U.S. Digital Corps graduates largest class of fellows yet
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“This government has starved for talent,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said during graduation remarks.
The General Services Administration on Wednesday celebrated the graduation of 71 U.S. Digital Corps fellows, marking the largest graduating class since the program’s inception. Those graduates updated the FedRAMP website, helped streamline Agriculture Department environmental reviews and supported other technology projects during their stints in the federal government.
“This government has starved for talent, for people who understand how to do all the things that we want to do to deliver better,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said during graduation remarks.
Some of the graduates of the two-year fellowship program are continuing civil service while others are headed to the private sector.
“For talented technologists like you, there's going to be a lot of paths … but if you want my take, public service is pretty damn great,” GSA Administrator Edward Forst also said during the graduation event.
Following remarks from Forst and Kupor, several U.S. Digital Corps graduates presented slideshows explaining work they did for federal agencies.
One team of three fellows spent their time in the program updating FedRAMP.gov with exact keyword search, the ability to search by clarification and other new features after running feedback sessions with users. The team estimated that the redesign boosted engaged sessions per user by 180%, average engagement time by 10% and views per active user by 28%, according to their PowerPoint presentation.
“Outside of these numbers, though, they represent agency IT teams spending more time finding the right solution for cloud service providers as decisions for documentation they need. This creates better informed decisions across the federal government,” said one of the graduates. The fellows working on FedRAMP.gov also consolidated two older marketplace websites into one.
Other fellows shared how they led a Health Resources and Services Administration project to create an organ transplant-related dashboard and modernized a National Institutes of Health website often used by academics by moving it to the cloud and updating its search engine.
The U.S. Digital Corps launched in August 2021 and had its first cohort of fellows in June 2022, placing early career technologists across numerous federal agencies. But the two-year fellowship is just one of several initiatives the federal government has recently launched to attract young talent.
The Trump administration in December started the U.S. Tech Force, which aims to hire 1,000 early career technologists to work for two-year stints in federal service with the controversial help of private sector companies. The program has a Defense Department-specific recruiting initiative known as the War Force.
The administration’s hiring push comes after nearly 20,000 technology employees left their roles in 2025, according to OPM data.