President Donald Trump has been forced into a stunning backtrack after firing a large chunk of government employees last year.
After campaigning on promises to shrink the size of the government, the Trump administration has fired more than 387,000 employees since January 2025.
But Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, has now admitted that the firings have left a skills gap in the government.
“We probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly,” Kupor told The Washington Post. “There’s no question anytime you do restructurings… sometimes you over-restructure, sometimes you under-restructure.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), charged with defending U.S. infrastructure from cyberattacks, has been left with significant operational blind spots.
The agency lost nearly 40 percent of its workforce last year, leaving it vulnerable to threats from China, Russia, and Iran.
“With the loss of hundreds of experts, CISA’s ability to detect threats from the most significant adversary, China, as well as others like Russia and Iran, is severely diminished, and now is not the time for the U.S. to let down its guard,” a former agency official told The Post.
Other agencies are struggling as well. The U.S. Agency for International Development is rehiring contractors to close out aid programs—but former employees who were cut are barred from returning.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, applications for positions, including nurses, are down 50 percent compared with last year, while at the Social Security Administration, staff have been reassigned from IT and policy work to handle surging customer calls.
At the IRS, only 50 of roughly 2,200 expected hires for the 2026 tax season have been onboarded—just 2 percent of the target.
To tackle staffing shortages, the administration is now promoting federal jobs to recent college graduates and early-career professionals, and targeting roles in healthcare, technology, and program management.
Last year’s hiring restrictions have also been eased, and new job categories have been created that make it easier to hire—and remove—employees who support the president’s priorities, according to The Post.
In early 2025, Trump issued a series of memorandums and executive orders that effectively froze federal hiring and forced agencies to reduce their workforces, barring them from filling vacant civilian positions or creating new ones except in narrowly defined exemptions such as national security, immigration enforcement, and public safety.
The president also established the Department for Government Efficiency, initially run by billionaire Elon Musk, to oversee reductions.
Trump and his top aides claimed the reductions would streamline an oversized and inefficient bureaucracy, pledging to root out waste and fraud in a way that could make a significant dent in the national deficit.
But while the size of the federal government has shrunk under Trump, the administration has also hired roughly 123,000 employees since his inauguration, and federal spending in 2025 exceeded the previous year’s total.
Meanwhile, by late 2025, the OPM confirmed DOGE had been quietly disbanded months before its official July 2026 end date after struggling to deliver on its ambitious savings goals.
But Kupor warned that more staff reductions could be on their way, telling The Post that there are more “opportunities to reshape” agencies this year. He did not say which agencies would be affected.
Michael Duffin, a former State Department official running for Congress in Virginia, warned that more reductions could have disastrous impacts in the current political climate.
“It’s about services,” Duffin told The Post. “It’s about this war with Iran, with the lack of diplomacy, with the lack of expertise, it could spiral out and then all of a sudden gas at the pump doubles. I think it’s about the bottom line. How does it impact their lives?”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and the OPM for comment.
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