‘We are going to lose Generation Z’: Trump’s workforce cuts could cripple recruitment

Some public management experts are growing concerned that President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce have particularly affected early-career employees and that the federal government’s ability to attract younger talent could be damaged even past the current administration. 

“We are not going to have the talent we need to continue to carry through with the business of our country,” said Michelle Amante, senior vice president of government programs at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to promote government effectiveness. “It will have devastating impacts as people continue to retire, either willfully or are being forced to retire. We're not going to have the new talent coming in, and we're going to lose institutional knowledge. So it's going to be very, very difficult for agencies to fulfill on their mission without the talent in hand.”

Beginning in February, the Trump administration began a mass firing of federal employees in their probationary periods, who are generally early-career workers who have been hired within the past one to two years. Two court rulings this week have allowed those firings to go through, reversing lower court orders for agencies to reinstate the removed probationers. 

Given the reductions in force across swaths of the federal workforce as well, Amante argued that federal jobs have lost their appeal as stable positions safe from layoffs, which many government workers accept as a tradeoff for making less money. 

“We are going to lose Generation Z. They are not likely to want to come back and work for the government,” she said. “And then the generation after them, Generation Alpha, they're watching all of this play out. They're in their formative years watching what is happening in government. Why would they want to come work for an employer that not only does not provide stability but also does not provide a good environment to work in — where federal employees feel traumatized day in and day out?”

Gen Z refers to individuals born between 1997 to 2012, and Gen Alpha designates those born after. 

A former senior federal official, who preferred to be unnamed in order to speak freely, expressed a more optimistic view, noting that in their experience the federal job selection process tends to be competitive because of the high number of applicants.

“I think this passion of people wanting to be in the mission-oriented space and influence the way we deliver goods and services to the citizens of the country, I don't think that's ever going away,” the former official said. “So I do think there will be people there at the end of the day that want to do it.”

The Partnership found in a spring 2024 survey that 67% of 18-to-34-year-olds agree that a federal career is an opportunity to improve their communities, but 68% said that they’ve never considered pursuing a non-military federal job. 

In addition to large-scale removals, Trump in February signed an executive order limiting many departments to hiring just one new employee for every four who leave, reducing job opportunities for younger individuals interested in working for federal agencies. The same month the president issued a directive canceling the Presidential Management Fellows program, which was established in 1977 as a pipeline for graduate students to consider and pursue a career in government. 

Statements by Trump officials also suggest that they want to push individuals away from public service. 

Elon Musk, who is spearheading the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, on March 4 posted on his social media platform X that “[a] lot of people need to move from low to negative productivity roles in government (and some in industry) to high productivity roles in the commercial sector. That is temporarily disruptive, but ultimately for the best.”

Still, the former government official predicts that once the Trump administration has finished layoffs agencies will realize they don’t have enough people for certain functions.