The acting head of the U.S. DOGE Service — formerly known as the White House’s U.S. Digital Service — says the federal government needs more tech hires to provide better services to the public.
Acting USDS Administrator Amy Gleason, who also serves as a strategic advisor for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said agencies are searching for tech talent to help improve service delivery.
“We need to hire and empower great talent in government,” Gleason said at AFCEA Bethesda’s Health IT Summit on Thursday. “There’s not enough tech talent here. We need more of it.”
The Trump administration, however, has been focused on slashing the federal workforce. The Partnership for Public Service estimates that more than 161,000 employees have left the federal government so far this year.
President Donald Trump has extended a governmentwide hiring freeze twice, and it is currently scheduled to expire on Oct. 15. Even once the hiring freeze lifts, the Trump administration has instructed agencies to make only one new hire for every four federal employees who leave.
The Trump administration recently outlined its plans for recruiting new hires into the federal government. But many federal tech experts have left the government or were fired under the Trump administration.
The U.S. DOGE service removed about 50 of its 200 employees in February. That same month, the General Services Administration shuttered its 18F tech shop.
Former 18F employees, in an ongoing lawsuit, claim they were “unlawfully targeted” by DOGE and its former leader Elon Musk.
The IRS, which has lost more than 25% of its total workforce under the Trump administration, has also lost about a quarter of its tech employees.
The agency’s acting chief information officer told employees in June that the agency’s IT office needs to “reset and reassess,” in light of its shrinking headcount.
Federal News Network reported in June that DOGE has been inviting federal employees to join the organization. DOGE, according to federal employees who received the messages, has been looking for technologists and legal counsel.
Sahil Lavingia, a former DOGE employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs, recently urged more tech experts to consider working for the federal government.
]]>
Speaking at a hacking conference last month, Lavingia said some DOGE screening steps, like a “political alignment interview,” create hurdles that prevent tech experts from joining the government.
“If you can’t hire Democrats, guess what? Most software engineers are Democrats, so good luck hiring a lot of software engineers,” he said.
Gleason said tech hiring is essential to help CMS “build modern services for the American people.” She said the agency, at the beginning of this year, had about 13 engineers managing thousands of contractors.
“If we could hire great talent for tech in the government, I think in five years, we can really transform a lot of these systems to be much more modern and user-friendly, and easy for citizens to engage with what they need,” Gleason said. “But we have to take advantage of hiring.”
CMS recently launched a Health Tech Ecosystem, focused on streamlining fragmented health care records. Gleason said that one of the goals of this initiative is allowing patients to share their medical history with providers through a QR code on their phones.
Gleason said CMS is trying to “kill the clipboard,” and “axe the fax,” by replacing paper-based processes with modern technology.
“When you look across your private life, you have all kinds of modern technology you can call in minutes. You can buy groceries and have them delivered to your door. You can stream music or movies from your phone. But when you go to health care, you show up with paper and patient portals and all of these things. And so we launched this tech ecosystem that’s really all about empowering the beneficiary to have modern tech tools that they can use anywhere in the world, 24/7, and help them get not just clinical care, but support as well,” she said.
CMS is also looking to modernize its legacy IT systems. More than $1 trillion in annual payments go through systems programmed in COBOL, an older programming language unfamiliar to most contemporary tech workers.
“That’s a hard project to take on and modernize. There’s been several efforts in the past — these big-bang, let’s go rewrite the whole code base and release it out. And it hasn’t worked. And so I think we need to continuously do small iterations and build these tools to get them out, and look at buying instead of building. Sometimes it’s appropriate, sometimes it’s not. But we need to do small iterations and not take five or 10 years to build something and then find out if it works.”
]]>
Patrick Newbold, the chief information officer at CMS, said industry “has a unique opportunity” to help attract more tech talent into the federal government.
“We are really focused on the technical talent that can actually turn the wrenches, write code, engineer and solve,” Newbold said. “That means I want full-stack engineers. I want cloud engineers. I want product engineers, platform engineers.”
Barclay Butler, the deputy commissioner for operations and chief operating officer for the Food and Drug Administration, said FDA saw a “significant reduction in resources” this spring following a widespread reduction-in-force and voluntary separation incentives.
However, Butler said those workforce cuts became “an opportunity” to streamline how FDA operates.
“When you lose that many folks … you can’t do the things the way you did it before,” he said.
“You’ve been through reductions of 5%, maybe as many as 10%, and you kind of move the deck chairs around. You just kind of keep it going. Well, these cuts were deep enough where you just couldn’t do that anymore, which was an opportunity to aggressively introduce shared services into the Food and Drug Administration,” he added.
The FDA laid off about 3,500 employees in April. The Department of Health and Human Services, more broadly, sent reduction-in-force notices to 10,000 employees. Another 10,000 HHS employees accepted early retirement offers, deferred resignation offers or voluntary separation incentives.
“Whenever you change an organization, performance drops, and it drops for a certain period of time in a certain depth, depending on how well you designed it and how much training you’ve done. And I think we’re starting to come out of that dip. In fact, I’m starting to hear FDA employees saying, ‘You know, it’s getting better,’ which boy, is music to my ears,” Butler said.
If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email jheckman@federalnewsnetwork.com, or reach out on Signal at jheckman.29
Copyright
© 2025 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.