Federal Employees 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 can be parsed by agency, a combination of agencies, or a specific occupation code. For each year, we provide the number of employees, average salaries, average length of service, the distribution of employees by age group, and an estimate of the proportion of the workforce eligible for retirement in September of that year. To better understand the major period of cuts to the federal workforce throughout early 2025, we elected to use the November 2025 data release. We excluded the average salary from the 2025 data due to a large proportion of redacted values.
The second visualization shows a map view that reveals the broad distribution of these federal employees in every state in September of 2024. California, Maryland, and Virginia lead the way with over 50,000 employees in physical science and engineering jobs. An additional 120,000 colleagues are employed in the remaining 47 states, US territories, and other countries. Due to redaction changes in OPM’s recent data releases, we cannot update this graphic. There are now widespread redactions in certain data fields, including the locations of federal employees. In the September 2024 release, less than 3% of federal employees in the physical sciences and engineering had their locations redacted in the dataset; by November 2025, this had increased to about 65%.
We created a second set of dashboards, focused on appointment types and agencies involved with physical science research, is accessible here .
The above visualizations 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.
