The Defense Department is preparing to launch its own Tech Force spinoff, tentatively called “War Force.”
The Trump administration is doubling down on efforts to rebuild its tech workforce, with a focus on short tours of duty lasting only a couple of years.
The federal workforce saw major staffing cuts last year, driven in large part by mass layoffs, firings of probationary employees and voluntary separation incentives.
So far under the Trump administration, there’s been a net reduction of 278,000 federal employees governmentwide. Nearly 20,000 federal IT workers have left government under the Trump administration — a net reduction of about 16,700 tech experts, when including new hires under the same period.
Senior administration officials say their goal is to convince private-sector tech experts to join the government for a short-term stint to tackle complex projects that will benefit the American public and their careers.
The U.S. Digital Service, launched under the Obama administration in 2014 following the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, pioneered this approach to getting talent experts into government for a brief tour of duty. Under the Trump administration, it’s been rebranded as the U.S. DOGE Service.
The Department of Government Efficiency, the temporary organization spearheaded by Elon Musk as a short-term initiative to slash federal staffing and spending, will officially dissolve on July 4, according to the executive order that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office.
But the U.S. DOGE Service will remain in place once DOGE officially disbands, and will remain the model for the Trump administration’s ongoing tech hiring plans.
U.S. DOGE Service Director Amy Gleason said last week at an industry conference that USDS is “largely continuing that same mission” first launched under the U.S. Digital Service to bring private‑sector technologists into government for short, high‑impact assignments.
“Our mission really is to transform government services for the critical services Americans rely on every day,” Gleason said June 11 at the Government Service Delivery conference. “One of the biggest things we do is recruit that top-tier talent to be able to come in and bring expertise to the government to come lend their services as civil servants.”
Several former DOGE officials who remain in federal IT roles say the federal government isn’t doing enough to bring in like-minded talent with the skills to address its longstanding IT problems.
Gleason said the U.S. DOGE Service is working on projects at a dozen federal agencies, and “doing a ton of work across agencies in helping them operationalize AI.”
“We hire and empower great people and let them do their jobs, optimize for results and not optics,” Gleason said. “A lot of these projects are very heavy, high-risk projects, and we need to make small wins to build trust, and then people start to believe it’s possible. We are in a lot of places.”
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During her presentation, Gleason touted the agency’s work rooting out billions of dollars in improper Medicare payments, overhauling the Education Department’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form and launching online passport renewal at the State Department. Some of these projects began before the Trump administration. Other USDS projects, like Direct File, an IRS-run online tax filing platform launched in March 2024, have been eliminated.
DOGE touted terminating 13,440 federal contracts, resulting in $61 billion savings. Gleason’s slide deck outlining the U.S. DOGE Service’s accomplishments to date stated that “hundreds of low-value contracts” had been cancelled or renegotiated.
The goal of USDS is to recruit mostly private-sector talent to do a two-year tour of duty in government. In most cases, those tours can be renewed for another two years.
“Once you’ve been in the government for four years, you’re not really coming in with that private-sector perspective anymore,” Gleason said.
Trump administration officials envision its tech recruiting pitch along the same lines — bringing private-sector tech talent for a tour of duty to tackle complex projects before returning 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 experts for two-year stints in federal IT jobs. Tech Force made its first official hire last month.
OPM Press Secretary McLaurine Pinover told Federal News Network that about 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 seeking work 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.”
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Following Tech Force’s launch, NASA rolled out its own tech hiring initiative, called NASA Force. In parallel with these efforts, OPM launched its Attorney Talent Network focused on bringing private-sector lawyers into government.
The Defense Department is preparing to launch its own Tech Force spinoff, tentatively called “War Force.”
Kupor said the federal government’s traditional selling point of a decades-long career is the “worst pitch I’ve ever heard” to attract the 30-and-under demographic that only makes up 7% of the federal workforce. Prior administrations also launched initiatives to recruit younger federal workers and tech experts.
Instead, Kupor said these tech experts are motivated by tackling “amazingly complex and critically important” IT projects within government that impact millions of Americans. Federal Chief Information Officer Gregory Barbaccia said his office is working with OPM on “what are the big bets for the future,” and coming up with a longer-term staffing and skills plan for the federal workforce.
“The government operates really, really well in crisis mode, but we need to do better at future planning,” Barbaccia said.
Kupor said the pitch that works best for tech professionals is giving them the opportunity 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 looking at 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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Jory Heckman is a reporter at Federal News Network covering the Postal Service, Department of Veterans Affairs, IRS, big data and technology issues.
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