A year after firing thousands of probationary employees, the Trump administration indicated it needs more early-career workers to sustain the federal workforce.
“We’ve got close to half of our population that’s within 10 years of retirement age,” Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), told Fortune. “So if you just did nothing else, you’ve got this major demographic challenge of a large number of people who will likely either retire or certainly be retirement-eligible over the near term, without us actually replenishing the pipeline of early-career people coming in.”
On Monday, OPM launched the Early Career Talent Network, a recruitment push for entry-level workers to join the federal payroll. Spanning finance, human resources, engineering, project management, and procurement roles, it will offer young workers the chance to dip their toes into government work, without the commitment of decades in the public sector, according to Kupor.
Early-career individuals—those with five to seven years of experience—make up only about 7% of the 2 million civilian federal workforce, compared to more than 20% of the broader U.S. workforce, he said.
The recruitment push comes as Gen Z has entered into a stagnant labor market that’s particularly punishing to early-career individuals. According to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 reached 5.6% at the end of 2025, above the 4.2% overall unemployment rate at the time and up from 4.2% unemployment for college graduates in mid-2023.
The hiring spree is a departure from the Trump administration’s early efforts to reduce the federal workforce, particularly entry-level employees. In the first days of his second term, President Donald Trump tapped Elon Musk to spearhead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to slash contracts and cull headcounts, with the initial goal of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget.
OPM was effectively DOGE’s executing arm. From January 2025 to January 2026, the federal workforce saw 386,826 workers depart from the government, including about 17,000 from reductions in force. Thousands of those employees were probationary, meaning they held their position for less than one year. The vast majority of the individuals who left the federal workforce either resigned or retired.
About 122,000 employees also joined the federal workforce, a 55% decrease from 2024, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. As a result, the federal workforce has seen a net reduction of 264,000.
Musk claimed DOGE saved $200 billion, but a Cato Institute report in December calculated that a 10% cut in the workforce would result in a savings of only about $40 billion.
Even DOGE employee Nate Cavanaugh said in a January deposition that DOGE failed to reduce the federal deficit.
The federal workforce, transformed
Kupor said he sees the cuts and hirings as part of the same mission: “We’re reshaping the workforce to make sure that we have the right talent for the right roles.
“A huge push is around technology, for example,” he added. “That’s an area where we don’t have all the skills we need to do the modernization efforts that we’d like.”
In December, the Trump administration launched the U.S. Tech Force, an initiative hiring 1,000 engineers and specialists to work with private-sector tech companies to build out AI infrastructure within the federal government. The employment program has a two-year duration for each cohort and is geared toward early-career professionals.
That came after DOGE’s gutting last year of the U.S. Digital Corps and the General Services Administration’s 18F program meant to improve the government’s technological efficiency.
Kupor said the U.S. Tech Force is a way to scale up and learn from previous initiatives. OPM launched a similar recruitment program with NASA earlier this month.
“We need people with modern software development. We need people with modern AI understanding. We need data science,” he said.
But many federal workers see the transformed government workforce differently, with some saying the headcount cuts have made it harder for existing employees to complete their jobs efficiently.
“This is going to be probably the roughest filing season we’ve had since the pandemic,” one IRS employee told Fortune, adding that the agency has been short-staffed and that ongoing burnout from greater workloads had the potential to impact the quality of internal reviews.
A 2025 Best Places to Work in Federal Government survey found a precipitous drop in job satisfaction as well as lower confidence that the workplace was free of favoritism and political coercion. The survey based its questions on OPM’s previous Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), which it did not administer last year. Kupor said the survey had a smaller sample size, about 11,000 federal employees, and its results should not be generalized.
Instead of administering the FEVS survey, OPM offered quarterly “pulse” surveys. The survey item with the highest mean score was “Understand work alignment with agency goals,” while the lowest was “Recommend agency as good place to work.”
An anonymous OPM employee not authorized to speak to the press told Fortune a handful of employees admitted to answering pulse survey responses more positively than they really felt, expressing concerns around lack of trust and that their responses were being surveilled. The employee said other employees didn’t complete the survey because of methodological limitations, such as no questions with open-ended responses.
Kupor said he understands not all employees will be on board with the mission of the administration.
“There’s no question that when you do the changes at the sort of magnitude we’re doing, it’s fully understandable that there are some people who are not fully bought off on those changes,” he said.
