Government can't attract tech talent while Trump is pushing them out

Normal recruitment strategies irrelevant amidst Trump’s hostile personnel practices

Image: Getty

There is widespread, bipartisan agreement that the federal government should get better at hiring tech talent into the civil service. Despite this, the gutting of state technical capacity has had limited mention on the right, where we still see the same hiring proposals being offered as before—and nothing about the much bigger problems. If you care about the government hiring tech talent, you have to care more broadly about the civil service.

I've worked as a data scientist for both the Department of the Army and, until last week, as part of the DHS AI Corps. I was working with LLMs and figuring out ways to automate processes. When I was hired, it was for a fully remote position. Then, I and other colleagues were told we would be fired if we did not immediately return to office 9-5, five days a week, to an office without adequate space. For me, this meant a 75 minute commute each way (on a good day) to an office that was never mentioned when I took the job, and no longer being able to pick my kids up from school. I, like many others put in similarly impossible situations, left a job that I loved. And it wasn't just about the logistics: I left because it was clear to me that the people making these decisions about my work conditions were not only unconcerned about my ability to be productive, but were actively hostile toward it.

The grim irony is that as a tech professional working in government, I’ve had conversations about the need to improve federal technical hiring with Republican Hill staffers, OPM employees, DoD researchers, and people working on digital services teams in the government. Their concerns about the need for tech talent and proposed solutions overlapped significantly. But those conversations feel increasingly disconnected from the current moment.

For instance, we should title jobs in ways that applicants will recognize. We should use technical qualifying assessments rather than letting applicants self-certify their skills. And we should use shared hiring certificates to make it easier for agencies to hire.

And you still see many of these same types of suggestions from conservatives. In March, a report from the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), Memorandum to President Trump on Talent, had a section on how to Build and Sustain a Highly Skilled Public Sector Technology Workforce to Meet National Needs. It included suggestions on improving pipelines to public service and harnessing the expertise of private sector technologists as surge capacity.

More recently, a report on Reforming Federal Hiring for Tech Policy Talent, part of an The Techno‑Industrial Policy Playbook from a handful of conservative organizations including the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) and the Institute for Progress (IFP), proposed fixes like more-accurate job titles and changing hiring processes.

And a year ago, any of these suggestions could have made sense. In my work I've seen how hard the government can make it to hire technical folks– and what it looks like when it's done well. And I've written and given talks about the same issues the IFP/FAI report brings up, like the need for better job titles and descriptions.

But there are much bigger problems now. We're in the middle of losing the kinds of people these organizations are calling for hiring, and it's only getting worse.

The dismantling of 18F and USDS has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention overall: these digital service groups were high-profile and hired significantly from industry, and were also specifically targeted for firings. And the absence of a mention of this from Reforming Federal Hiring is particularly notable: it cites one of USDS’s hiring guides without noting that they've ceased to exist in their previous form.

But those agencies aren't the only ones where technologists have been affected. At many others, technical organizations weren't specifically dismantled, but were swept up in the broader assault on the civil service. These include the mass firing of probationary employees and the offering of buyouts combined with threats of additional layoffs. While the federal government desperately needs more tech talent, in some cases it is paying people to leave, and in others firing them or making work conditions so untenable that they resign.

Engineers were not immune from this, and neither were the other professionals without whom engineers can't do their work– including product managers, user researchers, designers, and supervisors. Indeed, such employees have skills they can translate to private sector work, making it easier for them to exit. For example, the Washington Post reports:

At the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, a small, specialized team focused on autonomous vehicles has lost most of its staff, according to two former agency employees. Comprised mostly of staffers with engineering and technical experience from the private sector, the Office of Automation Safety was dedicated to developing new safety and regulatory standards for self-driving cars — something the new administration has labeled a priority.

Because of these losses, as well as the sudden cancellations of federal contracts for both people and infrastructure, state technical capacity has declined considerably. Products that used to be supported are going away. People who would have brought their experience to decisions about policy or procurement are no longer around to do so. And the handful of DOGE engineers being brought on does not begin to solve this problem.

But doesn’t this happen in industry all the time? Why is this different from Microsoft laying people off and then re-hiring?

First, these aren't normal workforce reductions. Normal layoffs don't involve firing everyone in a particular office or agency who got hired in the last year and falsely claiming it was based on performance.

Second, it was already tough to recruit people into government tech roles. Mission and stability were selling points. Both of those are severely compromised now: stability for obvious reasons, and mission because of the many actions being taken that make accomplishing that mission much more difficult, like cutting off government credit cards, reporting to physical offices with no physical space, and firing our colleagues. Those of us who once enthusiastically recruited talented people into government service now have to reckon with the conditions we led them into. Who would risk that again?

Third, it's not just the layoffs, it's the atmosphere of contempt. We've been told federal workers are “lower productivity”. We've been informed about major changes to our work conditions the evening before and told we'd be fired if we weren't able to comply. I have former coworkers, hired into fully remote technical positions, who were asked to take shifts scrubbing toilets at the random offices they've been assigned to “return” to. Mothers with infants are illegally not being provided with adequate space to pump breast milk, or who were forced to return to office for a period of time despite being a military spouse and therefore specifically excepted. In many cases, reasonable accommodation and military spouse exemptions are put on near indefinite holds as they work through the “process” and my former colleagues were often expected to report back to the office in the meantime. If we care about recruitment, or even retaining our existing workforce, why is this the environment we're creating?

But even if we acknowledge all of this destruction, shouldn't we at least plan for what to do when things are better? Why not start with those better job titles and improved hiring processes?

I certainly hope we rebuild someday. But the first priority should be stopping the destruction, because every week we have lost more people. Every week, capacity has degraded. This is ongoing. And there are policies happening now that will affect how the next months play out and how much of a hole we're in when it's time to build.

Two of them are the Schedule F proposal, which would strip civil service protections from many federal employees, and the new Executive Order which defaults to firing all probationary employees before they can be converted to tenure positions. These will drive more existing employees away, or prevent them from coming in the first place. Who wants to join an organization already trying in so many ways to fire them? And there is no reason for potential employees to believe that future firings will have any relation to their performance, which is how these policies are being sold: they certainly haven't so far.

Note, you can leave a comment on the revised Schedule F Executive Order until May 23. For more:

So let's be absolutely clear: policy papers about improving tech hiring which remain silent about these attacks on the civil service are the equivalent of moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. Tech talent does not live in a bubble separate from the rest of the federal workforce – nor should it.

And when it does become time to build, it will be about more than clear titles. It will crucially mean restoring trust that the public sector can be a stable work environment again, one that offers the opportunity to do meaningful work. Technical professionals, like all civil servants, need to believe they won't be purged with each administration change.

The reality is that we are still in the middle of the crisis. If you care about government tech capacity, your message should be simple: stop dismantling the civil service. Stop firing technical talent. Stop pushing government engineers to leave.