Trump’s cuts to the civil service undermine new tech internship push, good government group argues

The Office of Personnel Management in December launched a new internship program as part of a broader effort to bring tech talent into the government, but a nonpartisan nonprofit seeking to strengthen agency opportunities for college students is concerned that recent efforts to shrink the federal workforce will hinder the program’s success. 

“It will not be as easy as they think it will be to recruit people back,” warned Michelle Amante, senior vice president of government programs at the Partnership for Public Service. 

Under the new “semester of service” student volunteer service program, the Trump administration is aiming to initially select 200 students for tech-focused internships. The program will be administered through OPM, and Amante argued that centralizing internship processes in the government’s human resources agency will ease onboarding and recruitment. 

Still, she’s worried that “adding this to [OPM’s] plate will be an impossible task” due to workforce reductions at the agency over the past year. 

Another potential hurdle to the program's recruitment success, Amante said, is that the interns will be unpaid.

“It is impossible for most young adults to spend a summer without getting paid, particularly if they have to relocate to D.C. or any other major metropolitan area,” she said. “So they’re immediately decreasing their pool to people who are financially capable of making that commitment.”  

The Biden administration, which sought to create more paid internships, in 2024 updated regulations for agency internships to make it easier to convert participants into full-time employees. 

McLaurine Pinvor, an OPM spokesperson, told Government Executive in a statement that the internships “will be dispersed widely throughout the country, ensuring that students can participate from wherever they live or attend school.” 

She added that, while completing the internship does not lead directly to full-time federal employment, the agency hopes it will enable participants to be “better positioned to compete and be hired for such roles.” 

Broadly speaking, OPM’s Dec. 15 memo says the agency will “work with agencies to increase their percentage of early career hires to build a strong talent pipeline for the federal government.” 

Last year, however, the Trump administration axed the Presidential Management Fellows program, which served as a pipeline for agencies to recruit graduate students, and many early-career employees were impacted by the mass firings of individuals in their probationary periods (generally those who have been hired or promoted with the past one to two years). 

“There is such a high demand for [tech] students,” Amante emphasized. “It's difficult to make a commitment — particularly right out of school, and they probably have student debts to pay — to want to go into a job where they don't feel like they have any security.”

In response to a question about whether the Trump administration’s agency workforce reductions could deter potential interns from applying, Pinover said that “OPM is optimistic that potential applicants will see the unique opportunities government work can offer.” 

The new internship program is one of several initiatives to “provide agencies with access to top-quality talent in technology, cybersecurity, AI, data science and project management to deliver the most skilled technology workforce in the history of the U.S. government and help win the global race for artificial intelligence dominance.”

Most notably, the Trump administration created the Tech Force, in partnership with tech companies, with the goal of bringing in 1,000 early- and mid-career technologists to work two-year stints in the government. 

Tech Force is structured similarly to existing programs: the U.S. Digital Service, which recruits tech experts for time-limited government service, and the U.S. Digital Corps early career tech fellowship. 

In the spring, the Trump administration is also beginning fellowships for project management and data science, respectively.