OPM Announces New Tech Force Partners

Why It Matters

The Tech Force expansion signals a major push to modernize federal IT capacity by leveraging private-sector talent, affecting hiring and retention across agencies; the SSA allegations raise serious legal and civil‑rights risks and could prompt oversight, investigations, and policy changes around data governance and immigration enforcement.

Summary

The Office of Personnel Management expanded its Tech Force hiring program by adding industry partners including Cisco, Scale AI, Cognizant and others to bolster training, temporary detailees and pipelines between private sector engineers and government. Tech Force, launched six months ago to recruit 1,000 early-career technologists for two-year terms, has so far made roughly 200 hires and is beginning to place industry nominees into federal roles. Separately, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal pressed the Social Security Administration for answers after a whistleblower alleged that former DHS and SSA political appointees discussed a plan to mark 2.7 million living people as deceased in SSA systems to facilitate deportations. The senators requested details on who had access to SSA databases, whether data were removed, and how much of the alleged “kill off” scheme was implemented.

Original Description

The federal government’s human capital arm added several new industry partners to its Tech Force hiring effort Monday as the program begins to take root in agencies. The new batch of companies is Cisco, Scale AI, Wiz, Arista Networks, Armada, Cognition AI, Cognizant, Payward, and Moveworks, per a release from the Office of Personnel Management. They join a cohort of a couple dozen companies that are already part of the program’s industry support, including OpenAI, Google Public Sector, xAI, and Palantir. “These partnerships bring world-class engineering expertise into public service and create a stronger pipeline between industry and government at a moment when modernizing federal technology has never been more important,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a written statement Monday.

Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal want answers from the Social Security Administration chief following a whistleblower complaint that revealed a DOGE plan to target undocumented immigrants by moving 2.7 million living people to the agency’s Death Master File. In letters sent Friday to SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano and three DOGE alums — Antonio Gracias, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling — the lawmakers shared the protected disclosure of a former career SSA official, Jeremiah Schofield, who spent more than 25 years at the agency. Schofield, an expert in the process by which the SSA assigns Social Security numbers and cards, was called to meetings with the three DOGE representatives and other career agency staff to discuss potential fraud and the Numident system, which includes all information applicants must disclose for a Social Security card.

Links

• Cisco, Scale AI among new batch of Tech Force partners via FedScoop: https://fedscoop.com/cisco-scale-ai-among-new-batch-of-tech-force-partners/

• Democrats push SSA on reported DOGE plan to ‘kill off’ living individuals in database via FedScoop: https://fedscoop.com/social-security-whistleblower-doge-death-master-file/

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