The Trump administration on Monday began a recruiting effort aimed at bolstering the government’s ranks of technology workers, starting a program that will hire tech employees to join federal agencies and work on projects related to artificial intelligence and modernization.
The project, called the U.S. Tech Force, is the first targeted recruiting program of its kind for the administration, which kicked off its tenure by firing federal workers and pressuring tens of thousands to resign. The government has long needed more tech workers, but that deficit most likely worsened this year, when an unknown number departed.
“We have some resources, but certainly it’s an area that we need to build out more,” Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, which is leading the program, told reporters on Monday.
The goal is to hire about 1,000 top-level technical employees and supervisors to work on projects at agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Defense Department. The government is seeking software engineers, data scientists and product managers. After two years, Mr. Kupor said, they can stay in government or take a higher-paying job in the private sector.
The Tech Force resembles other efforts by the federal government to recruit more technologists. The U.S. Digital Corps, a program initiated in 2021 under the Biden administration, also seeks to bring tech workers into federal jobs for two-year terms, but it targets candidates in earlier stages of their careers. That program was intended to allow participants to help the government modernize its technology before eventually moving on to higher-paying jobs in the tech industry.
Another program was the U.S. Digital Service, founded in 2014, which the Trump administration fashioned into a home for the Department of Government Efficiency and renamed the U.S. DOGE Service. The project, spearheaded by Elon Musk, also sought to bring tech workers into government jobs for rapid modernization. But DOGE made sweeping job cuts as well — including senior technologists in the Digital Service and others in the wing of the General Services Administration that runs the Digital Corps. DOGE also eliminated 18F, a digital services agency created in 2014 that developed software and technology products for various federal agencies and employed nearly 100 people.
In February, Mr. Musk posted on X that 18F had been “deleted” and reposted another social media message that called it a “far-left government wide computer office.”
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Mathias Rechtzigel, who left the U.S. Digital Corps over the summer through the administration’s resignation incentive program and previously worked at the Digital Service, said the new Tech Force sounded like an effort to replace the more senior tech talent that DOGE had fired.
The government was in need of more “smart technologists,” Mr. Rechtzigel said. The Tech Force, he said, appeared to be recruiting people a lot like him.
“I do think that this is a reaction to DOGE not going well,” said Mr. Rechtzigel, who now works at a tech start-up.
Mr. Kupor distinguished the Tech Force from DOGE, which is still active but is not as prominent since Mr. Musk left this year.
“If you think about a lot of what the DOGE engineers did, a lot of things, but a big portion, of course, was looking for waste, fraud and abuse, which you know is ongoing, and it’s still a very important thing,” Mr. Kupor said. “Our hope here is that these individuals will really focus on, broadly, modernization efforts.”
Mr. Musk was widely criticized for his chain-saw approach to shrinking the government instead of studying agencies and recommending more specific job cuts.
The job market in the tech sector has softened in recent years, and many large tech companies have had widespread cuts, making it less certain that a worker could easily return to the industry after a temporary stint in the federal government. The Office of Personnel Management said major tech firms like Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia and OpenAI were teaming up with the Tech Force, pledging to recruit workers from within their companies and potentially hiring ones leaving the program.
From his first days in office, President Trump has thrown his support behind artificial intelligence, answering the lobbying wishes of Silicon Valley. One of his first actions was to unwind Biden-era directives for safety standards.
In July, the Trump administration introduced an A.I. action plan aimed at accelerating the growth of domestic artificial intelligence companies by cutting red tape on the development of A.I. data centers and opening up exports of A.I. chips and technologies, including to China. Last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order seeking to neuter state A.I. laws that protect consumers and require safety testing of the largest systems.
Kate Conger contributed reporting from in San Francisco, and Cecilia Kang from Washington.
Eileen Sullivan is a Times reporter covering the changes to the federal work force under the Trump administration.
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