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After firing much of its staff, the Office of Personal Management, under Elon Musk’s effective control since late January, has handed out a no bid contract to cloud-AI-based HR company Workday to help handle the mountain of terminations, retirements and layoffs built up over the first three months of the Trump administration. OPM stated in justification for the sole-source, no-bid contract that “an urgent confluence of operational failures and binding federal mandates that require immediate action.”
Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach has reportedly been making the rounds of Washington DC since the first days of the Trump administration. After an earnings call in late February he pointed to DOGE’s work as a source of many new opportunities for growth. “As we think about DOGE and what that could potentially do going forward …” Eschenbach said, “If you want to drive efficiency in the government, you have to upgrade your systems and we find that as a really rich opportunity.”
Workday was founded in 2005 and became a public company in 2012. The contract itself isn’t especially large, $342k for one year. OPM says it will put the contract out for competitive bidding at the end of the one year contract. Hiring Workday is part of the global DOGE strategy of firing federal civil servants and replacing them with contractors from the tech sector. In February Goldman Sachs upped its price target for Workday from $310 to $345 before lowering it in April to $275.
