The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency Service is hiring up after much of the staff in what was formerly called the U.S. Digital Service was laid off or left the team in the first six months of Trump 2.0.
When Trump transformed USDS into DOGE, he also established a new, temporary organization — which volunteers can work for, in addition to paid employees — within USDS. Those two parts of DOGE still don’t really intermingle or work together, one person familiar told Nextgov/FCW.
It’s unclear if the temporary organization is also hiring.
In early June, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, told lawmakers that the vision for DOGE was for it to become more “institutionalized” within agencies as “in-house consultants,” and that the leadership of DOGE was “decentralized” and with agency heads.
The executive order establishing DOGE directed agencies to set up DOGE teams and also allowed for those teams to include “special government employees,” a type of time-limited position that can be paid or unpaid.
Before Trump took office, USDS boasted a team of over 200 people and worked on projects like improving the website of the Social Security Administration or modernizing the public health surveillance system used to track diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In the last six months, agencies that had ongoing work with USDS before the second Trump administration started have struggled to get the staff for these projects, one current government employee, not authorized to speak on the record, told Nextgov/FCW.
“We the Builders was created in February the day after 40 US Digital Service employees were fired without notice, partially in response to this action. Now we hear that they are seeking to replace [those fired],” said Kate Green, the publisher of We the Builders, a nonprofit communications and advocacy organization that’s been publishing blogs written by anonymous government employees and other information about the federal government.
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