Following more than a year of sweeping reductions across the federal workforce, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told House lawmakers on Wednesday that he would be open to hiring more federal employees — with one crucial caveat.
Kupor said he would be “perfectly happy” to see an increase in federal workforce staffing if it meant that the number of federal contractors went down. The OPM director described contractors as a “shadow” workforce and argued that creating that type of shift would save taxpayer costs and improve government services.
“Contractors, I think, can be very valuable where you have temporary assignments, or you have skill gaps where potentially the government can’t recruit those,” Kupor told the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on financial services and general government. “Instead, we have people who are contractors for five, 10, 15, 20 years. They are basically full-time employees in disguise, and they get paid anywhere from 25% to 100% higher than what a federal employee would.”
More than 380,000 federal employees have left their jobs since President Donald Trump took office, through both voluntary and forced means. Later this year, the Trump administration is expected to get clearer insights into agencies’ forward-looking staffing plans, for both federal employees and contractors.
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OPM and the Office of Management and Budget are jointly requiring all executive branch agencies to provide annual staffing plans at the beginning of each fiscal year. Those plans, according to Kupor, should include agencies’ intended staffing levels for both contractors and full-time federal employees.
“What we have encouraged [agencies] to do is to manage that as a single bucket of dollars, and to go through and figure out where there are opportunities to reduce contractor dollars — and, quite frankly, increase [federal employee] headcount,” he told lawmakers.
At the same time, Kupor also told the subcommittee that agencies are still looking to fill talent gaps in “certain areas.”
“We are reshaping the workforce to make sure we are taking advantage of technology, taking advantage of areas that we need to, where we might have critical talent gaps,” he said.
As part of those recruitment plans, Kupor spoke about the need to hire early-career talent — a longstanding challenge for the federal government. Through hiring efforts such as OPM’s recently created “Tech Force” initiative, the OPM director said he intends to encourage younger employees to join the federal workforce, at least temporarily.
“This is about as existential a problem as we have in government today — are we convincing younger people to come into government and do government service?” Kupor said. “Then on the other end, do we have the technology skills to be able to advance our nation in the way that, I think, is appropriate?”
Since Trump took office, the share of federal employees under age 30 has declined from about 9% in 2024, to about 8% by the end of 2025, according to OPM’s workforce data. Democrats during the hearing questioned how the administration’s overhauls to the workforce would impact early-career employees’ interest in joining their ranks.
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“In terms of sending a message to those young people you want to recruit, what is that positive message we’re going to send them, in the context of the environment we see in federal employment today?” said Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the subcommittee’s ranking member.
Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) also raised concerns over what he said is a lack of “stability” in federal jobs, considering the mass probationary firings and other removals of federal employees that have occurred since Trump took office. Ivey questioned what type of “signal that sends to young people looking to come into the federal government.”
“If there are going to be parts of the government that are firing people at random, at points when they need stability and they need fair treatment, and their record is going to reflect the fact that they got fired — if that’s what happens, you’re going to undermine the ability to bring in the best talent,” Ivey said.
Kupor pushed back against the lawmakers’ concerns, arguing that job stability is not “the most compelling message” for early-career employees.
“We may disagree on this, but I think what young people want is to build their careers. They want to learn. They want to be surrounded by smart people. They want to be in an environment where they can actually progress and be recognized for that,” Kupor said. “That’s why the early-career push is exactly consistent with our push around performance management culture.”
The OPM director also alluded to the Trump administration’s plans to create a performance management system that “can actually hold people accountable.”
In February, OPM proposed regulations to limit how many federal employees can be rated as high performers, a change that may take effect later this year. During the hearing, Kupor emphasized expediting the government’s process for addressing poor performance — including by removing lower-rated employees as needed.
“What I hope we can do is create a system where it doesn’t take 24 months of litigation for people to actually, truly be removed when they are not performing their jobs,” Kupor said. “If we had a system like that, then I think you can solve the challenges [of] fairness and accountability, without people having to fear the stability question.”
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