For most of the past decade, defense contractors treated a shortage of cleared engineers and technical staff as a hiring problem. Companies raced to fill open positions against long security clearance timelines and salary competition from commercial tech firms, while retaining the people already on staff got far less attention. Margarita Howard, founder of Fort Walton Beach based HX5, has approached the issue from a different angle.
HX5 operates across roughly 70 government locations in more than 20 states, supporting NASA and Department of Defense missions with a workforce of approximately 1,000 employees. That geographic spread means keeping experienced staff in place matters as much as recruiting new ones, especially now that the federal workforce itself is shrinking. The Department of Defense lost more than 61,600 civilian employees, close to 8 percent of its total workforce, through deferred resignation and reorganization programs across 2025 and into early 2026.
A Shifting Talent Pool
Those departures create an opening for contractors actively hiring, since many of the civilians who left carry years of specialized government experience. They also point to a deeper problem. A March 2026 Federal News Network pulse poll of 141 current Department of Defense employees found workers describing heavier workloads, lost institutional knowledge from colleagues who departed, and duties stretching beyond their original job descriptions. Experienced civilians who remain are watching that strain build and reconsidering where they want to work.
Margarita Howard has framed HX5’s response as a management question rather than one solved through hiring volume alone. The company has leaned on programs including SkillBridge and the Hiring Our Heroes Corporate Fellowship since 2021 to bring transitioning service members into its ranks before they separate from active duty. Veterans now make up more than 30 percent of HX5’s employees, a figure built through years of steady recruitment rather than a short term push.
Treating retention as a structural priority, instead of an outcome that sorts itself out, has become a defining part of how Margarita Howard runs HX5 inside a contracting industry still catching up to the scale of change in the federal workforce it depends on every day.