One year into President Donald Trump’s return to office, experts say the federal government is still grappling with the fallout from sweeping workforce cuts that disproportionately pushed out younger, tech-savvy employees – even as the administration now moves to rebuild the technical capacity it helped dismantle.
A new report from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service finds that the first year of Trump’s second term was marked by disruption and attrition across the civil service. Losses among technology professionals were especially acute, raising concerns about agencies’ ability to meet digital transformation demands.
“You saw a disproportionate number of young, tech-savvy federal employees being shown the door,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told reporters during a media briefing on Jan. 15.
Stier said the federal workforce already faced a generational imbalance before Trump returned to office – and that the past year deepened the problem. Over the past year, Stier said that employees under the age of 30 declined from about 8.9% of the federal workforce to 7.9%.
According to the latest data from the Office of Personnel Management, over 320,000 employees have separated from the federal government since Jan. 20, 2025.
“We expect – and unfortunately fear – that the larder will be restocked, not with those that are expert, nonpartisan civil servants, but there is a structure being put in place to hire loyalists in their place,” he said. “The change of our federal government into one that is a loyalist workforce, as opposed to a professional one, is a process that we anticipate moving forward in 2026.”
The Trump administration has taken recent steps to hire more federal tech talent, such as through the launch of the US Tech Force in December 2025. The program aims to hire early-career technologists who will serve two-year employment terms across the federal government.
However, the Trump administration laid off many tech workers in early 2025 when it shuttered the General Services Administration’s 18F digital consulting office, and transformed the U.S. Digital Service – which was designed to bring tech experts into the government – into the U.S. DOGE Service.
The Partnership for Public Service’s report warns that these layoffs “may have discouraged top candidates from pursuing these careers and left a significant void for many months.”
“Those cuts required the marshalling of additional resources to create a new program. Keeping the existing infrastructure of the previous programs may have been more efficient and cost-effective,” the report says.
Stier said the administration’s track record complicates its efforts to attract top-tier technologists.
“One element that is vital for improved performance in our government is first-tier tech talent,” he said. “It is obviously better that they’re now trying to bring more in, but it’s going to be more difficult given the track record that they’ve had in shutting down preexisting programs that were intended to solve for the same problems.”
Stier also raised questions about the administration’s hiring strategy, including the level of experience it is targeting and how new hires would be integrated into agencies.
“Are they looking for entry-level talent, more experienced talent?” he asked. “What is the relationship between the new potential employees and their prior employment? Can they maintain relationships there?”
Those issues are critical, Stier said, because recruiting experienced private-sector technologists requires a clear value proposition and credible career pathways.
“What is the career track that they’re offering best-in-class, private-sector talent to leave their employment to come into the government?” he said. “Answering those questions in a way that is concise and clear – they have work to do there.”
Beyond new hiring, Stier stressed that sustainable modernization depends on investing in the existing federal workforce rather than sidelining it.
“It is not really possible to achieve significant long-term improvement by trying to strap on some external force that parachutes in for a short period of time,” he said. “You really need to invest in the people that are already there, that have deep knowledge, not only about the subject matter of the programs, but also about the way government works.”
The administration, for its part, has pointed to renewed hiring efforts as evidence that rebuilding technical capacity remains a priority. The US Tech Force program recently extended its application deadline to Feb. 2, citing “tremendous interest” from prospective candidates.
Whether those efforts can offset the loss of experienced federal technologists – and restore confidence in public-sector tech careers – remains an open question as agencies enter the administration’s second year.