Don’t let Elissa Slotkin scare new grads out of public service

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) is warning young job-seekers not to seek a position with the Trump administration, lest they harm their careers. 

As she put it: “I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity. I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that,” she said at a University of Chicago forum last week. “I want that deterrence message.”

To be sure, some federal agencies have been especially politicized — think here of working for ICE or perhaps even the Department of Justice legal team going after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). But far more current federal job openings are for positions that provide the nuts and bolts of government on which Americans rely. They carry no political valence. 

That is the conclusion one must draw from the “early careers: recent graduates” section of the USAJobs site operated by the federal Office of Personnel Management. 

One wonders whether Slotkin would object to a new grad taking a job as staff psychologist for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (starting pay $107,000 in Denton, Texas), or as a cybersecurity specialist for the Defense Information Systems Agency ($57,000, Fort Meade, Md.,). What about an industrial hygienist for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration ($50,000, Overland Park, Kan.)? Or a safety engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration ($53,000)?

These cannot simply be dismissed as political positions. Many are permanent jobs not subject to presidential whim. They represent the sinews of public service, the “human resources” that allow us to be confident in our food supply, air traffic, workplace safety and much more. These services rely on young people stepping into positions being rapidly vacated by retirees. 

As the Federal News Network has reported, “105,858 retired from federal service in 2025. The Defense Department saw the largest number of employees leave via retirement at 31,689, while the departments of Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Justice, Treasury and Health and Human Services all saw more than 6,000 employees leave via retirement.” 

Slotkin’s discouraging words come on top of a worrisome trend: Graduates of the nation’s leading professional schools of government have been choosing private or non-profit employment instead of public service. In a survey of 13 such schools, including Harvard, Berkeley and Princeton, just a third of graduates chose to work for government. Even that may overstate the trend; their student bodies have included many non-U.S. students who return to their own countries.

One can argue that our core political debate centers on the size and scope of government. But that is a debate about relatively modest adjustments — about the extent of the welfare state, for instance, not about whether we should have a safety net. It is about how the IRS should discourage tax cheats, not whether it should do so.

Our student loan system has reflected the need for new graduates to choose to work for government. The Public Service Student Loan program forgives the balance of such a loan if the borrower has made 120 monthly payments. One might dispute whether government (or non-profit) employment is really more valuable than work in the private sector, but both parties have voted for the loan forgiveness law, which began in 2007 during the George W. Bush administration, was preserved by the Obama administration and survived the changes of last year’s “big beautiful” tax bill.

One can only wonder why Slotkin deems it a good idea to break from the bipartisan path and discourage capable young graduates from staffing the government. 

Howard Husock is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.”