The Trump administration is blurring the public and private sector workforce, and OPM director Scott Kupor won’t rule out conflict of interest risks

President Donald Trump’s second-term appointments set a record for the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history, an early indication Trump had no problem welcoming business magnates into his inner political circle. Those individuals included Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with a net worth of $805 billion, to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), as well as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, longtime CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

With Trump himself a real estate developer with deep ties to cryptocurrencies, it’s perhaps not a surprise that among the priorities for building the government workforce would be to create more opportunities for private sector workers, as well as to create a more permeable barrier between the two sectors. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor—the former managing partner at venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz before joining the Trump administration in 2025—has been tasked with carrying that out. 

“One of the things that I’m hoping to do a better job on is getting people from the private sector—who’ve been in the private sector their whole career—who also spend a couple years in government at some point in their career, and learn something,” Kupor told Fortune.

Tightening private sector ties

Kupor has helped create a number of initiatives to welcome private sector workers into the government. In December of last year, OPM launched the U.S. Tech Force, an initiative hiring 1,000 engineers and specialists meant to improve AI infrastructure in the government. The program is in “collaboration with leading technology companies,” according to the government website, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Palantir, OpenAI, and Oracle, among others.

After two years of participation in the program, Tech Force members can apply for full-time jobs with these companies, which have committed to weighing employment for those who completed the initiative. These companies can similarly nominate their own employees to complete the program.

OPM brought back Amanda Scales, former OPM chief of staff and DOGE leader, who was previously the head of talent acquisition at Musk’s xAI, to help scale the U.S. Tech Force.

Kupor said he wants these opportunities to serve government roles to be effectively a way to dip one’s toes into public sector work without committing to a multi-decade career. He similarly wants federal workers to explore the private sector for a few years and decide if they want to rejoin the federal workforce.

“Maybe I’m just old fashioned,” he said. “But I think people having diversity of experience between the public and private sector is mutually beneficial to both organizations.”

Transforming the federal workforce

The recruitment efforts are perhaps a tone shift from the first year of Trump’s second term, in which the federal government shed 386,826 workers, including about 17,000 from reductions in force and thousands more who resigned or retired, largely a result of DOGE’s efforts to slash government headcount to trim the federal budget. Thousands of those employees were also probationary, holding their position for less than one year. 

About 122,000 employees also joined the federal workforce in the space between January 2025 to January 2026, but it was a 55% decrease from the number of new hires in 2024, resulting in a net reduction of 264,000 employees in 2025.

Though DOGE was dissolved as a centralized entity in late 2025, federal workers told Fortune DOGE personnel are still active in individual agencies, and the mass firings and resignations have disrupted day-to-day workflow and in some cases burdened remaining employees with greater workloads.

Kupor said he sees the simultaneous hiring and firing as a reprioritization of filling workforce gaps rather than simply cutting. This week, OPM launched the Early Career Talent Network, a recruitment pipeline for entry-level workers to join the federal payroll working jobs in finances, human resources, engineering, product management, or procurement.

Among Kupor’s concerns with the government workforce is its older skew, with half of workers within 10 years of retirement age, he noted. Meanwhile, only 7% of the federal workforce is made up of entry-level workers compared to more than 20% in the broader U.S. workforce, according to OPM.

“If you just did nothing else, you’ve got this major demographic challenge of a large number of people who will likely either retire or certainly be retirement-eligible over the near term, without us actually replenishing the pipeline of early-career people coming in,” Kupor said.

Conflict of interest realities

The ample ties between the Trump administration and the private sector have raised concerns of conflicts of interest, and Kupor said he would not “dismiss” those risks. Rather, in some cases, it is one the administration is willing to take.

“We have not done a good job in government—which I hope we do better—is we’ve got to balance potential risks with potential upside,” he said. “In some cases, we think, okay, if there is some modicum of risk, therefore we just ignore whether there’s upside potential. And not in all cases, but I think in many cases, the upside potential of having people with different backgrounds and different experiences is, I think, really important.”

The administration has come under scrutiny over conflicts of interest. Public Citizen has identified 137 Trump appointees with prior private sector ties, including some in industries they have been tasked with regulating. The president’s own close ties with the private sector have caused some experts to sound the alarms. Last July, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, a bill (which stands for Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins) establishing rules for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar. As of March 2025, $1.8 billion of Trump’s net worth came from crypto-related entities.

(Federal laws prohibit government employees from participating in official decision that would directly impact their own financial interests or the interests of their families or commercial partners.)

“It’s a really big problem that the president has an indirect financial relationship with a stablecoin issuer,” Todd Phillips, a banking and administrative law professor at Georgia State University, told Fortune at the time. “That stablecoin issuer may go to the OCC asking for a license, and if the OCC doesn’t give it to them, the president can fire the comptroller.”

Kupor, for his part, said OPM would put up guardrails to mitigate conflicts of interest in the U.S. Tech Force. OPM would not, for example, put a former private sector employee in the position to make a procurement decision.

“It’s worth at least thinking through those problems and taking some modicum of risk, as long as we feel like we can contain it.” he said. “The upside opportunities are very great for the organization.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com