Tech Force director says roughly 200 have been hired through the program
Workers hired under the Trump administration’s Tech Force program are gradually making their way into the government.
About 200 people have been hired so far, and onboarding began over the past couple of weeks, Tech Force Director Kevin Hennecken told an audience gathered in a meeting room within the U.S. Capitol Visitor’s Center on Wednesday.
He estimated about 10 people have been onboarded and expects that to be over 100 next month. The goal, he said, is to have about 300 to 500 workers by the end of summer.
“Going from hiring to onboarding the government can take a little bit of time,” Hennecken said. “We’re moving as fast as we can.”
Hennecken’s remarks come about five months after the Trump administration announced the Tech Force program as its solution for filling the federal government’s tech needs. The program is centralized at the Office of Personnel Management and aims to hire mostly young workers for two-year stints. After that, the recruits can choose to try to stay in government or leave for the private sector.
As of mid-April, FedScoop reported OPM was floating the names of more than 700 candidates to agencies via three shared certificates. The program aims to hire roughly 1,000 workers.
Uniquely and somewhat controversially, the program has also set out to borrow several management-level workers directly from industry partners to be part of the Tech Force.
Those workers will take an unpaid leave of absence to serve their roles, and will also be allowed to retain earned — but not yet vested — restricted stock units while in government service, an arrangement that has been blessed by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
Per Hennecken, the first such hire is expected to start next week. Hennecken wasn’t able to share what company the individual was coming from, but said they would be working at OPM.
In a conversation with FedScoop after the event, Hennecken shared that there’s a pool of about “15 plus who are in the pipeline” for those management-level roles. The next step for those individuals is matching them and finding the best agency to place them in, he said.
The Wednesday event was focused specifically on Tech Force program updates and was hosted by Workday and the Alliance for Digital Innovation, a membership organization representing technology companies. Hennecken, officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Defense also discussed technology hiring and needs.
In comments to FedScoop after the event, Eric Sidle, HUD’s chief information officer and chief artificial intelligence officer, said that so far, the Tech Force “candidates have been impressive” and praised the screening process.
HUD is just now getting to the background check process with its selections after work to overhaul its hiring process, Sidle said. “If I could, I’d hire 50 [to] 100 of them,” he said.
Eventually, those hires will focus on the many modernization efforts across the department. Sidle told FedScoop that “very few places” across HUD don’t need modernization support, and part of the pitch to candidates has been the impact that each worker in the department can make on housing and community planning.
While the technology workforce needs have long been an issue in government, the current effort follows the Trump administration’s massive workforce cuts and incentivized departure programs. As a result, some former federal technologists have noted irony in the new program’s hiring efforts.
Since President Donald Trump took office, the government has lost more than 16,500 people in IT roles alone, according to OPM’s most recent workforce data. The Trump administration also eliminated technology-focused units such as the General Services Administration’s 18F and turned the U.S. Digital Service into the U.S. DOGE Service.
