OPM’s federal hiring push runs up against young workers’ waning interest

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Thursday said he was puzzled that more young people aren’t interested in federal employment, even as his department has shed more than 4,000 employees since 2024. 

“I find it fascinating that more young people don’t want to apply,” he said. “We’re begging for people to come in.” 

Duffy pitched federal employment at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, as a guest speaker for Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor’s college recruitment tour, part of his initiative to attract more early-career workers to the civil service.

The effort marks a shift for the Trump administration, which has spent much of the last two years shrinking the federal workforce. It is also the latest attempt by the government to address the historical underrepresentation of younger people in the civil service. 

“I want to put the [early-career] analyst programs at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs out of business because I want to send everybody to go do two years in government,” Kupor said on Thursday. “I think it's a real opportunity for you to think about not just serving your country but also how you develop your career.”  

“My year in the government, I learned more than I ever learned in 15 years"

The OPM director, clad in boots, told roughly 75 TCU students and other attendees that people younger than 30 make up 7% of the roughly 2 million-person civil service despite being 23% of the total U.S. workforce — a statistic that he frequently cites.  

However the percentage of federal workers younger than 30 decreased, from 8.9% to 7.9%, during the first year of Trump’s second term, as agencies conducted mass firings of newly hired employees who hadn’t completed their one-year probationary periods, which impacted many early-career workers. 

OPM has recently sought to reverse this regression, including through hiring initiatives, a social media campaign and college visits. 

Kupor occasionally brings conservative influencers along on the college tour. At the University of Florida, he had a fireside chat with right-wing commentator Benny Johnson. In September, he visited the University of Austin, a roughly 150-student unaccredited school founded by conservative figures that began its first academic year in 2024. 

On Friday, however, Kupor will speak at Southern Methodist University in Texas with Mark Cuban, a billionaire investor who is known for his support of Democratic candidates. 

Kupor and Duffy’s talk was moderated by Michael Boes, a TCU alumnus who served as a senior adviser at the Health and Human Services Department during Trump’s second term and is now chief “Make America Healthy Again” officer at Steak ‘n Shake. 

“I [spent] 15 years [in the] private sector, and without a doubt, my year in the government, I learned more than I ever learned in 15 years,” Boes said at Thursday’s event. 

Duffy also made a comment that he’d “prefer to have a lot of TCU grads versus a lot of Berkeley grads coming in,” referencing the California university that is known for left-leaning activism. 

"Prefer to have a lot of TCU grads versus a lot of Berkeley grads"

Titus Fagan, a TCU senior accounting major and student body president, said in an interview with Government Executive that listening to Duffy and Kupor made him more interested in pursuing public service. 

“When I was coming over here to go to this event, a lot of our students were saying the same thing [as me]. I just didn’t simply know all that the government had to offer position-wise,” he said. “The conversations today have really helped open up some of those doors or pathways that we didn’t know existed.” 

He cautioned, however, that agencies are competing against companies that have already made inroads with students. 

“They get recruited by another company before the opportunities in the federal government get presented,” he said. “Accounting internships and finance internships really start now in earnest around your sophomore year.” 

Kupor and Duffy on Thursday also discussed artificial intelligence, which surveys show young adults are increasingly worried about, particularly with respect to job loss. The OPM director urged students to develop “soft skills,” including team building, leadership and communication skills. 

“You have to master your technical competencies, but don't neglect these other areas because I think that's a lot of what is going to differentiate people and performance from an employer perspective over time,” he said.