A year after Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency allies purged hundreds of thousands of federal employees, the Trump administration is ramping up hiring — a reversal that reflects a quiet retreat from one of the president’s defining early priorities and marks a new phase in efforts to reshape the bureaucracy in his image.
“We probably have some skills that we now need to hire back, quite frankly,” Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “There’s no question anytime you do restructurings … sometimes you over-restructure, sometimes you under-restructure.”
The hiring push is unfolding under new rules designed to give the White House greater influence over the government’s 2-million person civilian workforce. The administration has lifted restrictions imposed during last year’s reductions and created job classifications that make it easier to hire — and fire — employees aligned with the president’s priorities. Kupor, who was sworn in last July, said the administration hopes to rebuild in part by rebranding the government as a launchpad for college graduates and early-career professionals and by focusing on recruitment for health care, program management and technology roles.
In recent months, the administration has moved to centralize hiring decisions, expand the role of political appointees in recruitment and roll back diversity initiatives adopted under previous administrations. Together, the shifts amount to changes supporters say will make government more responsive to elected leadership. But critics warn they could erode long-standing protections meant to keep the civil service nonpartisan.
“The president has certain priorities in the administration, and when we decide to actually exercise and do those priorities, people may call that political,” Kupor said. “But to me, that’s the way the process was designed.”
Even with the renewed hiring, officials expect the federal government to remain far smaller than when Trump took office and unleashed DOGE, a department that deleted entire agencies, eliminated offices devoted to civil rights and diversity, and imposed a hiring freeze for most of the calendar year. At the height of DOGE’s power, Trump and his senior staff said the cuts would slim a bloated, corrupt bureaucracy and promised to expose waste and fraud at a scale that would meaningfully reduce the national deficit. No large-scale evidence publicly emerged, and the government spent more in 2025 than it had the previous year. Musk later split with the president over his signature tax and domestic policy bill and DOGE quietly dissolved, its members dispersing inside and outside government.
“President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government. In just a year, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in response to questions about the president’s plans for rebuilding parts of the federal workforce and why Trump has stopped talking about DOGE.
The Trump administration fired, laid off or accepted buyouts from more than 387,000 employees since the president’s inauguration. During that same period, the administration hired roughly 123,000 workers, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management.
A year later, current and former officials warn of vacancies that have created operational blind spots.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, responsible for defending domestic infrastructure against cyberattacks, lost nearly 40 percent of its workforce last year — a reduction in capacity as cyberthreats from nation states remain a concern.
“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,” said a former agency official, who, like others in this piece, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
CISA did not respond to a request for comment about the shortages.
One of the hardest-hit agencies during last year’s cuts, the U.S. Agency for International Development, is hiring again for contractors to wind down aid programs but with an exception: Those who were pushed out are not welcome back. Agency leaders are seeking to preclude a contractor from hiring anyone who used to work there “to avoid the risk of impaired objectivity — a conflict of interest that occurs when former personnel are tasked with auditing, closing, or settling actions they may have previously initiated or overseen,” according to an internal memo obtained by The Post.
Other agencies are struggling to stabilize basic services or recruit enough applicants to fill vacancies.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, job applications for all positions including nurses are down 50 percent so far in fiscal year 2026 compared with the previous year, according to the agency’s workforce dashboard. At the Social Security Administration, employees in IT, policy and other offices were reassigned to answer phones and handle customer inquiries as call volumes surged.
Some agency heads have said they can manage with a leaner staff. Internal Revenue Service CEO Frank Bisignano told the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday that he believes the agency is sufficiently staffed. “I feel good about the number of employees I have right now,” he said.
But the agency’s inspector general reported that the IRS had onboarded only 50 of the roughly 2,200 employees it expected to hire to help process tax returns for the 2026 filing season — about 2 percent of its target as of the end of last year.
Kupor said the administration remains committed to building a leaner, more effective government, noting that just 7 percent of the federal workforce is under 30 — a demographic imbalance he said he intends to address.
With White House backing, he launched “Tech Force,” a two-year program partnering with companies including OpenAI and Meta to deploy teams of software engineers and data analysts across federal agencies. Participants will have streamlined pathways to private-sector roles after completing the program.
“My goal is to demonstrate that not only can you do great public service here if you’re a part of Tech Force, but you will learn and develop skills that are going to be translatable no matter what industry you decide to go into,” Kupor said.
Senior White House officials have been personally involved in shaping the rebuild. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has been active in hiring discussions, according to two people familiar with the process. He has emphasized recruiting young staffers and ensuring that new hires are aligned with Trump’s agenda.
Some job postings now reflect that ideological framing. An immigration services officer position titled “Homeland Defender” urges applicants to be ready to “protect your homeland and defend your culture.” Prospective hires must explain how they would advance Trump’s executive orders and policy priorities.
Kupor said there are more “opportunities to reshape” agencies this year, suggesting additional staff reductions could come in some departments, though he declined to specify which ones. He also declined to release agency hiring plans submitted to OPM under Trump’s executive order, calling them “predecisional.”
At Veterans Affairs, Secretary Douglas A. Collins has told lawmakers he wants to hire more health care workers but faces stiff competition in a tight labor market. He has asked Congress to lift salary caps that he said make it difficult to recruit specialists.
“When you have starting salaries of $600,000 for anesthesiologists in the community and I can’t pay that, I don’t blame them going somewhere else,” Collins said at a recent hearing.
But critics have said that the agency stifled recruitment when leaders threatened mass layoffs last year and eliminated openings at hospitals.
VA spokesman Pete Kasperowicz said the agency is “always looking to hire people who are dedicated to providing the best possible care and service to Veterans, families, caregivers and survivors.”
At the Social Security Administration, officials are moving forward with plans to hire at least 700 customer service representatives this year, according to two people familiar with internal discussions. The agency aims to increase its workforce by roughly 1,000 employees after losing about 7,000 last year.
“We are currently hiring as part of the agency’s commitment to providing better, faster service to the public, whether it’s online, on the phone, or in-person,” SSA spokesman Barton Mackey said in a statement.
Meanwhile, various lawsuits about last year’s dismissals are also still making their way through the courts, resulting in continued uncertainty for thousands of federal employees and triggering new staff reduction tactics from agency heads.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs Voice of America, offered employees a “deferred resignation program.”
The deadline was Monday, but a U.S. District Court judge ruled Saturday that earlier efforts to lay off the majority of the staff were invalid.
The future of the federal workforce, and whether DOGE is viewed as a success or a misstep, is playing out on the campaign trail, with Democrats working to capitalize on the fallout.
Michael Duffin, a former State Department official running for Congress in Virginia, said Democrats should be loud about the consequences of losing expertise in government. He has called to reinstate federal workers, warning that without subject-matter experts and adequate staff, the government cannot deliver on its core responsibilities.
“It’s about services,” Duffin said. “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?”
Ellen Nakashima and Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
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