OPM Vetted 35,000 to Place 250. The Tech Force Off-Ramp Opens in 2028.

Federal News Network reported in mid-June that OPM has now hired roughly 250 Tech Force candidates and onboarded 100 of the targeted 1,000-person cohort, with DoD prepping a spinoff tentatively called "War Force." Most of the coverage frames this as a federal HR story. For sourcers, it is something else entirely: a pre-screened pool of technical talent on an explicit two-year clock, sponsored by a roster of named industry partners that already includes AWS, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Anduril, Nvidia, Oracle, ServiceNow, and Adobe.

The earliest fellows onboarded in spring 2026. That means the first off-ramp wave hits spring 2028. If you start mapping the cohort now, you own the relationship 18 months before any of your competitors notice it exists.

The funnel is the gift

OPM Director Scott Kupor said more than 35,000 people expressed initial interest in Tech Force. Just under 10,000 submitted full applications. From that pool, roughly 700 made it onto shared certificates after passing a technical assessment, a resume review, and a screening interview. As of the June reporting, about 250 have been hired and 100 onboarded.

Every layer of that funnel is sourceable.

35,000

The 9,750 who applied but did not land are the most underrated talent pool in federal-adjacent recruiting right now. They have already been vetted for intent. They wrote a resume optimized for a technical fellowship at salaries of $130,000 to $195,000. They were willing to take a two-year role in DC. Most of them are still at their day jobs and almost none of them are on a recruiter's saved-search list.

The ~700 who made it to shared certificates are even cleaner. OPM's own language: candidates on the shared certificates "have already passed three rounds of hiring evaluations, including a technical assessment, a resume review and a screening interview." That is a pre-screen most in-house teams cannot run in volume. The federal government just ran it for you, on tens of thousands of engineers, for free.

Why the precedent matters

The historical comparison most sourcers reach for is U.S. Digital Service or 18F. That is the right instinct, but the scale is wrong by an order of magnitude. Search comparable titles like "Digital Service Expert" or "Presidential Innovation Fellow" and you will find roughly 23 US-based profiles in normal indexes. Tech Force is targeting 1,000. Even at the current pace, the public alumni list at the end of 2027 will be 10x anything that came before it, and OPM has actively encouraged fellows to publicize the role on LinkedIn from day one. "U.S. Tech Force" is a discrete, searchable employer string. Most federal stints are not.

The Trump administration eliminated 18F and reshaped USDS into the U.S. DOGE Service, which means the prior generation of federal technologists is already on the market. They are the dress rehearsal. Watch where they landed, and you have a heat map for where Tech Force alumni will land in 2028.

The 35 named partners are the real map

The founding partner roster is the most important document in this story and it is hiding in plain sight. The list: Adobe, AWS, Anduril, Apple, Box, C3 AI, Coinbase, Databricks, Dell, Docusign, Google Public Sector, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, Palantir, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, Robinhood, Uber, Workday, xAI, Zoom, and NobleReach Foundation. June 2026 added Cisco, Scale AI, Wiz, Arista Networks, Armada, Cognition AI, Cognizant, Payward, and Moveworks.

Kupor has been clear that partners "have not made firm agreements to hire program alumni but can do so in line with their needs." Read that carefully. It is not a job guarantee. It is a designed off-ramp. Built-in reporting confirms participants "can pursue employment opportunities with the private-sector partners, continue in the government or leverage their experience elsewhere." The private-sector exit is the company's own framing, not journalist speculation.

The federal government just pre-screened 10,000 engineers for you and named the 35 companies most likely to hire them in 2028. </pull> If you recruit for any of those 35 companies, the alumni list is your warm pipeline. If you recruit against them, it is your competitive map. ### Anduril, Palantir, Scale AI, Armada These four deserve their own line. They are the partners with the clearest commercial appetite for cleared or defense-adjacent talent, and they are exactly the partners most likely to absorb the DoD "War Force" spinoff alumni. DoD lost over 61,000 employees in 2025, about 8% of its total workforce, including 3,500 IT employees. The Pentagon is not building War Force to replace those people permanently. It is building it to plug a two-year hole with industry-friendly profiles who will rotate back out with active clearances and defense-program exposure. That profile (cleared, defense-program experience, named-program credibility, willing to relocate) is the single most expensive sourcing target in commercial tech. If you are working a req at Anduril, Palantir, or Scale AI in 2028, the War Force alumni list will be the highest-yield source you have ever touched. This is also where most sourcing tools fall over. Sourcing cleared engineers usually means hand-stitching LinkedIn, GitHub, ClearanceJobs, and the open web together, then guessing at clearance status. [Refolk](/) lets you describe the person in plain English ("ex-Tech Force fellow who rotated through DoD, now 6+ months out, defense-adjacent infra experience") and get a ranked shortlist across all of those surfaces at once. The named-program string is the unlock.

refolk prompt: Find engineers whose LinkedIn lists "U.S. Tech Force" or "NASA Force" as a current or past employer, prioritizing infra and ML backgrounds with prior FAANG or defense-tech experience. note: You get a ranked shortlist of the cohort as it grows, refreshed as fellows publicize their roles and start showing alumni signals on GitHub and the open web. slug: z7mdqfj18z

## The two-year clock is staggered

Most recruiters reading the June news will mentally bookmark "2028 cliff" and move on. That is wrong. There is no cliff.

First hires onboarded in spring 2026. Tech Force Director Kevin Hennecken told GovExec the goal is 300 to 500 fellows by end of summer 2026, with the rest of the 1,000-person cohort filling through 2027. Run the math forward and the off-ramp is a rolling 18-month wave from spring 2028 through late 2029, not a single date.

```stat
number: 18 months
label: rolling off-ramp window, spring 2028 through late 2029
note: Tech Force fellows are on staggered two-year terms, so the alumni wave is continuous, not a cliff.
</stat>

That matters for two reasons. First, you cannot wait until 2028 to start the relationship. By the time the first fellow's term ends, the next 11 quarters of off-ramps are already in motion. Second, your pipeline tracking has to be continuous. A static list pulled in Q1 2028 will be stale by Q3.

This is the kind of problem that breaks Boolean search. The query is not "title X at company Y." It is "person who was at Tech Force, whose term is ending in the next 6 months, whose pre-fellowship background matches my req." That is a temporal query against a moving cohort. It is the exact use case for ranking candidates with [Refolk](/) instead of grepping LinkedIn.

## The reverse-loan population is sleeping

Here is the detail almost nobody is tracking. Tech Force has set up a reverse-secondment program where management-level workers come *from* industry partners *into* government, on unpaid leave, with retained-but-unvested RSUs. The arrangement got specific signoff from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Roughly 15-plus senior ICs and managers from named partners are on this track. Their return dates are knowable. Their pre-secondment employer is named in the public reporting. Their RSU vesting schedules anchor their return. If you build a list of these people now, you have a list of senior, soon-to-be-returning operators with fresh federal exposure and intact equity.

This is the most overlooked sub-pool in the entire program. They are not federal hires looking to exit. They are private-sector veterans on a known return clock. For executive search, this is gold.

## NobleReach, NASA Force, and the warm-handoff sub-pools

Two sub-pools deserve their own search strings.

**NobleReach Foundation** has connected nearly 50 recent STEM and business graduates to yearlong public service roles at eight federal agencies and 10 state and local partners. NobleReach Scholars are the warmest handoff inside Tech Force. They are younger, they came in through a named program with its own alumni network, and they are over-indexed on STEM credentials.

**NASA Force** is a dedicated sub-program OPM launched within the larger Tech Force to place fellows at the space agency. It is a discrete search string and the candidates skew toward aerospace, simulation, and ML-for-physics profiles. If you recruit for SpaceX, Anduril Space, Varda, or anyone touching aerospace primes, NASA Force is its own pipeline.

Both are searchable as distinct employer strings on LinkedIn. Both are small enough today that a manual list is feasible. Neither will stay small.

## What to do in the next 90 days

Three concrete moves.

**1. Build the application-rejected list now.** The ~9,750 applicants who did not make it onto a shared certificate are the most underrated cohort in this whole story. They self-identified as wanting mission work, they wrote a federal-friendly resume in 2025 or 2026, and they were not selected, often for reasons that have nothing to do with technical quality (the program is heavily quota-constrained by agency demand). Use Tech Force as a search facet, layer in your usual technical filters, and you have a fresh pool that no in-house team is working yet.

**2. Map the 35 partner companies for reverse-secondment loaners.** Pull the named industry-loan population. Anchor on RSU vesting cliffs at the partner companies (most are 4-year monthly cliffs after a 1-year). The return dates are not secret. Anduril, Palantir, and Scale AI are the highest-value targets here.

**3. Set a saved search for "U.S. Tech Force" and "NASA Force" as employer strings.** Refresh weekly. The cohort is publicizing the role on purpose. The first 250 hires are already on LinkedIn. The next 750 will be by end of 2027. Two-year fellowship recruiting is fundamentally a tracking problem, and the tooling exists. We built [Refolk](/) for exactly this shape of query: plain-English description, ranked shortlist across GitHub, LinkedIn, and the open web, updated as the cohort grows.

Federal tech hiring 2026 is going to look like a sideshow next to AI labs and defense tech. The recruiters who treat it that way will be paying retained-search rates in 2028 for people they could have warm-introduced in 2026.

## FAQ

### Are Tech Force fellows actually allowed to take private-sector jobs after their term?

Yes, and the program is designed for it. Multiple primary sources, including OPM's own statements and the partner agreement language, frame the off-ramp to industry as an explicit feature. Partners have not made firm hiring commitments, but the founding-partner job-fair structure and the public framing of "pursue employment opportunities with the private-sector partners" make clear that exit to industry is anticipated, not penalized. Standard federal post-employment ethics rules apply but do not block the move.

### How do I tell which fellows have clearances?

You usually cannot, directly. But War Force, the DoD spinoff, will produce a cleared sub-cohort by design, and fellows rotating through DoD, State, or DHS placements will typically pick up at least a Secret-level clearance during their term. The signal to watch is agency placement plus role description. Sourcing cleared engineers from this pool will be easier than from most federal sources because the program encourages public role disclosure, and clearance-relevant assignments are often named in fellows' own LinkedIn descriptions.

### What's the salary band, and how does it affect compete offers in 2028?

Tech Force salaries run roughly $130,000 to $195,000. That is competitive for senior federal work but well below private-sector total comp at the named partners, especially at AI labs. For Tech Force private sector partners like xAI, OpenAI, Anduril, and Scale AI, the comp delta on exit will be 2x to 4x for senior fellows. That is the leverage point for any recruiter working alumni in 2028. The fellows are not staying for the money. They are leaving for it.

### Should I treat the rejected-applicant pool the same as the hired cohort?

Different plays. The hired cohort is a relationship build for 2028, low urgency, high value, and worth investing in early because the alumni network will be tight. The 9,750 rejected applicants are a sourcing play for *right now*. They are still at their day jobs, they were vetted enough to apply, and most are unhappy enough with their current role to have considered a two-year federal pay cut. Different timelines, different messages, same underlying signal: people who raised their hand for mission-driven technical work in 2025 and 2026.