October 26, 2026
Any credible assessment of the federal workforce must begin with the convergence of two demographic pressures: retirement eligibility and a narrowing early-career pipeline. Today, 13.5% of federal employees are eligible to retire, while the share of employees under age 30 declined between 2024 and 2025. At the same time, agencies are being directed to develop detailed hiring forecasts that prioritize early-career talent this fall. These are not separate workforce challenges; they are mutually reinforcing pressures on institutional capacity, succession, and service continuity.
Taken together, this is less a standalone retirement story and more a shift in where experience sits across the federal workforce. It raises real questions about continuity, claims exposure, and support for employees at every stage of their federal careers. How agencies prepare for this shift, and who they lean on to support their people through it, will shape how smoothly the transition happens.
What Experience Means for Federal Agencies
Behind every federal agency is a team of supervisors, HR specialists, safety professionals, and internal and external claims handlers who know the logistics that keep the organization moving. This kind of knowledge takes years to build, and with around 40% of federal employees 50 or older as of January 2026, much of it sits with employees who are moving toward the end of their careers. This gap between older and younger workers can also contribute to challenges in knowledge transfer, especially as this experience often isn’t easily sourced from a manual for newer team members to pull from.
Between the most experienced employees and the newest entrants sits the federal workforce’s critical middle layer: mid-career supervisors and program managers who convert institutional knowledge into repeatable practice. They supervise new staff, manage operational handoffs, and translate decades of experience into actionable guidance. In an increasingly complex claims environment, that function is already demanding. As fewer early-career employees enter and more senior personnel approach retirement, mid-career staff is left to absorb both additional workload and the mentoring responsibilities previously distributed across a deeper bench. The resulting risk is a detrimental combination of both individual burnout and the erosion of the connective capacity that agencies rely on to sustain performance, compliance, and continuity.
Where Strain Shows Up First
A few examples show how the middle can be stretched thin. First, is a bandwidth and information consideration. An experienced HR supervisor, or similar role, could retire, taking years of knowledge about how injury, leave, workers’ compensation, or other related questions need to be handled. Or an employee is injured or falls ill, and their supervisor and HR team have to get the paperwork filed, care coordinated, and a return-to-work plan together. In a workforce where a larger portion of employees are later in their careers, both are everyday realities and leave thinner, less experienced teams to absorb the constant work in between.
The second consideration is scale. In FY 2025, more than 79,000 new Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA) cases were reported; during the corresponding chargeback year, the program paid $3.13 billion in benefits to more than 173,000 workers and survivors. Each case depends on agency personnel to assemble documentation, coordinate across functions, monitor recovery, and support return-to-work activity. When experienced staff retire or take extended medical leave, the loss of embedded expertise can slow decisions, delay access to care, allow a manageable claim to become a prolonged case, and potentially drive up the cost of the case. At this scale, workforce continuity becomes a program-performance and cost-management issue, as well as an administrative concern
Meanwhile, newer members of the team may be forced to take on heavier workloads with lighter guidance than those who came before. This could lead to sustained strain which surfaces such as fatigue, delayed injury reporting, burnout, longer recoveries, and overall, more mistakes. This makes a timely, well-coordinated return to work all the more important.
Keeping the Middle Supported
Agencies can mitigate this risk by planning early and aligning internal capabilities with an experienced third-party administrator such as Sedgwick Government Solutions (SGS) where the objective is not to displace agency expertise, but to institutionalize and extend it. When staffing is constrained, a qualified partner can provide surge capacity, standardized workflows, specialized claims expertise, and operational continuity, reducing dependence on any single employee and preserving service levels through retirements, absences, and leadership transitions.
It starts with the first report of an injury, as this can shape both clinical and vocational outcomes. SGS’s agency-specific injury reporting hotline, for example, is staffed 24/7 365 days a year, which assists in getting the process started faster. From there, early intervention case managers focus on access to care and a plan for recovery and return to work, while a component such as SGS’s Concentrated Action toward Recovery and Employment (CARE) case management service focuses on long-running cases that have reached a chronic stage.
Along with the partner themselves, the tools also need to align to best help the middle and those early on in their careers. Having a platform the keeps case history all in one place will be key. In addition to compiling case notes, documents, and claim status in one place, SGS’s WebOPUS Federal platform creates an opportunity to allow these materials to trigger alerts and diary tools that prompt next steps and flag cases approaching specified limits. When a colleague retires or goes on leave, the next person can pick up where they left off, backed by support of national provider network of additional medical and ancillary providers.
Together, these efforts can reduce the number and duration of lost-time injuries and expedite access to care, keeping people working, and cases moving.
Looking Ahead
If agencies lose their middle layer, experience will be lost instead of passed along, and employees at every phase of their career will feel the impact. But this is avoidable to some extent.
The redistribution of experience across the federal workforce is already underway. Agencies that treat knowledge transfer, workforce development, and claims operations as an integrated continuity strategy will be better positioned to manage the transition. With disciplined processes, accessible technology, and appropriately structured partner support, the middle layer can sustain mission performance while newer employees develop the judgment and institutional knowledge required to assume greater responsibility. The strategic imperative is clear: preserve expertise before it exits, convert it into durable operating capability, and ensure that workforce change does not become mission disruption.
