DOGE spent months slashing jobs. Now its leader says the government needs to hire again

The Department of Government Efficiency made its reputation on staff cuts. Under Elon Musk, DOGE slashed the federal payroll in the name of cost-cutting. Now, the division’s new leader is urging the government to start hiring again.

Amy Gleason, acting head of DOGE, spoke last week at the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International Health IT Summit about the “need to hire and empower great talent in government.”

“There’s not enough tech talent here,” she said at the time. “We need more of it.”

That’s a pretty major reversal for DOGE. While the government hasn’t provided an exact tally of layoffs earlier this year, The New York Times estimates 135,000 employees were fired or resigned, with another 150,000 at risk. Gleason isn’t calling for all of them to return, but she did argue for hiring more technical staff to modernize outdated government systems within five years.

That plan faces immediate obstacles. The government remains under a hiring freeze, extended twice already, through at least October 15. (And it has already been extended twice, once in April and once again in July.)

It’s also something of an open question as to which of those public-facing systems will continue. The Trump administration canceled the IRS Direct File program—ending free online tax filing for eligible taxpayers after just one season—and ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to halt nearly all operations, effectively shuttering the agency. (The CFPB relies on user-submitted complaints to detect wrongdoing.)

Gleason was named acting administrator of DOGE in February, and has kept a low profile during her tenure, never appearing alongside Trump on any public comments about DOGE’s work since being named to the role. (The White House did not respond to Fast Company‘s request for comment.)

Since its creation early in Trump’s presidency, DOGE has been mired in controversy. It claims to have saved $205 billion, but those figures are widely disputed. An independent tracker, The Musk Watch DOGE Tracker, estimates savings closer to $16.3 billion.

Musk initially promised DOGE would save $2 trillion. By March, he lowered the target to $1 trillion. Then at an April cabinet meeting, he scaled it back again, telling Trump and other officials that DOGE now expected to cut $150 billion during the 2026 fiscal year—which runs from October 2025 through September 2026, months after the agency is scheduled to be disbanded.

An expansion of government hiring would add even more volatility to those numbers, should government officials take Gleason’s suggestion. The hiring would be slow, even if the freeze ends, however. Under new rules set by Trump, government agencies will only be able to hire one person for every four workers who leave.