Government agencies are facing critical operational risk

Artificial intelligence and automation are valuable tools that can drive more efficient operations, particularly with a reduced workforce.

Government agencies are under immense pressure to maintain reliable, always-on digital services while absorbing significant jobs cuts.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, more than 300,000 U.S. federal employees departed in 2025, and agencies are permitted only one hire for every four departures. This reduction not only negatively impacts their teams’ bandwidth, but it removes much of the operational expertise that keeps those digital services running smoothly. The remaining employees are now responsible for the same systems and processes with a much leaner team and limited institutional knowledge, creating a significant risk of public services becoming inaccessible.

The cross-functional dependencies of an agency’s services mean the blast radius of disruption is much larger than before. When these systems falter, the impact is immediate and public: benefits don’t process, citizens can’t reach services, and trust erodes with every outage. Agencies are challenged with being operationally resilient while managing their growing digital infrastructure, and they need to mitigate the impact of major incidents when they inevitably occur.

Although hiring can’t keep pace with departures, agencies can better mitigate operational risk by addressing existing inefficiencies.

The flaws of manual processes and disparate tools

From benefits to healthcare access, government digital services run around the clock, so it’s imperative to ensure they remain accessible. However, manual processes and fragmented incident management make digital operations especially vulnerable to failure, which can also incur significant financial costs. According to PagerDuty survey data, 50% of the public sector estimate the cost of incidents exceeding $500k per hour.

When an incident occurs, responders often coordinate manually across disconnected tools, slowing down the team’s ability to gather data and create context of the issue.

Artificial intelligence and automation are valuable tools that can drive more efficient operations, particularly with a reduced workforce. Teams can leverage automation for the repetitive work that drains limited bandwidth, allowing more time to be spent toward mission-critical tasks. However, adoption of these tools may be gradual as agencies navigate the challenges in federal procurement and authorization requirements.

In the meantime, their top priority should be getting the operational fundamentals right before they can layer in automation and AI.

Refining operational workflows and frameworks

A strong operations foundation enables teams to centralize institutional knowledge and define processes that are repeatable. This can be achieved by:

• Reducing strain on personnel. Operational risk doesn’t shrink when agencies lose staff. The public’s rising expectations for digital services create an ever-widening gap between what government agencies are expected to deliver, and the realistic capabilities of remaining employees. Agencies can reduce operational strain and dependence on individual responders through coordinated incident management processes that eliminate friction and redundancies.
• Modernizing operations without rip-and-replacing systems. Government agencies operate in complex, layered technology environments built over decades, and replacements of such large platforms are slow, risky and expensive. By connecting fragmented tools and environments, agencies can improve operational resilience and maturity as institutional knowledge is captured and processes mature, all without disturbing the systems their teams already depend on.
• Establishing consistent incident management workflows. Incident management too often depends on whoever happens to be available and the knowledge they carry over from the previous incident. Escalation paths are informal, coordination is scattered across disconnected tools, and critical decisions are left undocumented. Agencies should standardize incident management across teams with shared operational context and coordinated workflows that keep responders aligned, leadership informed, and every action documented.

By establishing strong operational fundamentals, government agencies have a clear path away from reactive, person-dependent response toward a proactive, resilient operating model. With this foundation in place, they can continue to keep critical services running and maintain continuity until they can adopt AI and automation.

Stevenson Jean-Pierre is director of engineering for infrastructure, reliability and FedRAMP at PagerDuty.

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