The Trump administration quietly marked the country’s 250th anniversary by quietly declaring independence from the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting project that wreaked havoc across the federal government during President Donald Trump’s first months back in office last year.
The Department of Government Efficiency officially blinked out of existence Saturday in accordance with the executive order that mandated it would “terminate” on July 4, 2026.
It leaves in its wake an estimated $11 billion hole in the federal budget paid to workers who accepted the Musk-authored “Fork in the Road” offer to do nothing for nine months before officially resigning while being paid full salaries and benefits during that period, plus a gutted U.S. Agency for International Development that has left key foreign aid programs shuttered and contributed to the deaths of millions across the globe.
But the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who left voluntarily or were fired during Musk’s rampage through the federal workforce may be collecting taxpayer-funded paychecks once again before long.
According to NOTUS, multiple agencies that saw their employee rolls slashed in the first months of Trump’s second term are staffing up once more.
One such agency is the National Endowment for the Humanities, which recently began contacting former employees to invite them to interview for positions that are now being filled and are posted on the government’s USA Jobs website.
Over the first five months of this year, the Office of Personnel Management-run site had more than 104,000 new positions listed for hiring. That’s nearly 40,000 more than the 68,900 that were listed during the last five months of 2025.
Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor told NOTUS that his agency is overseeing a “reshaping” of the federal workforce — with Musk’s stated goal of slashing hundreds of thousands from the federal payroll in the name of so-called “efficiency” no longer on his radar.
“Do we have the right headcount for the priorities of the administration? And where we don’t, let’s make sure we go figure out how to fill those gaps,” he said.
The federal hiring spree marks a stunning turnaround from Musk’s heyday as an unpaid “Special Government Employee” with a broad mandate to rampage through almost any agency in search of what he deemed to be “waste” or “wokeness.”
He spent months during Trump’s first year back in power working out of a suite of offices in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, often sitting in on Trump’s cabinet meetings and infamously wielding what he called the “Chainsaw for Bureaucracy” during a shambolic appearance at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
But Musk, who would temporarily fall out of favor with Trump, clashed with cabinet secretaries who resisted his plans to cut payrolls without their involvement.
Many of the same departments that touted their massive reductions in force last year are quietly reversing the cuts.
The Office of Personnel Management has given the Internal Revenue Service special authority to hire as many as 8,000 workers on a fast-track basis after slashing a quarter of its workforce under DOGE. The State Department is once again hiring and training new Foreign Service Officers after slashing hundreds of its more experienced diplomatic hands.
And while previous rounds of mass firings under other administrations led to those workers being replaced with contractors, Kupor told NOTUS that the administration wants agencies to bring on new full-time employees rather than outsource.
“We’re very supportive of that activity,” he said.
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