After laying off scores of government employees last year, President Donald Trump was forced into a stunning backtracking.
The Trump administration has laid off more than 387,000 employees since January 2025 after campaigning on a promise to shrink government.
But Scott Kupol, director of the Office of Personnel Management, now acknowledges that the firings have left a skills gap in the administration.
Scott Cupel says the Trump administration is experiencing a skills shortage. /Getty Images for A N Washington
“Frankly, we probably have some skills that we need to rehire now,” Kuppel told The Washington Post. “Any time there’s restructuring, there’s no question… Sometimes there’s too much restructuring, sometimes there’s not enough restructuring.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which is responsible for protecting U.S. infrastructure from cyberattacks, has serious operational blind spots.
The agency lost nearly 40% of its staff last year, leaving it vulnerable to threats from China, Russia and Iran.
“With the loss of hundreds of experts, CISA’s ability to detect threats from its most important adversary, China, as well as other countries such as Russia and Iran, has been severely reduced, and now is not the time for the United States to let down its guard,” a former agency official told The Washington Post.
Other institutions are struggling, too. USAID is rehiring contractors to end aid programs, but former employees who were laid off are barred from returning.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, applications for positions including nurses are down 50% compared with last year, while at the Social Security Administration, staff have been reallocated from IT and policy work to handle a surge in customer calls.
At the Internal Revenue Service, only 50 of the approximately 2,200 employees expected to be hired for the 2026 tax season have already been hired, accounting for just 2% of the goal.
To address staffing shortages, the government is currently promoting federal jobs to recent college graduates and early-career professionals, targeting positions in health care, technology and project management.
Hiring restrictions were also eased last year and new job categories were created to make it easier to hire and fire employees who support the president’s priorities, The Washington Post reported.
In early 2025, Trump issued a series of memos and executive orders that effectively froze federal hiring and forced agencies to reduce their workforces, prohibiting them from filling vacant civilian positions or creating new ones, except for narrow exemptions such as national security, immigration enforcement and public safety.
Elon Musk signs an executive order in the Oval Office accompanied by US President Donald Trump and his son X. /Andrew Harnick/Getty Images
The president also created the Department of Government Effectiveness, initially run by billionaire Elon Musk, to oversee emissions reductions.
Trump and his top aides claimed the spending cuts would slash the national deficit by streamlining an oversized and inefficient bureaucracy and promised to root out waste and fraud.
But while the federal government has shrunk under Trump, it has also hired about 123,000 workers since he took office, and federal spending in 2025 exceeded the previous year’s total.
Meanwhile, OPM confirmed that DOGE had quietly disbanded just months before its official end date of July 2026 after struggling to meet its ambitious savings goals by the end of 2025.
But Cupper warned that further layoffs were possible and told The Washington Post there were more opportunities to “reshape” the agency this year. He did not say which institutions would be affected.
Michael Duffin, a Virginia congressional candidate and former State Department official, warned that further cuts could have a catastrophic impact on the current political climate.
“It’s about service,” Duffin told The Washington Post. “This is about a war with Iran that could worsen dramatically and then suddenly double because of a lack of diplomacy, a lack of expertise. I think it’s about the bottom line. What impact does it have on their lives?”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and OPM for comment.
