Trump govt is hiring again, remember Doge?

During the first year of his second presidency, President Donald Trump dispatched a chainsaw-wielding billionaire to loudly eliminate more than 300,000 federal jobs in an unsparing attempt to shrink the government.

Now, the Trump administration is quietly hiring again.

Job announcements posted to the federal government's main hiring portal were up 23% in March from the previous month. The government has launched new recruiting drives targeted at tech staffers, attorneys and project managers.

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And the budget proposal that Trump submitted to Congress this month would authorize a small increase in total full-time equivalent employment in 2027. Though those numbers aren't directly comparable to actual employment, they would give the government headroom to grow the workforce.

"I'm trying to be louder on hiring," Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said in an interview.

Kupor, a former managing partner of Andreessen Horowitz, was confirmed by the Senate six weeks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk left the White House last year. Musk's self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had launched a shock-and-awe campaign to vastly downsize the federal workforce through a combination of early resignation incentives, mass firings and micromanagement.

Those sweeping efforts have largely run their course, and courts have struck down some Trump administration efforts to impose layoffs.

Federal government employment is now the lowest its been since 2009, approaching the 2 million employee mark.

"If things stay on trajectory, which I expect, we will be net positive for the year," Kupor said.

Those topline numbers conceal significant churn, however. Trump's 2027 budget would dramatically reduce civilian head counts at the departments of Agriculture, Education and Labor, as well as at NASA. But other agencies would see net increases, including Commerce, Defense, Interior and Transportation.

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"The areas where they're planning to hire are not the areas where they have decimated the workforce. It's different areas," said Jacqueline Simon, the policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal workers.

"Can these people turn around and apply for a new federal job? Yeah, they can start all over again - but only after a period where they have no rights and are probationary employees all over again," she added. "It's not an attractive prospect."