Cisco, Scale AI among new batch of Tech Force partners
The federal government’s human capital arm added several new industry partners to its Tech Force hiring effort Monday as the program begins to take root in agencies.
The new batch of companies is Cisco, Scale AI, Wiz, Arista Networks, Armada, Cognition AI, Cognizant, Payward, and Moveworks, per a release from the Office of Personnel Management. They join a cohort of a couple dozen companies that are already part of the program’s industry support, including OpenAI, Google Public Sector, xAI, and Palantir.
“These partnerships bring world-class engineering expertise into public service and create a stronger pipeline between industry and government at a moment when modernizing federal technology has never been more important,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a written statement Monday.
According to the release, the companies will provide training resources and programming, as well as their own employees who they’ll nominate for temporary federal service. Eventually, the companies will also “create paths for Tech Force alumni into the private sector,” the release stated.
In an emailed statement, Bhavin Shah, founder of AI assistant company Moveworks, which was recently acquired by ServiceNow — already a TechForce partner company — pointed to the program as an opportunity to increase AI adoption in government.
“We’ve seen agentic AI resolve the vast majority of IT support requests autonomously and cut resolution times nearly sevenfold inside large enterprises,” said Shah, who is now senior vice president and general manager of Moveworks and AI at ServiceNow. “That same capability belongs inside government. When the people running critical public infrastructure have better tools, that impact reaches everyone.”
FedScoop reached out to each of the new companies Monday afternoon for additional details about their involvement in the program. Several were not able to immediately respond or provide comment before the publication of this story, and Armada and Arista declined to comment.
Cisco, meanwhile, directed FedScoop to a post the company made on X, formerly known as Twitter, lauding the partnership as something that will “help build the U.S. government’s talent pipeline and power innovation in the AI era.”
A spokesperson for Scale AI said in an email to FedScoop that it’s increasingly important to equip the government with technical talent “as AI becomes more central to national security and critical public infrastructure.”
The addition of new partners comes as the technologist-focused hiring program finally shared last month that it has made about 200 hires and onboarded around 10 workers.
The program, which was announced nearly six months ago, aims to solve federal tech needs by hiring an initial group of roughly 1,000 early career workers. Those workers will serve two-year terms and will then have the decision to stay in government or join the private sector.
Tech Force also plans to borrow management-level workers from the private sector who will take unpaid leaves of absence to join the program. Per recent comments from Tech Force Director Kevin Hennecken, the first such industry hire was expected to start at OPM last week. The agency has not yet shared which company that worker hails from.
Technology workforce needs have long been an issue in government, but the current effort follows President Donald Trump’s incentivized departure programs and workforce cuts that have significantly reduced the size of the federal workforce — including technologists. Former federal technologists have noted irony in the new program’s hiring efforts as a result.
The Trump administration eliminated technology-focused teams, such as the General Services Administration’s 18F, and reshaped the U.S. Digital Service into the U.S. DOGE Service. According to OPM’s most recent workforce data, the government has lost more than 16,500 people in IT roles alone since Trump took office.
As Tech Force begins to embed its workers in agencies, the program and tech hiring are being incorporated into mandates from the White House.
On Thursday, Trump’s executive order focused on AI security, tasked the budding program with expanding its hiring and placement pathways for information cybersecurity specialists within 60 days of the directive. The program already announced that category, but the order at least puts a deadline on its efforts.
More broadly, a National Security Presidential Memorandum published Friday directed OPM to accelerate hiring AI talent in government by using “special hiring and pay authorities, as well as novel talent programs.”
