Exploring Potential Changes to the Federal Workforce in the Physical Sciences and Engineering
(Last Updated: March 2026)
The public sector is a major employer of physical science and engineering professionals. As part of the 2025 AIP Research Agenda , we focused on understanding and exploring changes in the civilian federal physical science and engineering workforce. We present interactive dashboards that focus on the federal workforce using data from the US Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) FedScope.
The visualization above outlines the types of appointments under which federal employees in the physical sciences and engineering serve and showcases the largest agencies that employ individuals in these two broad job fields. Hovering over the bars in the graph will display additional details, including the number of employees, length of service distribution, and the number of those with less than one year of service. The views can be filtered by agencies or individual job titles within the physical science and engineering fields.
The second visualization displays the total number of employees at each federal agency that oversees research in the physical sciences. The agencies listed by default closely mirror those agencies covered by AIP’s FYI team. Additionally, we have selected several sub-level agencies to highlight.
By selecting one of the agency names from the left of either dashboard, the views will change to display each sub-level agency associated with the selected agency for that dashboard. Users can add agencies to both visualizations.
We created another set of dashboards focused on employee locations and longitudinal characteristics,they are accessible here .
These numbers do not include employees of federally-funded research and development centers (FFRDCs). The National Science Foundation (NSF) maintains the master list of FFRDCs . The National Laboratory Directors’ Council reported more than 80,000 total staff at 17 national labs funded by the Department of Energy as of July 31, 2024. One of the DOE labs (National Energy Technology Lab ) is not an FFRDC, so their employees are included in this dataset.
