One of the biggest sources of stress for a college student is the relentless search for a summer internship. For those not lucky enough to land a job at their parents’ company, the spring is spent writing dozens of cover letters, doom scrolling LinkedIn, and waiting by the phone for ghosting employers.
For students interested in public service, this process has been made all the more difficult by the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce, to fulfill its campaign promise of making the government more efficient. This complete overhaul has made hiring for federal summer internships and pathways programs nearly impossible, with thousands of federal internships and entry-level jobs being cut. As a result, students are being forced to redirect their job searches toward non-federal sectors, making the job hunt more cutthroat for all and risking long-term damage to the federal talent pipeline.
On his first day in office, Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum instituting a “90-day” hiring freeze (which wound up being extended indefinitely) on federal employees across the executive branch. This meant that students who had secured a federal internship for the summer of 2025 had their offers abruptly revoked, leaving them scrambling to find other opportunities.
Now entering a second summer under the Trump administration, key internship and pathway programs to federal employment continue to be unavailable and the hiring process has been limited and restructured to align with Trump’s commitment to government efficiency. Furthermore, while certain agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Defense were never subject to the hiring freeze to begin with, more progressive agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE), remain in a perpetual state of “realignment,” facing continued stalled hiring and instability. This has limited the agencies’ regulatory capacities in alignment with the Trump administration’s goals, such as its promise to eliminate the DOE.
For instance, the Presidential Management Fellows Program, a two-year training program for advanced degree holders in a variety of fields, was abolished in Feb. 2025. This was much to the dismay of the program’s alumni, who credited the fellowship with attracting and grooming them to become critical leaders in the federal workforce.
Additionally, the hiring process has been restructured to have a “bottleneck” effect on new employment. The “4-to-1” rule was implemented, so for every four federal employees who retired, resigned, or were shown the door, agencies can only hire one person back. On top of that, the introduction of a new “Merit Hiring Program” has placed an emphasis on “skills-based hiring,” removing traditional degree requirements and replacing them with mandatory essay questions, designed to gauge applicants’ “alignment with American ideals and interests.” For example, “How would you help advance the president’s executive orders and policy priorities in this role?” or “How has your commitment to the Constitution and the founding principles of the United States inspired you to pursue this role within the federal government?” To assess applicants, strategic hiring committees have been assigned to each agency to individually review each applicant. Prioritizing subjective, potentially ideological screening questions over objective qualifications may allow qualified applicants to be filtered out based on their political alignment rather than their ability to do the job. Combined with a slower, centralized form of review, the hiring process trickles down to a slow drip while neutrality is undermined.
Another key change President Trump made to the federal workforce was through Executive Order 14148, which rescinded all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies within the U.S. government. Adriana Jaime, a fourth-year Berkeley student, and former intern at the Department of Education’s White House Hispanic initiative under the Biden administration, learned that her old program would be cut the same day the executive order was released.
The initiative was established in 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, and continued under every following president — including Trump in his first term — up until now. According to Adriana, the mission of the initiative is to “connect Hispanic students, K-12 and above, with federal resources the Department of Education has to offer.” For example, one of her main projects for the summer was researching how universities and the Department of Education could provide more resources to assist Hispanic students completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) application and help them overcome any potential language barriers in the process.
Growing up in Los Angeles as a young Latina woman, Adriana witnessed firsthand many educational gaps within her own community, and saw this internship as an opportunity to support them at the federal level. For her fellow interns, Adriana said they too were motivated by their personal backgrounds and came from universities all across the country. The opportunities this internship made available to them were endless, “I would’ve never learned how to write a professional memo, properly conduct research, and be exposed to so many high-level professional mentors.”
Now, with the Hispanic Initiative and other DEI programs ending, the professional opportunities and recognition that were once available to students from underrepresented backgrounds through these internship programs are now lost. Adriana says, “There’s so much harmful media messaging right now, programs like these really put marginalized communities in a different light by exemplifying how driven and motivated Hispanic students are.” Additionally, she’s worried about the students who will come after her, “Now when I go back to D.C., I can network with the mentors I worked under all summer, future students won’t be able to access this community.”
While longstanding internship programs like Adriana’s have been cut, the Trump administration has simultaneously launched a new internship program called Tech Force. Tech Force aims to select 200 students for tech-focused internships to “provide agencies with access to top-quality talent in technology, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data science, and project management.” However, Michelle Amante of the Partnership for Public Service warns that the recent federal workforce reductions within the Office of Personnel Management itself will undermine the program’s effectiveness, as there will be a shortage of employers available to recruit, hire, and manage this new influx of interns. Therefore, this initiative will do little to correct the cuts made, depriving students like Adriana of the opportunities and skills a federal internship could have provided.
For at least the remainder of Trump’s presidency, prospective college interns and recent graduates alike are being redirected to state and local governments, the private or nonprofit sector instead of the federal government. This is overloading an already hypercompetitive job market and is damaging to an aging bureaucracy. In 2023, a Biden administration survey found that only 8 percent of federal employees are under the age of 30, making it critical that there is a new generation of skilled professionals gaining the proper experience and skills to support future administrations. Additionally, the dissolution of federal DEI programs combined with the advent of strategic hiring committees creates a federal workforce that is less representative of the American people’s cultural, ideological, and economic diversity. Even after his departure from the presidency, this historic, radical, and politicized restructuring of the executive branch’s workforce signals a dangerous precedent. With each election cycle, federal hiring could develop into a cat-and-mouse game between Republicans and Democrats, undermining the political insulation of the bureaucracy and subjecting its employees to instability, which in turn subjects citizens to the dangers of an inefficient bureaucracy.
However, Adriana makes it clear that despite these setbacks, she and her peers are still absolutely committed to a career in public service. “No matter what, when all of this is over people are ready to go in, reverse all the damage that’s been done and advance the policy issues that matter to our communities forward.” So while the Trump administration’s reconfiguration of the bureaucracy may leave permanent damage, there is still faith that young professionals will be waiting to rise to the challenge.
Featured Image Source: Teen Vogue