The Transportation Department, tasked with spending the better part of $1 trillion from last year’s infrastructure law, needs more than 1,000 new employees to carry it out. Trouble is, the agency is struggling just to maintain the size of its workforce.
“Right now, America is undertaking one of the biggest investments in transportation infrastructure in our history and that means we’re hiring,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an April video as he walked between rows of desks. “We need to recruit a new generation of public servants.”
The department, seeking to deliver on one of President Joe Biden’s signature achievements, has nearly 400 fewer employees than the month the president took office, a Bloomberg Government analysis of the agency’s most recently available data shows. Its agencies that oversee aviation and highways have fewer employees than in January 2021, and the department has only slightly improved its workforce diversity, a goal for Buttigieg.
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The tight labor market and mounting retirements across the federal government have strained agencies that require hundreds of personnel, analysts, and managers to deploy the spending from the infrastructure package (Public Law 117-58), enacted in November. Transportation Department officials have said publicly that they...
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