In the fall, as she was interviewing at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Elizabeth Rauenhorst, a senior at Georgetown University, asked if the incoming Trump administration could jeopardize the position she was applying for.
The interviewer assured her that because of USAID’s bipartisan support, nothing would change. Rauenhorst was thrilled to receive a tentative offer, pending her background check, in December, and had a January start date. She never started that internship, though, and now the entire agency she hoped to work for is effectively defunct.
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Rauenhorst is one of many graduating seniors whose post-grad plans have been disrupted by the Trump administration’s efforts to drastically shrink the federal government. As President Trump seeks to dismantle whole agencies, college seniors have been terminated from internships that had the potential to become full-time roles. Others have had job offers rescinded after the administration froze hiring across the federal government.
Some of these students spent their entire college career preparing for a life of public service, while others didn’t realize the roles they were applying for fell under a federal agency’s jurisdiction. All of them are deeply uncertain and anxious about graduating into a market that is flooded with job seekers.
This fear is acute at schools like Georgetown, where the rate of students entering the federal government is particularly high. When the hiring freeze went into effect, the career center launched a series of listening sessions and seminars aimed at helping students pivot their plans. Despite the help, though, many seniors can’t shake the anxiety and disappointment. “It's a bummer. It's a sad time to be a graduate student or a graduating student who wants to work in this field,” Rauenhorst says, reflecting on her interest in international development work.
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Michelle Amante, the senior vice president for government programs at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that, among other goals, aims to recruit young talent to the federal government, worries about the big-picture impacts of the hiring freeze. “Certainly, [the federal] government has gone through downsizing before, and there have been major budget issues. One year you can recover from," she tells Teen Vogue. "But I think it's going to be multiple years. I am worried about losing an entire generation of people that will not want to serve in government. And we just can't afford to do that.”
Eric is one of those young people now considering a pivot to the private sector. (He asked to use a pseudonym because USAID employees have been instructed by email not to speak to the media.) Now a senior, he applied to Georgetown hoping to use his experience and interests to pursue a “dream career” in foreign policy. After completing a number of internships, primarily at nonprofits and think tanks, he was offered an internship at USAID starting in December that had the potential to become a full-time position after graduation.
Eric enjoyed his first month of work with the agency, describing his days as filled with “potential learning.” But after Trump was sworn in, the agency drastically changed as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, took an axe to it. Eric watched as contractors were furloughed, and his work trickled to a halt. “I was literally just refreshing my email all the time, waiting to be eventually kicked out of it, because I knew it was coming,” he recalls. Eric was ultimately placed on administrative leave along with most of USAID’s staff.
He says he can’t help feeling that he’s been preparing for a career that is now in danger of extinction: “It's hard for me to imagine that some of these careers might just not exist, right? If there's no USAID, then maybe there won't be significant careers in public service in international development,” he says. “Did I make a mistake by choosing to study what I studied?”
James Weld, like Eric, remembers “clear as day” when he was terminated from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). To deliver the news, his director had to log on to the Zoom call using her husband’s email because she had already been locked out of her EPA email. “It was so awful,” Weld says.
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Since that call he’s remained in contact with his director; despite her own termination, she has been helping him retool his career plans. Weld, a senior at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, has a deep passion for biology. At the EPA he had been charged with researching how environmental issues impact underserved communities, and he hoped to join the agency full-time after graduation. Now “uncertainty is the defining characteristic” of how he’s feeling.
“It's pretty devastating. It's pretty anxiety-inducing because I didn't have really extensive networks outside of what I had been cultivating with the [agency],” Weld explains. “There are people in the private sector that I've been speaking to since then. I'm trying really, really hard to find opportunities like paralegal positions, research assistant positions — something that won't be affected by these federal layoffs.”
In Weld’s calculus, at this moment, entering the private sector poses its own challenges: “You have the sense that the federal government is huge and so many people work for it, and so many people just got kicked out into the workforce looking for jobs,” he says. He also worries about other college seniors who would have gone into government and “are now competing for positions in the private sector." He adds, "It's not a good time to be a graduating senior at all.”
Komal Samrow, who's had her “heart set on” doing public service work, agrees: Thinking about the future has now become “disheartening.”
Last summer, she interned at the Government Accountability Office (GAO). It was a “dream internship,” she says. On her last day she received a conditional job offer for after graduation. But as layoffs and buyouts began sweeping the federal workforce after President Trump took office, she assumed the offer no longer existed.
Samrow grew up in a family that deeply values service. She says her grandfather served in the Indian Foreign Service, her father works for UNICEF, and she had hoped to follow in their footsteps. “I want to do something that feels meaningful. Then to pour everything into that since freshman year, interning for nonprofits, for international organizations, for GAO — that was all because this is something that I believe in," she says. "And then to almost feel punished for it?”
As graduation creeps closer, it’s been difficult for Samrow to see the certainty her peers with business and consulting job offers are experiencing, especially because she knows she willingly sacrificed that certainty for her commitment to public service. “I've been grappling with this sort of anger that I don't even know how to articulate sometimes," she says. “Because, I’m like, this is something I chose for myself. But it's not that I didn't put in the effort, it's not that I didn't put in the work, it's not that I didn't care — it's that it's literally been taken away from me.”
She continues, "And it's not just me; it's thousands of people.” For Samrow it feels like the federal government “isn't even an option” right now, but she’s hoping with time that may change.
Weld is not so sure. In his eyes the Trump administration is a “different beast,” and reflects his worries about what increased political polarization means for the future. “How can I reckon with the possibility that if I get into the federal bureaucracy under a Democrat and in four years a Republican comes into power, my whole life could be upended?” he asks. “I would consider working in the federal government depending on the circumstances, but the only way that I would feel truly secure in doing so is with a paradigmatic shift in the political scene of the country.”
The hiring freeze has also impacted college seniors who weren’t interested in pursuing careers that traditionally fall into the realm of civil service. When Sara Pizzini, a senior at Georgetown and a psychology major, first heard about the hiring freeze, she didn’t think it would affect her.
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Since middle school, Pizzini has wanted to pursue psychology to understand “why people are the way they are.” For the past three years, she has conducted lab research on culture and emotions, early-childhood development, and is currently writing a senior research thesis on mothering and fathering.
In December, she applied for a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health; she interviewed with three separate labs. After she received a second-round interview at one lab, the federal hiring freeze went into effect and her hiring process slowed down. Pizzini then got an email saying the program had been “paused.” She’s trying to figure out something else, but at this time, she says, the uncertainty, “honestly, feels really bad.”
Recently she met with an advisor who encouraged her to pursue opportunities outside the research space: “She's like, ‘You should get a real job,’” Pizzini recalls, her voice cracking. “And I was just like, 'That goes against everything that I stand for.”
Some students hope that the current disarray is more of a blip. Luka Wohl, another senior at Georgetown, has interned at USAID twice. He's upset about how dismantling the aid agency will impact the millions it serves, but still feels hopeful that “normality will return.” When it does, he’s ready to dive back into development work. For now, though, he’s content to either pursue plans to study abroad or, after graduation, work in an agency unaffected by the freeze. “I don't think my plans have changed,” he says. “I think that these are just going to be a really tough four years, [but I don’t plan to] shy away from something that I'm truly passionate about.”
For many other seniors, radically readjusting their expectations has been one of the most difficult parts of losing their offers. Samrow describes it as a process of “coming to terms with the fact that I'm doing something that I told myself I would never do.” Weld describes it as “being screwed over.” Pizzini is trying not to let it “put a damper” on the rest of her senior year.
For Eric, who has watched the dismantling of USAID firsthand, his uncertainty is coupled with dismay. “It does make me sad,” he says. “That I feel like if I want to serve the US government, it might not be a government I'm willing to serve, or that wants me to serve it.”
