DOGE Is Officially Ending. Agencies Are Hiring Again.

When Molly Hardy — the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 employee of the year — was laid off in 2025 because of DOGE, she checked a box that she’d like to be considered for future employment.

In March of this year, NEH emailed Hardy to schedule a virtual interview. The agency, which lost two-thirds of its staff during DOGE cuts last year, was hiring again. The email was “affirming, but in a way that was so sick and twisted,” Hardy said.

She didn’t take the job. “It didn’t feel good, it just felt really sad.”

DOGE’s formal mandate ends July 4, as prescribed by the executive order President Donald Trump signed last year to create it. The group, initially helmed by Elon Musk, has left the federal workforce significantly leaner than it was at the start of Trump’s second term. It has also left many agencies scrambling to address capacity crises across the government.

The NEH is one of many agencies throughout the federal government that’s staffing back up as DOGE’s mandate ends. In the last five months of 2025, the government listed just over 68,900 jobs on its hiring website, USAJobs. In the first five months of 2026, it posted over 104,000, according to a data dashboard of government job postings.

Trump has largely lifted the nearly government-wide hiring freeze. And the administration appears to be shifting away from its explicit objective of reducing the count of federal employees.

Asked if there’s still a goal in the administration to cut the number of workers employed by the government, Scott Kupor, the head of the Office of Personnel Management, told NOTUS, “I’m not hearing that.”

Kupor describes the current work as a “reshaping” of the government’s workforce. The question is: “Do we have the right headcount for the priorities of the administration? And where we don’t, let’s make sure we go figure out how to fill those gaps.”

Over the past year, the federal government has gone from the infamous “Fork in the Road” email that DOGE sent to government employees, offering them an exit ramp from their government jobs that included months of pay without being required to work, to splashy new initiatives: campaigns encouraging workers to join the federal workforce.

Even the Obama-era digital services office that Trump renamed the U.S. DOGE Service — and which housed Musk’s isolated workforce-cutting team of the same name — is backfilling the many workers who either were laid off or quit in protest.

“One of the biggest things we do is recruit that top-tier talent to be able to come in and bring expertise to the government,” U.S. DOGE administrator Amy Gleason said last month,

The “Fork in the Road” program cost an estimated $11 billion in payouts to federal workers, according to progressive watchdog group’s analysis of OPM data.

A year and a half after DOGE began, Kupor said agencies are still determining how to right-size.

“It’s not surprising to me that we’re not at the finish line,” he said, noting that he thinks this should be an ongoing process.

Among the administration’s hiring efforts is the Tech Force, a program meant to lure early-career technologists into the government with a robot mascot wearing a black hoodie over its 2000-era desktop monitor head.

Kupor is focused on recruiting people with software development skills into the government, something he says is rare among the government’s existing technology workforce. About 20,000 government tech workers left the government last year.

He’s also hoping to bring in entry-level talent, despite the administration’s push to fire new hires across government last year.

Tech Force has so far hired 125 of the 1,000 employees it said it wanted to hire, according to an OPM spokesperson. This week, the administration also launched War Force, a Pentagon-specific program within Tech Force, which followed the Defense Department shedding 78,000 employees last year. And it has launched NASA Force, following the space agency cutting around one-quarter of its workforce.

Elsewhere in government, the State Department has since last year brought on new classes of foreign service officers after it laid off hundreds of career diplomats. As NOTUS previously reported, the IRS has received special authority for fast-track hiring of 8,000 employees after it pushed out 27% of its workforce last year. IRS officials said privately that virtually every element of the agency’s operation was at risk due to staffing shortages.

The Energy Department is scrambling to onboard staff to the office responsible for handling and cleaning up nuclear waste after it incentivized a wave of departures, which an auditor later found was compromising mission-critical work. The Department of Veterans Affairs has loosened restrictions on hiring after its leaders celebrated cutting 30,000 employees last year.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which laid off 10,000 workers last year, is now looking to hire 12,000 staff. Several HHS components walked back the initial layoffs after lawmakers warned of critical shortages. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Congress the rising prevalence of chronic disease in the United States demonstrates that HHS requires new staff.

The Social Security Administration is aiming to hire over 1,000 new employees. Most are being brought on to handle phone calls, although the agency is also hiring field office staff, developers and other employees, according to Rich Couture, spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees SSA general committee. SSA has already hired over 500 call center employees. The agency lost 1,727 of its customer service representatives between the start of last year and May 2026.

While the SSA waits for new hires, employees in its risk and quality department have been asked to volunteer to take 120-day stints answering calls.

“They’re robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said one SSA employee, who had been detailed to the phone line and requested anonymity for fear of retribution. They called the decision to push employees out of the agency “stupidity.”

A spokesperson for the agency told NOTUS that Frank Bisignano, SSA’s commissioner, “has consistently pledged to have the right level of staffing to ensure SSA operates at peak efficiency, meets customers where they want to be served, and delivers best-in-class customer service.”

Trump administration officials also predicted more growth in the federal ranks from a surprising source: insourcing services into the government. President Ronald Reagan kicked off a privatization push that, coupled with a government reform effort under the Clinton administration, led to an explosion of outsourcing and reliance on federal contractors.

Kupor said he and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought have encouraged agencies to reverse that approach and he now expects the federal workforce to grow “as a result of contractors coming down and us doing conversions.”

“Knock yourself out,” Kupor said he and Vought have told agencies of the insourcing push. “We’re very supportive of that activity.”

Still, most agencies have replaced only a small percentage of the employees they lost, said Don Kettl, professor emeritus and former dean at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

The Agriculture Department’s office that administers nutrition programs, for example, has replaced 0.3% of departed employees. Immigration enforcement and Secret Service – which all received unprecedented funding surges in the past year – are among the few agencies that’ve seen a net increase in staffing levels.

In congressional testimony this week, Vought did not rule out that some agencies would still make personnel cuts going forward.

Each agency is “assessing where they need to go deeper and where they need to go higher,” he said. If a Cabinet secretary identifies a need for more staffing, he said, “then we will work that internally.”

He made clear that even with DOGE gone, the White House is maintaining firm control over agency hiring. Trump has overseen a push to reduce the federal workforce’s civil service protections, which has the potential to fundamentally reshape how the government operates as much as DOGE’s chainsaw-wielding leader.

The Trump administration has also pushed to expand the number of political appointees in agencies and shrink the number of career staff in leadership roles. The appointees are cropping up in new places, like inspector general offices.

“You can significantly politicize the federal workforce by firing them, and then loosening the standards and restrictions on which you bring people in,” Jenny Mattingley, vice president for public policy and stakeholder engagement at the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, told NOTUS.

Even as agencies implement reversals of DOGE’s policies, Vought said he is pleased with the legacy the group has left behind.

“We think it made some important strides,” Vought said. “Many of the fruits of their labor are sprinkled all across the government.”

Nonetheless, there is some acknowledgement that maybe DOGE didn’t carry out its workforce cuts with the precision some in the government had hoped.

“There’s always a risk that potentially there are some people who may decide they want to do something that’s different from what you’d otherwise do,” Kupor said.