The Austin IRS campus is one of the agency’s largest, and the South Texas border is one of the busiest stretches of federal hiring in the country. So when an analysis of federal workforce data found that three agencies were adding jobs while the rest of government shrank, Texas turned out to be near the center of it — not because of anything unique to the state, but because the agencies doing the hiring all have a heavy Texas presence.
An aggregation of Office of Personnel Management workforce data, covering fiscal year 2023 through early 2025, found that three agencies added roughly 14,000 positions during a period when the broader executive-branch payroll was contracting. Here is what the data shows, why Texas figures so prominently, and the important caveats the numbers come with.
The three agencies that grew
The growth concentrated at the Veterans Health Administration, Customs and Border Protection, and the Internal Revenue Service — each driven by a specific law Congress passed with public votes, not by any quiet maneuver. The figure is reproducible from public data: OPM maintains monthly workforce snapshots through its Enterprise Human Resources Integration system, downloadable from OPM’s data portal, and comparing successive files reveals which agencies gained or lost staff.
One honest caveat up front: the roughly 14,000 figure is the product of independent aggregation of those monthly snapshots, not an official count published by any single federal agency. The underlying data is public and the math is reproducible, but no government office has packaged the combined growth into one report — part of why it drew so little attention.
Why each agency hired — and the Texas connection
The Veterans Health Administration expanded to meet a congressional mandate. The PACT Act of 2022 extended health-care eligibility to roughly 3.5 million veterans exposed to toxic substances such as burn-pit smoke, according to Department of Veterans Affairs estimates, and required the VHA to hire clinical and support staff faster than attrition. Texas is home to one of the largest veteran populations in the country and to major VA medical centers in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Temple, and the Rio Grande Valley, so much of that clinical hiring landed in the state.
Customs and Border Protection grew under successive appropriations bills that funded officers, processing coordinators, and asylum officers to handle record migration volumes at the southern border in 2023 and 2024. The Texas-Mexico border is the longest of any state, which puts a large share of CBP’s frontline hiring on Texas soil.
The Internal Revenue Service staffed up under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which originally allocated $80 billion over a decade to modernize enforcement, taxpayer services, and IT. Congress later clawed back roughly $20 billion of that funding, but the agency still moved forward with a multiyear hiring ramp aimed at replacing an aging workforce and cutting phone wait times. The IRS runs one of its largest processing operations in Austin, anchoring the Texas piece of that growth.
Putting 14,000 in perspective
The number is real but modest relative to the size of these agencies. The VHA alone employs more than 370,000 people, making it the country’s largest health system; CBP has about 65,000 employees; and the IRS, before its recent push, had shrunk to staffing levels not seen since the 1970s. Former IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel told Congress in 2023 that the agency needed roughly 30,000 hires over several years just to offset retirements and restore basic service. By that yardstick, 14,000 across all three agencies is a fraction of what each said it needed.
Why the numbers are hard to pin down
Federal workforce statistics come in two forms that don’t always agree. OPM’s files count individuals on the rolls. The Office of Management and Budget’s historical tables track full-time-equivalent employees, converting part-time and seasonal work into standardized units. A Congressional Research Service report, R43590, explains how an agency can show flat FTEs while its headcount rises — for instance, by converting temporary or contractor roles into permanent positions.
That measurement gap matters here, and it means some of the apparent growth may reflect conversions rather than entirely new hires. OPM’s personnel-action codes would show that breakdown at the individual record level, but no aggregated public report has confirmed it for these three agencies.
The broader contrast
The growth stands out because it ran against the tide. Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 228,000 in March 2025, one of several strong readings that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even as federal-government payrolls declined over the same stretch. A growing private sector alongside a contracting federal workforce made selective expansion at three agencies more conspicuous, not less.
The cost question deserves emphasis because it’s the one Texas taxpayers care about most. Adding 14,000 positions carries salary, benefits, and overhead that vary widely by grade and duty station — a senior VA physician in Houston and an entry-level processing clerk in Austin represent very different line items. Neither OPM nor OMB has published a consolidated cost estimate tied to this specific growth, which means anyone claiming a precise dollar figure for “what the hiring cost” is extrapolating. What can be said responsibly is that the positions were funded by laws Congress passed and appropriated for — the PACT Act, border appropriations, and the Inflation Reduction Act — so the spending was authorized, even if no single office has totaled it up for the public.
What the data can’t tell you
Workforce files are descriptive. They record how many people were on the rolls, in which jobs, and at which duty stations — not the deliberations or tradeoffs behind the decisions. Several questions remain open as of mid-2026: the conversions-versus-new-hires breakdown, the consolidated cost to taxpayers (neither OPM nor OMB has published one tied to this specific growth), and how many of the 14,000 positions survived the reduction-in-force actions that swept multiple agencies in 2025.
As Max Stier of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service put it, the issue is less that the agencies hired and more that no one in government connected the dots for the public: simultaneous hiring and firing across the executive branch, with no single office explaining the overall strategy.
Austin, the Rio Grande Valley, and the VA hospitals: where the 14,000 landed
For Texans, the practical picture has two halves. Half of the roughly 14,000 positions trace to work concentrated in this state: VA clinicians hired under the PACT Act at hospitals in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Temple, and the Rio Grande Valley; CBP officers and processing staff along the Texas-Mexico border; and IRS employees added to the Austin processing campus under the Inflation Reduction Act ramp. Those are real jobs supporting real local economies, not an abstraction in a spreadsheet.
The other half of the picture is exposure. The same three agencies that hired are the ones most likely to show up in the next round of reduction-in-force notices, because RIFs tend to target recent additions before they target tenured staff. Anyone who wants to check the underlying math can: OPM’s monthly files are free to download, and the 14,000 figure can be reproduced with a spreadsheet and some patience. What’s still missing, even now, is any single federal office that has explained why the hiring and the cuts were allowed to run at the same time.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
