DC’s shutdown is hurting government tech workers — and everyone else

Kin Lane fondly remembers working on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in 2013. FAFSA is used by millions of college students each year to help access scholarship money, and Lane, an API expert, had an up-close look at the system. He saw the importance of ensuring financial data remains stored securely and can be accessed by Internal Revenue Service tools. The job wasn’t flashy, but it was tangibly meaningful — when his own daughter went to college, he would use FAFSA himself.

Lane wasn’t a veteran employee. He had recently joined the government as a Presidential Innovation Fellow and, in some ways, a skeptic. He was raised questioning government programs that meddle in people’s lives. But after a couple of short months, his perspective had changed. “I’m no longer libertarian because of it,” he says. Working on financial aid, among other systems, gave Lane an appreciation for the impact of public-sector technology. “That process working or not working, the privacy, the security … just equipping the next generation year after year. That kind of bureaucratic machine [is] super important and super critical for my daughter to go to school,” he says.

Ultimately, Lane’s time at the government was cut short when the 2013 shutdown created a financial strain that forced him to leave DC; he currently works in the private sector. But his perspective is widely shared by public servants. The field is notoriously low-paid and slower-paced than the private tech world, with layers of bureaucracy to deal with. The reward is fulfilling a sense of civic duty. But over the past year, the Trump administration has waged a deliberate campaign to drive workers out of the government. Now, the three-week-long federal shutdown is dealing them another blow — and threatens a brain drain that could last for years to come.

For most of 2025, federal workers have been pummeled with Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-induced cuts across their workforce and regularly face threats of further (and likely illegal) reductions in force. The shutdown is forcing what’s left of that workforce to carry on with even fewer workers than were already there. Thousands of workers have been furloughed — with the threat they’ll never get paid for the weeks they were supposed to be employed — and others continue to work without pay. For skilled tech workers who have options in the private sector, that’s making the choice to stay more difficult than ever. For the public, it likely means delays in modernizing government tech ranging from portals that help consumers access government services to ways to access public data — and the risk that when systems break, nobody will be left to fix them.

“It definitely contributes to the perception — the perception and the reality, because it’s an accurate perception — that the government is just a pretty shitty employer, it’s going to treat you badly at all times,” says Mikey Dickerson, who served under Barack Obama as the first administrator of the US Digital Service (USDS), which was later repurposed into DOGE. “You get the same warm, personal-touch customer service as an employee as you do if you’re fighting with the IRS over your refund check.”

The USDS was officially opened after the catastrophic launch and subsequent rescue of Healthcare.gov, which underscored the need for bringing skilled technology talent into the government. Through USDS, technologists would work with agencies across the government to improve a range of systems. Projects the group worked on included making it easier for visa applicants to check their case status online and for veterans to manage healthcare claims and prescription refills.

One of Dickerson’s tougher jobs was luring technologists to work for USDS in the first place. “I don’t have very much to work with to make this sales pitch,” he says. “The 85 percent pay cut is not attractive. The pre-employment drug testing and background check is not attractive. I am not going to be able to replicate the Google work environment.” While he could offer a meeting in the Situation Room or breakfast at the White House mess hall, Dickerson says the novelty of those things tends to wear off over time. “Really all I have to pitch is the notion that you’re going to be joining a group of people, and they’re going to be fun to hang around with, and they’re going to be different from what you’re used to in the Bay Area,” he says. “And they’re trying to serve the public in some altruistic sense.”

The Trump administration and DOGE have painted federal workers as do-nothing bureaucrats. But they maintain systems the average American often takes for granted, except when something goes wrong. Last year, a series of issues with FAFSA delayed schools’ financial aid offers and made it difficult or impossible for non-citizens or their children to fill it out. The result was uncertainty for millions of residents about whether they’d be on the hook for thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars in college fees — which could mean the difference between celebrating an acceptance letter and turning it down.

A contractor for a large federal agency, who was granted anonymity to discuss their work, says they’re worried about important government operations slowing down as the overall federal workforce has been thinned out. “I’m worried as hell about IRS. How are they going to be able to do taxes this coming year with a fraction of the staff?” they say. “I’m worried about the military and them having the morale to be able to do their jobs in the face of maybe not getting their next paycheck. I don’t want air traffic controllers to be worried about how they’re going to pay their mortgage while they’re trying to bring my aircraft in.”

Even private contractors, who have continued working during the shutdown, have felt the squeeze of a diminished workforce. “Half of people are gone and you can’t reach anybody,” the contractor says. “So the way the furlough is affecting tech staff is that the contractors are doing a lot of the work and we don’t have the chance to be directed by our federal counterparts, which slows everything down and is a big fat waste of taxpayer dollars.”

The result is a “self-fulfilling prophecy” of the administration’s guiding narrative that public servants and services are useless, they say. “If you don’t have enough people to do the work, nothing’s getting done. And then they can be like, ‘Look, the government doesn’t get anything done.’” Donald Trump has warned that he’ll use the shutdown to gut what he calls “Democrat programs” from the government, and his administration has already used it to further dismantle the Department of Education, a long-standing goal. “And they’re never going to come back in many cases,” he said of the programs he’d shutter during the standoff.

Decimating the government tech workforce doesn’t just make public services function worse; it undercuts the private sector as well. Lane notes that technologists can gain an understanding of government systems by working directly with them. That could prove useful if they go on to found startups or work in companies that intersect with government-funded programs, like education technology.

For Lane, his experience in the government also changed his whole worldview. “I just saw government isn’t just this evil market force that’s trying to ruin people’s lives. It’s actually the one thing that’s in between you and market forces, especially when you’re a person of color. So it changed me forever, for the good.”

But Lane knows more than most how a shutdown could drain tech talent from the government. Just two months after he moved to Washington in 2013 for his fellowship, the federal shutdown at the time made it impossible for him to make ends meet, and he had to cut his time short. “My parents weren’t supportive of me being there. I don’t have a lot of money. I didn’t have a credit card at the time, so we were literally living paycheck to paycheck in DC,” Lane recalls. “When the shutdown happened, everybody was kind of partying. I was freaked out. I had an Airbnb. I was like two weeks away from being homeless.” Over the years he’s gone on to work on several projects for the government, but from the outside.

Former USDS officials are now trying to help government technologists who might be in a similar position as Lane bridge the gap. Dickerson is part of an informal group that offered personal loans to the agency’s alumni network to help former USDS workers in government roles weather the shutdown. They offered two to three months of net take-home pay, and figured they’d see how many they could lend to based on interest. So far a “handful” of people have taken them up, Dickerson says.

He recognizes it’s a risk that he might not get paid back should these workers be denied back pay. The Trump administration has reportedly been hatching a plan to withhold the pay that up to 750,000 furloughed workers would typically receive after a shutdown ends. But while Dickerson believes USDS was ripe for change even prior to DOGE’s takeover, he says he still feels an obligation to make sure his successors feel they joined something valuable, even years after he left.

Dickerson continues to advocate for a version of USDS to be “resurrected,” though he says it doesn’t need to be identical to the past. “Why still keep the dream alive? It’s because if we want to assume for a second that in five years or 10 years there will exist a US president, an administration that wants the government to be competent at doing anything at all, then there’s going to be an even bigger hole to dig out of,” he says. “We’re going to need these same people again, and they’re going to need to be willing to come back together and work together again. And the only thing I can do right now from a position of no power is encourage them to feel like the universe still cares about them in some way.”