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Trump administration scrambles to rehire key federal workers after DOGE firings

Published 7:00 AM EDT, Tue June 24, 2025

Federal agencies are rehiring and ordering back from leave some of the employees who were laid off in the weeks after President Donald Trump took office as they scramble to fill critical gaps in services left by the Department of Government Efficiency-led effort to shrink the federal workforce.

The Trump administration’s quiet backtracking from the firings and voluntary retirements — which are also paired with new hires to fill vacancies those departures created — come as federal agencies are still implementing their “reduction-in-force” plans as part of a push for spending cuts.

Experts warned that even though the Trump administration has backtracked on some of its efforts to shrink the federal workforce, the rapid rehirings are a warning sign that it has lost more capacities and expertise that could prove critical — and difficult to replace — in the months and years ahead.

“There are time bombs all over the place in the federal government because of this,” said Elaine Kamarck, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. “They’ve wreaked havoc across nearly every agency.”

Some government employees’ firings were halted by courts. But other moves to reinstate federal workers come as the Trump administration faces pressure from lawmakers, industries and groups they serve.

“President Trump pledged to make our bloated government more efficient by slashing waste, fraud, and abuse. The administration is committed to delivering on this mandate while rectifying any oversights to minimize disruptions to critical government services,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.

Earlier this month, as Israel’s conflict with Iran escalated, Voice of America called back dozens of Farsi speakers who had been on paid administrative leave since March. Those staffers at its Persian-language service were among hundreds who were then laid off again the next week, as the Trump administration gutted the network.

With hurricane season looming, the National Weather Service — which lost more than 560 employees to layoffs and early retirement incentives earlier this year — received permission to hire about 125 new meteorologists and specialists for its forecast offices around the country, despite a federal hiring freeze. Those hires will help staff offices that had to cut back on their hours or stop staffing the overnight shift.

The Department of Health and Human Services reinstated 450 employees at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were fired as part of a massive reorganization in April, including workers focused on HIV and childhood lead exposure.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in May that the department had also reinstated 328 workers at the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health focused on mine safety.

Those employees combined represent about one-third of the 2,400 workers whose jobs HHS eliminated as part of its “reduction-in-force” plan as the Trump administration slashed the size of the federal workforce.

More than 200 employees had their firings rescinded at the CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD and Tuberculosis Prevention, along with 158 at the National Center for Environmental Health, an HHS spokesperson confirmed. Another 71 were brought back in the Office of the Director and two dozen more at the Global Health Center.

The cuts had wiped out the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch as it was in the midst of helping Milwaukee address a lead exposure crisis in its public schools. The firings meant the CDC had to deny a request from the city for specialists to help. The entire lead team was rehired, along with its parent group, the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, according to its newly reinstated director, Dr. Erik Svendsen.

Other rehires are similarly driven by specific government services that were gutted by the initial layoffs. The Food and Drug Administration rehired more than a dozen scientists at a food safety lab in Illinois. The Department of Agriculture halted plans to lay off 25% of its staff at 58 facilities responsible for responding to bird flu, which had driven up the price of eggs.

Federal agency heads are also blocking some plans to lay off their employees. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was concerned about plans to slash 10% of the Indian Health Service’s staff, said in a New York Times interview that Kennedy called her to say he was personally blocking those cuts.

“He called me up to say, ‘They told me that I was supposed to find 10% cuts across the board for IHS, and I told them I wouldn’t do it, that IHS has chronically been underfunded, we cannot go backward, and I’m not going to do that,’” the Alaska Republican said.

In February, the Trump administration fired — and then the next day rehired — more than 300 probationary employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency within the Department of Energy tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Sources told CNN at the time the Trump administration officials responsible for the decision did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.

After HHS let go of the entire team that handles the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, in early April, the agency had to rehire one longtime employee for 2½ weeks to run a critical formula needed to distribute more than $400 million to states, said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

The dismissal of the more than a dozen LIHEAP staffers raised concerns among state officials and lawmakers, who feared HHS would not send out this final tranche of fiscal year 2025 funding. Some states were depending on receiving this money to help residents cool their homes this summer since the states had already exhausted their prior appropriations on the heating season.

The agency announced at the end of April that it was releasing the remaining LIHEAP money. Wolfe, however, remains concerned about how HHS will handle the distribution of any fiscal year 2026 funds that Congress may appropriate since the agency will not have any experienced LIHEAP staffers. Doing so “requires skills, requires knowledge about the program,” he said.

Scott Laney, a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health epidemiologist who’d received notice he was being placed on administrative leave but was then called back, told CNN there is “still a lot of chaos, sort of throughout the federal workforce.”

But he said he is more concerned about coal miners’ safety.

If protections in place for decades are cut, Laney said, it’s certain “that people will die earlier — that people will die in mining accidents and roof collapses, all sorts of the work that we do to prevent injury and illness and mining more broadly across the United States.”

Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said the moves to eliminate, and then reinstate, many federal workers “shows the mosaic of incompetence and a failure on the part of this administration to understand the critical value that the breadth of government expertise provides.”

“This is not about a single incident. It’s about a pattern that has implications for our government’s ability to meet not just the challenges of today but the critical challenges of tomorrow,” Stier said.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/24/politics/doge-fired-workers-rehired

Yet another mess trump created that they're still trying to fix.

It's getting crazy at my place right now, but I don't think that the full effects will be felt for months, or maybe a year.

We have disproportionately had a lot of our leadership take the early retirement and/or the DRP which has caused significant brain drain and reductions in staffing. Right now, our leadership in my office (myself included) is playing zone defense to fill all the roles, including our chief's role. A lot of the early retirement was sparked by the threats of significantly reducing our benefits and pay that have made their way through multiple iterations of the bill. One thing that the DRP and early retirement didn't take into account is the disproportionate reductions in voluntary departures, all in addition to the RIFs experienced by dropping remote workers. By that, I mean agencies like Space Force hired TONS of people remotely, and lost all of those people. They are scrambling...big time. Other agencies may not have been as badly impacted.

We also have a hiring freeze.

Right now, we are beating ourselves up to try and maintain our cadence in acquisition and equipping timelines, but it's not sustainable over the long-term. I am almost certain that deadlines will start getting missed and things will start getting backlogged, at least at our agency, which won't be good.

I think what bothers me most about this is that it makes headlines that they are "eliminating government waste" but the results are just simply not there in any way, shape or form.

Who could have guessed that there would be a massive rehire effort?

The whole thing screams "we have no idea what we're doing" from beginning to end.

I have been wondering how things were going where you worked. From the few people I know working in other sectors of the government, their stories seem to be much the same as yours. This entire debacle could have been avoided if they were really going after waste and fraud instead of making such a claim and doing nothing of the sort. Now it's turned out be nothing but a huge cluster buck.

I would appreciate any updates you have on the status at your work place. You are a very middle of the road, reasonable kind of poster that isn't an extremist. Something quite rare but valued at least on my part. Feel free to PM me any time you would like on how things are going.

Thank you, sir! In my building that was set for demo, the temperature yesterday exceeded 85 degrees. The power is also out there today, so they finally relented and let us work offsite, if we agreed to sign a modified telework agreement, which is basically that you can only telework if the building or base is shut down. If you did not agree to sign the agreement, then you had to find somewhere else on base where there was a desk and a functioning outlet and LAN connection...that you also were able to get access to. I sold my soul and signed the agreement, because I have a project that needs to get done (per what I wrote above). At least I have a bathroom at home that is clean and has soap and paper towels

Ha, that's just the problem...there is no massive rehire effort where I'm working. We just have to make do with what we have until it reaches a fever pitch at some point because the freeze is still in place. When people come in, they will be brand new and there will be a ramp-up period as well, which will be a struggle.

The other thing about it is that the OBBB significantly strips away benefits for newly hired federal workers. If I were looking for a job as a young professional right now, I would not want to work for the federal government. It used to possess stability with good benefits and both of those are under attack.

Thanks again for the update.

Just a DOGE update.........

Trump administration rehires hundreds of federal employees laid off by DOGE

Hundreds of federal employees who lost their jobs in Elon Musk’s cost-cutting blitz are being asked to return to work.

The General Services Administration has given the employees — who managed government workspaces — until the end of the week to accept or decline reinstatement, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.

Those who accept must report for duty on October 6 after what amounts to a seven-month paid vacation, during which time the GSA in some cases racked up high costs — passed along to taxpayers — to stay in dozens of properties whose leases it had slated for termination or were allowed to expire.

“Ultimately, the outcome was the agency was left broken and understaffed,” said Chad Becker, a former GSA real estate official. “They didn’t have the people they needed to carry out basic functions.”

Becker, who represents owners with government leases at Arco Real Estate Solutions, said GSA has been in a “triage mode” for months. He said the sudden reversal of the downsizing reflects how Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had gone too far, too fast.

Rehiring of purged federal employees

GSA was established in the 1940s to centralize the acquisition and management of thousands of federal workplaces. Its return to work request mirrors rehiring efforts at in several agencies targeted by DOGE. Last month, the IRS said it would allow some employees who took a resignation offer to remain on the job. The Labor Department has also brought back some employees who took buyouts, while the National Park Service earlier reinstated a number of purged employees.

Critical to the work of such agencies is the GSA, which manages many of the buildings. Starting in March, thousands of GSA employees left the agency as part of programs that encouraged them to resign or take early retirement. Hundreds of others — those subject to the recall notice — were dismissed as part of an aggressive push to reduce the size of the federal workforce. Though those employees did not show up for work, some continue to get paid.

GSA representatives didn’t respond to detailed questions about the return-to-work notice, which the agency issued Friday. They also declined to discuss the agency’s headcount, staffing decisions or the potential cost overruns generated by reversing its plans to terminate leases.

“GSA’s leadership team has reviewed workforce actions and is making adjustments in the best interest of the customer agencies we serve and the American taxpayers,” an agency spokesman said in an email.

Democrats have assailed the Trump administration’s indiscriminate approach to slashing costs and jobs. Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, the top Democrat on the subcommittee overseeing the GSA, told AP there is no evidence that reductions at the agency “delivered any savings.”

“It’s created costly confusion while undermining the very services taxpayers depend on,” he said.

DOGE identified the agency, which had about 12,000 employees at the start of the Trump administration, as a chief target of its campaign to reduce fraud, waste and abuse in the federal government.

A small cohort of Musk’s trusted aides embedded in GSA’s headquarters, sometimes sleeping on cots on the agency’s sixth floor, and pursued plans to abruptly cancel nearly half of the 7,500 leases in the federal portfolio. DOGE also wanted GSA to sell hundreds of federally owned buildings with the goal of generating billions in savings.

GSA started by sending more than 800 lease cancellation notices to landlords, in many cases without informing the government tenants. The agency also published a list of hundreds of government buildings that were targeted for sale.

DOGE’s massive job cuts produced little savings

Pushback to GSA’s dumping of its portfolio was swift, and both initiatives have been dialed back. More than 480 leases slated for termination by DOGE have since been spared. Those leases were for offices scattered around the country that are occupied by such agencies as the IRS, Social Security Administration and Food and Drug Administration.

DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts,” which once boasted that the lease cancellations alone would save nearly $460 million, has since reduced that estimate to $140 million by the end of July, according to Becker, the former GSA real estate official.

Meanwhile, GSA embarked on massive job cuts. The administration slashed GSA’s headquarters staff by 79%, its portfolio managers by 65% and facilities managers by 35%, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, who was not authorized to speak to the media, provided the statistics on condition of anonymity.

As a result of the internal turmoil, 131 leases expired without the government actually vacating the properties, the official said. The situation has exposed the agencies to steep fees because property owners have not been able to rent out those spaces to other tenants.

The public may soon get a clearer picture of what transpired at the agency.

The Government Accountability Office, an independent congressional watchdog, is examining the GSA’s management of its workforce, lease terminations and planned building disposals and expects to issue findings in the coming months, said David Marroni, a senior GAO official.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/24/politics/doge-federal-workers