Hawaiʻi’s governor has an urgent message for federal and nonprofit workers impacted by the Trump administration’s job cuts and spending freeze: Apply for an open state position and you could have a job within 14 days. 

Operation Hire Hawaiʻi, which Gov. Josh Green created via executive order, will benefit both the state and the federal workers whose jobs have been thrown into disarray by the new presidential administration, his office said in a press release Tuesday. Nearly a quarter of state government positions in Hawaiʻi are vacant.

“We are eager to welcome those impacted by the changes at the federal level to our workforces, as we believe they will make an immediate, positive impact,” Department of Human Resources Development Brenna Hashimoto said in the release.

The initiative will target people impacted by layoffs, resignations, loss of federal funding and other interested job seekers, according to the program’s website. As of Tuesday afternoon, little information was available on the site, however, about job openings or how agencies would be able to so quickly speed up the state’s notoriously slow hiring process.

Several federal employees in Hawaiʻi who spoke with Civil Beat said they like the governor’s plan to expedite job applications, although it may be an imperfect solution depending on personal circumstances — for example, if a worker is a military spouse beholden to sporadic relocations. 

The state and county governments have been struggling to fill vacancies. The state’s most recent report shows a 24% vacancy rate, a slight improvement from last year’s rate of 27%. And more than a third of state workers will be eligible to retire in the next five years.

The Department of Human Services has some of the hardest positions to fill, losing more people in recent years than it has hired. Specific roles, such as social workers with Child Welfare Services, were recently given pay differentials to generate more applicant demand. 

Vacancies in public health, climate change policy, infrastructure planning, technology modernization, disaster resilience and housing and homelessness were specifically mentioned in Tuesday’s executive order as safe havens for sidelined federal workers.  

The executive order calls for the Department of Human Resources Development to report quarterly on the initiative’s progress.

The City and County of Honolulu also struggles to hire enough workers, with roughly 2,300 vacant civil service positions. It employs more than 10,000 people, but the city doesn’t have plans for a similar program, deputy communications director Ian Scheuring said last week before the governor’s office officially announced the program.

“We don’t have a ton of agility when it comes to hiring civil service positions,” Scheuring said at the time. 

On Tuesday, he added that the city would evaluate the governor’s program and see if there are ways to further streamline its own hiring process, especially for the impacted federal employees.