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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s sweeping federal layoffs aren’t just wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of employees across the country.
Lawmakers in both parties are warning the cuts will harm the government’s ability to recruit young people out of college — as well as highly skilled candidates from the private sector — causing a ripple effect that could be felt for years or even decades.
“The recruiting challenge they’re creating for themselves is enormous,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., whose state is home to hundreds of thousands of federal workers, said of the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts. “I don’t think that’s an accidental byproduct. I think that’s a known consequence — and they don’t care.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., whose state also borders Washington, D.C., and is home to thousands of federal employees, agreed with Kaine that DOGE’s headline-grabbing, scorched-earth approach is designed, in part, to drive away the next generation of civil servants.
“I’m very worried that this will discourage talented young people from joining the federal service,” Van Hollen, the son of two former federal workers, said in an interview. “A lot of people who join the federal service do it for all the right reasons; they’re patriots and they want to serve the country. And with the Musk-Trump approach, they’re effectively terrorizing the federal civil service.”
Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said he, too, had concerns about the impact of cuts on recruitment efforts. A rare Republican voice on Capitol Hill who has questioned DOGE’s hard-charging approach, Bacon told NBC News: “DOGE has been good for showing where our money is being spent and some of the stupid projects that were funded. But it has been too rash in the firings. Better analysis needed to be done. It’s not efficient to fire someone and then rehire.”
“There’s an old saying I learned. Measure twice, cut once,” Bacon said.
For many young people, particularly those attending college in and around the nation’s capital, DOGE has been a live-fire exercise.
One student at Georgetown University was hoping that her current internship at a federal agency would help her secure a full-time job there before she graduates in May. She found her work in the sciences rewarding and her co-workers “brilliant” and inspiring.
But in just two short months, the DOGE cuts and federal hiring freeze have upended her career plans. The student, who requested anonymity because she wasn’t authorized to speak to the media, told NBC News she’s now putting her dreams of working in government on hold and making a pivot to the private sector.
“I loved the work that I did so much and I could feel like it had a tangible impact on real people that I decided that I really wanted to work in the federal government,” said the student, who asked that her name not be used and her agency not be identified.
But she acknowledged: “The federal option isn’t there. I mean, I’m still holding out a little bit of hope for the federal hiring freeze to end in April, but I know that is probably not realistic.”
“I was really trying to not follow the consulting, private-sector track of most Georgetown students, and I really thought the best way to do that was to go into the public sector,” the student continued. “But now I’m thinking, I’m probably just going to try to pivot into consulting, even though it’s kind of late, or do tech.”
Both Kaine and Van Hollen pointed to a 2023 speech by Russ Vought, now the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he said of federal bureaucrats that the goal of a second Trump administration would be to “put them in trauma.”
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video of the speech obtained by ProPublica. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
“Russ Vought was quite open about it,” said Van Hollen, who added: “Unfortunately, this will have a huge dampening effect on the ability to recruit.”
Asked about lawmakers’ concerns about the government’s ability to attract talented applicants in the future, White House spokesperson Liz Huston focused on the Cabinet members and other political appointees whom Trump has installed over the past two months.
“Never before in history has an administration hired such a huge number of qualified, capable, and America-first Patriots in such little time,” Huston said in a statement. “We’ve broken records by selecting over 2,000 appointees in less than 2 months including incredible MAGA warriors like Russ Vought, Tom Homan, Sean Parnell, Harmeet Dhillon, Kash Patel, Kari Lake, Brent Bozell, and Jay Bhattacharya.”
On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also touted the Trump administration’s “successful” efforts to fill political jobs. She said 281 Trump appointees had been confirmed by the Senate so far, with another 280 in the process. And Leavitt said the administration had filled “100%” of the political slots at the White House, the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration.
Still, those political appointees are a just a small slice of the 3 million-plus federal workforce. The overwhelming number of workers are career civil servants who traditionally remain in their jobs regardless of which party controls the White House.
In addition to slashing agencies, Trump is also shutting down critical pipelines to federal careers. Started nearly a half century ago, the Presidential Management Fellows Program pairs current or recent graduate students with opportunities in the federal government, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the National Forest Service.
But on Feb. 19, Trump signed an executive order to “promptly terminate” the competitive leadership development program, and its “talent management system” is set to be “decommissioned” at the end of this week, according to a message on the Office of Personnel Management website.
“It’s a federal governmentwide program that really draws very talented people into the federal government,” Van Hollen said of the fellows program. “So I guess they don’t want young people serving the country. I mean, that’s the message they’re sending.”
Arati Prabhakar, who served as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Biden administration, said the DOGE cuts are telling young people and those with highly skilled, technical backgrounds to “pound sand.”
“It’s a terrible message,” she said in a phone interview.
During the Obama administration, Prabhakar led the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development arm of the Defense Department. And she said a big part of her job was recruiting people from universities or from the private sector, where they were offered “much higher salaries.”
“But we got them, and they came in and they did great things. And the reason that they came is that the work was so exciting. … They have the ability at places like DARPA to address problems at scale. It was a place you could do big things, and you could do it for our country,” she said. “It takes so much nurturing to find those few people, and then they make such a difference, and that’s what’s being disrupted. So, we’ve got to get back on track.”
Prabhakar, now living in Silicon Valley, said she recently reconnected with a Stanford University student who had been her former intern in the White House.
“She’s about to finish up in computer science, and what she wants to do is to bring this incredible AI expertise that she has into public service, and she even has an offer, but she doesn’t know if it’s going to stick in this current environment,” Prabhakar explained.
“And you know what DOGE’s actions are doing? Those actions are telling these immensely talented people who want to serve our country — they’re telling them to pound sand,” she said. “It’s the opposite of what we should be doing … to draw them in.”
Scott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News.
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