The Office of Personnel Management extended the deadline to apply for the U.S. Tech Force, due to what it said has been “tremendous interest and a recent surge in applications.”

The Tech Force program initially launched in December, as a way to temporarily hire technologists into government for two-year stints to work on critical tech challenges across agencies. Those interested now have until Feb. 2 to apply for a spot in the program, according to a Thursday social media post. OPM is targeting 1,000 recruits to the program by March.

It’s not clear how many individuals have so far submitted applications to Tech Force. But OPM Director Scott Kupor said more than 35,000 people expressed initial interest in the program.

“We’re working through our funnel now of how many of those people will give us a resume, how many people will do the application,” Kupor said Wednesday during an event hosted by Washington AI Network. “From my perspective, the interest is phenomenal.”

The federal tech recruitment program incorporates skills-based hiring practices by not requiring candidates to have a college degree to apply for the program. It is also targeted in large part toward hiring early-career talent — something the government has struggled with for years.

“If we do nothing, basically, we have a pending problem where we’re going to have a ton of people retiring over the next five or 10 years, and we’ve done absolutely nothing to actually replenish the pipeline,” Kupor said. “So, to us, this is the perfect opportunity. We can fill a talent gap in the technology area, and we can also start to solve what we call the early-career problem in government.”

Early-career staffing in government, however, has declined over the last year due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Currently, 7.9% of the federal workforce is under age 30, compared with 8.9% a year ago. In contrast, about 41% of the federal workforce is over age 50, and 13.5% of federal employees are eligible to retire, according to OPM workforce data.

“You saw a disproportionate number of young, tech-savvy federal employees being shown the door,” Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, told reporters Thursday. “The federal government has had a history of insufficient generationally diverse talent, and that went down even further over the course of the past year.”

Additionally, as part of the more than 320,000 federal employees who left government last year, OPM workforce data shows that agencies lost nearly 13,000 IT managers governmentwide. That includes a net loss of about 4,300 IT managers in the Defense Department, and 1,400 IT managers at the IRS.

But through the Tech Force program, Kupor said his goal of creating more flexibility for technologists to move between jobs in the federal and private sectors may lead to better recruitment of early-career federal employees.

“If you’re an early-career person, you don’t need to make a 40-year decision as to whether you’re going to be in government or be in the private sector,” Kupor said. “I think it would be healthy, both for the government and for the private sector, if we had more people who come in and out … We want to create a fluid career track, particularly for early-career folks.”

Kupor expressed interest in scaling up the initial 1,000-member Tech Force cohort over time. He also discussed the possibility of expanding the federal recruitment program to other fields, such as HR specialists and financial analysts.

To recruit talent for Tech Force, OPM is collaborating with various private sector companies, along with the NobleReach Foundation — a non-profit organization with an existing STEM scholarship program targeted toward public service. The organization is expected to work with OPM to help connect agencies with Tech Force recruits in AI, cybersecurity, data science and more.

“We’re at a transformational time right now — how people think about their careers is going to be very different,” NobleReach CEO Arun Gupta said Wednesday during the Washington AI Network event. “You may decide you want to stay, you may decide to leave, but we celebrate both options. We want them to be ambassadors for understanding what public service is about and stay connected to public service.”

The Tech Force hiring effort is far from the first time the government has created a short-term program seeking to recruit technologists and early-career talent. Initiatives during past administrations have included the U.S. Digital Service, now called the U.S. DOGE Service, as well as the U.S. Digital Corps.

“Some of what we’re seeing right now, frankly, is duplicating stuff that used to exist that no longer does … and we did see an outflow of a lot of tech talent in the federal government,” Stier said. “It is obviously better that they’re now trying to bring more tech talent in, but it’s going to be more difficult given the track record that they’ve had in shutting down preexisting programs that were intended to solve for the same problems.”

Stier also emphasized the importance of integrating the temporary Tech Force employees with the current federal workforce to maximize technological progress in agency programs.

“It is not really possible to achieve significant long-term improvement by trying to strap on some external force that parachutes in for a short period of time,” Stier said. “You really need to invest in the people that are already there, that have deep knowledge not only about the subject matter of the programs, but also about the way government works.”

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