How Trump’s OPM director wants to attract tech talent after months of workforce cuts

In a list of the Office of Personnel Management director’s priorities for the federal workforce, technology is “number one, two and three.” 

“We have a real, acute shortage of people who have what I would call very cutting-edge, modern tech skills,” said Scott Kupor, director of the government’s personnel agency.

Kupor’s focus on beefing up the tech workforce comes after months of workforce reductions across federal agencies, including cuts to technology-focused employees, since President Trump took office. 

The longtime venture capital executive from Andreessen Horowitz took over in mid-July after months acting leadership at OPM, which was an early landing place for the Department of Government Efficiency itself, the controversial effort initially led by Elon Musk that pushed many of these cuts. Nextgov/FCW spoke with Kupor in September about his priorities for the technology workforce in the federal government. 

The OPM director emphasized the need for early career talent especially. Fewer than 9% of the federal workforce is under the age of 30, compared to 22.7% of all workers, according to Pew Research Center. 

“Whether it's tech or non-tech, I think we have to do a better job of figuring out, ‘How do we get early career people to get excited about and be part of government?’” he said. 

One way Kupor may do that is through a forthcoming tech hiring initiative that he’s hinted at. A monthslong government-wide hiring freeze for most positions is set to end in mid-October, though a shutdown initiated by Congress’ failure to pass funding legislation by Oct. 1 has also added complications for the federal workforce. 

Whenever Kupor is able to start recruiting new tech talent, it remains to be seen how his pitch for tech talent will land after nine months of headlines about government layoffs and DOGE. The stakes, however, are clear.

“The technology is going to advance, whether we hire the right people or not. We’re not going to slow down the pace of technology,” said Kupor. “The only question is, are we actually equipped as an organization to be able to utilize the technology in a way that will actually drive change?”

Dealing with losses 

Kupor’s focus on the government’s technology workforce aligns with the priorities of OPM directors before him. The Biden-Harris administration launched a hiring push focused on artificial intelligence in 2023 that yielded at least 200 onboarded employees. Cybersecurity staffing has also been a perennial issue across administrations.

The government needs tech-savvy talent to put many, if not most, of its policies into practice in the digital age. The 2013 healthcare.gov crash is a prime example of how technology can make or break high-profile initiatives. 

What sets Kupor’s efforts to attract tech talent apart from his predecessors is the fact that they come after sweeping cuts pushed by DOGE, which is nominally focused on tech modernization but has played a large role in efforts to shrink the federal workforce. 

About 300,000 people will have left the federal workforce by the end of the year, said Kupor, most via the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, which enabled employees to take paid leave for several months before exiting government at the end of September. The administration has also conducted layoffs across many agencies.

And the number of feds exiting federal agencies could go up — the Trump administration has been threatening to implement more layoffs across federal agencies during an ongoing government shutdown. Nextgov/FCW spoke with Kupor before this funding lapse began on Oct. 1. 

So far, most of the workforce departures were voluntary, Kupor emphasized, although that’s a point that Rob Shriver, former acting OPM director, takes issue with. 

“The only reason that those folks were thinking about taking the ‘Fork in the Road’ is because they were being treated so miserably,” said Shriver, who now works at Democracy Forward as managing director of Civil Service Strong. “The [Trump administration’s] strategy, as stated by their own OMB director, was to traumatize federal workers.”

It’s difficult to know the scale of these losses in the federal tech workforce specifically, said Michelle Amante, the senior vice president of government programs at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

“There’s such a lack of transparency,” she said, although “anecdotally, we know that there were big cuts to at least newer tech employees because of the probationary period cuts.”

Presumably, that includes Biden-era AI hires, given that they were early in their government tenures.

The entire 18F office at the General Services Administration — an internal government tech consultancy of about 90 employees that worked across agencies — was laid off in the spring.

In the U.S. Digital Service — another cross-cutting tech talent team that was transformed to house DOGE on Trump’s first day back in office — dozens of employees were fired in February and over twenty more later resigned.

Agency-level technology teams also haven’t been spared. The IRS has lost 2,000 technology employees as of June.

At Kupor’s own agency, the OPM tech shop is down by an estimated 200 employees, according to budget documents. The agency’s watchdog says that the loss of IT workers combined with a hiring freeze has put the agency’s Postal Service Health Benefits Program at risk of failure.

“That’s not a surprising outcome, unfortunately, for those who have been through these things,” said Kupor when asked if layoffs ever went too far. “You do the best you can with the information you have at the time.”

Even at OPM, there are likely areas where the agency needs to hire back talent it lost, he said. That’s part of a trend across agencies, and it includes tech talent. As of mid-summer, USDS was trying to reverse some of its losses, recruiting engineering, product and design talent. 

At the Labor Department, 20 to 30 IT employees are among those being brought back onboard, according to one current and one affected employee, after the department’s tech shop lost roughly 40% of its workforce.

Amante stressed that any new hires coming in won’t be effective immediately as the Trump administration fills in gaps and hires the cutting edge talent Kupor talked about. It takes time to learn the context, relationships and systems to be successful in a government environment, she said.

That’s something DOGE associates have been criticized for — that they didn’t respect institutional knowledge, rules and even laws in their work across agencies, as alleged in several lawsuits.

Government employees were “sidelined and not able to do the jobs they cared about,” said Shriver. “They were being threatened if they dared to speak up at all, to raise any kind of question about the appropriateness or the legality of what the incoming team was doing.”

Cost equations 

Victor Udoewa is one technologist that no longer works for the federal government. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recruited him in 2023 as a principal service designer in its then-new Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology, aimed at improving public health data after the COVID pandemic made clear the brokenness of the health data ecosystem used to track data across the country.

At the CDC, Udoewa was focused on AI, machine learning and data interoperability products and services. He also worked on a redesign of how health data makes its way across a vast health ecosystem to the CDC.

He was laid off in February as part of widespread layoffs of probationary workers across agencies, even though he was only new to the CDC, not to the government, and had already been at the CDC for over a year.

Udoewa was later brought back to the CDC as the agency faced lawsuits and then fired — only to get another CDC letter shortly thereafter telling him he was officially laid off, as if he’d been on administrative leave since February.

A federal judge has since found that the OPM illegally required mass firing of probationary federal employees, although they didn’t require the government to give fired feds their jobs back.

Udoewa — an expert in human-centered design, specifically radical participatory design — had previously worked in the U.S. Agency for International Development, General Services Administration and NASA. His first government job was through a fellowship program that placed him at the Department of Homeland Security in 2009.

You can build something that functionally works, but that doesn’t mean that people will use it, Udoewa explained. 

That’s something that human-centered design is supposed to correct for by involving the end users in the process of building a product. Radical participatory design is meant to go a step further, bringing in the public for full participation, said Udoewa. 

“I have more grieving to do,” Udoewa said of losing his CDC job. He’s still figuring out his next steps, although he’s been working for a digital services firm. “This is where I thought I was going to be for the rest of my life. Not because it’s the best job ever, but the meaning behind it.”

“I’m in this because I feel a vocation, like a calling to this type of work,” he said of his work in government. “I love public service.”

Beyond the personal impacts on affected employees, the various layoffs, deferred resignation offers, vacant positions, rehiring and replacing of employees have a dollar cost, too, although it’s difficult to nail down an exact number. A July report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations estimated that the deferred resignation program alone cost the government $14.8 billion.

Low morale also affects how well people do their work, said Amante. But determining the full effect of the Trump administration has had on employee engagement will be challenging, as this year OPM isn’t conducting the annual employee feedback survey required by Congress as it has since 2010.

There’s also the question of how the mass layoffs and departures will impact future recruitment.

“I do not think it will be easy to try to turn the tide and turn the messaging to convince young adults that, ‘Oh, now we've changed our minds, and now we do value you, and we do want you to come into government,’” said Amante. “What [the administration has] told young talent is, ‘You are dispensible.’”

Attracting new talent 

In his effort to shore up government tech talent, Kupor will also be contending with perennial problems the government faces when hiring tech talent, like low starting salaries for early career tech workers as compared to the private sector and slow hiring timelines. 

Kupor says that he’s focused on skills-based hiring, a common goal across both the Trump and Biden administrations, with a goal of testing job candidates for capabilities instead of using proxies like education or experience. He also hopes to address performance management.

“We have a terrible grade inflation problem here on ratings and we’re going to solve that problem,” he said. “I'm hoping the package that we will be able to roll out to an early employee is, ‘There's great things to do here, and, oh, by the way, we have created a talent management system that allows you to be recognized and progress through the organization.’”

Skills-based hiring and nonpartisan performance management improvements hold promise, although it remains to be seen if the administration is focused on loyalty or performance, said Amante. In May, OPM published a federal hiring reform plan with bipartisan initiatives as well as more controversial essay questions, including one asking what an applicants’ favorite Trump administration policy is.

But one of the biggest challenges Kupor sees in recruiting the right tech workers is the “narrative challenge,” he said, noting that he doesn’t view government compensation levels as the “overarching problem.”

Kupor was told by longtime OPM employees that “the reason people come to government is for stability and longevity of their job, basically,” he said. “I don't think that's actually a true statement anymore. I don’t think anybody has lifetime employment, no matter where they are. And I said, ‘Look — that's not, to me, a very compelling narrative.’”

That doesn’t match with what young career-seekers say they want, said Amante and Shriver, who both noted that young people are often seeking stability and mission in government work. Stability also doesn’t necessarily mean lifetime employment, said Shriver. The average tenure in the government is 11.8 years, although this varies across agencies, according to the Pew Research Center. 

In Kupor’s view, “We do a terrible job of actually telling the story and recruiting people who are early career about why they should come to work for government.” 

The story the government should be telling is that people can work on great problems and be able to take skills learned on a government job to the private sector later on, he said. 

Asked if he thinks the last nine months have hurt the pitch for future recruits, Kupor said “the answer is unequivocally no.”

Editor’s note: The interviews for this piece were conducted before the shutdown of federal government funding that began Oct. 1.