OPM announces new 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.

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal want answers from the Social Security Administration chief following a whistleblower complaint that revealed a DOGE plan to target undocumented immigrants by moving 2.7 million living people to the agency’s Death Master File. In letters sent Friday to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano and three DOGE alums — Antonio Gracias, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling — the lawmakers shared the protected disclosure of a former career SSA official, Jeremiah Schofield, who spent more than 25 years at the agency. Schofield, an expert in the process by which the SSA assigns Social Security numbers and cards, was called to meetings with the three DOGE representatives and other career agency staff to discuss potential fraud and the Numident system, which includes all information applicants must disclose for a Social Security card. Following a pair of Department of Homeland Security orders from then-Secretary Kristi Noem involving Numident and the Death Master File, Schofield said he “was asked to develop a strategic approach to ‘killing off’” individuals’ Social Security records, adding that he “understood that this directive had come from DHS and ‘killing off’ meant marking these individuals as deceased in the Numident system.”

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