationary firings in particular, Kupor said those efforts affected a relatively “small number” of workers — fewer than 7,000. While he didn’t have data about recent tech and AI hires that were impacted, Kupor said he doubted organizations would have let those workers go.
“Based on all the conversations I’ve had with the [chief information officers] and the organizations, I would have been really hard pressed to believe that any people would have let go of somebody who had AI talent that they wanted to keep in the administration, just given that we know how scarce that skill set is,” Kupor said.
Kupor told reporters last week that Tech Force will not “conflict” with the work of the U.S. DOGE Service, which replaced USDS at the beginning of the Trump administration. “DOGE still exists,” he said, but described that project as a “much smaller cohort of folks” — about 70 to 75 employees — who work on a contract basis for “discrete projects” at various agencies.
The Tech Force, by contrast, aims to “take a much bigger swing in terms of the number of people” it can bring in and its hires will be directly employed at those agencies, the OPM director added during the announcement.
Paris speculated that the choice to pursue early-career workers may relate to the “highly politicized” nature of the federal workforce.
“It’s really hard to understand how someone with a lot of experience is going to come into a risky environment right now, like the federal government,” she said, though she added that it is a “pretty bad economy” for young developers and that might make the jobs more appealing.
Kupor pushed back on these concerns, telling FedScoop he does not “buy for a second” the argument against recruiting early workers and is “not worried” about the approach.
OPM is looking for workers with “deep technical skills” who can learn the required government methods, Kupor said. As part of this approach, OPM is eliminating degree and tenure requirements that often come with the government’s General Schedule pay scale.
“If I can hire a 22-year-old who, quite frankly, can perform at the level of GS-15 in terms of their technical capabilities,” Kupor said, “then, under this program, I can pay them at that level. And to me, that’s actually a much more efficient way to actually bring in talent.”
Lambert here: So Coristine will be rule and not the exception?
He also signaled that the initiative may be used as a test case for pooled hiring across the government. Agencies are currently working on gathering their headcounts, and Kupor said there may be more common needs that arise.
Lambert here: Hmm. Hires will be fungible only to the extent that data structures and agency procedures (many governed by statute) are aligned. This stinks, to me, of more data exfiltration (and/or “Foundry Everywhere”™).
Another somewhat unique Tech Force quality is its apparent formalization of a relationship with private sector companies — though former federal workers pointed out government technologists often cycle back to the private sector naturally.
What the Tech Force will have to account for is ensuring that the exchange doesn’t breach ethics.
Lambert here: LOL.
Vinton said the handoff to the private sector was interesting, but the government needs to be careful not to create a conflict of interest. In government, Vinton said, “there’s a lot of things that you need to do to make sure that the data and the IP that you have access to remains confidential.”
Implementing that exchange will likely be difficult, she said, particularly when it comes to ensuring “you’re protecting the government IP, you’re protecting confidentiality, and, most importantly, the privacy of the users.”
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