President Donald Trump ordered a hiring freeze on federal employees on Jan. 20, stripping some American University students and alumni of job positions and fellowship opportunities as career prospects continue to vanish.
The federal hiring freeze is a part of a larger initiative from the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, to cut overall federal spending. Some critics argue DOGE is not an official government department because Congress did not pass a law to create it.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas is a United States outplacement firm that tracks and announces job cuts. In an April 3 report, it said that employers headquartered in the U.S. announced 275,240 layoffs of federal workers and contractors in March.
School of International Service students and alumni are particularly affected by these cuts, especially those who are contracted under the executive branch or have secured a position in the Presidential Management Fellows Program, a two-year paid government fellowship for those with advanced degrees. Trump cut the fellowship in an executive order in February.
According to Brian Rowe, the director of experiential education at the AU Career Center, industries and contractors funded by the State Department have also been affected by DOGE initiatives. This includes those supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers humanitarian assistance and foreign aid across the globe.
“I have friends who worked at USAID for, like, 20 plus years who are now without a job, and they have mortgages and kids in college, and they've never done anything else,” said SIS professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Education Nina Yamanis. “I don't think they ever imagined that this would happen.”
Summar Lyons, an AU graduate, said she was laid off at Partners of the Americas, a nonprofit organization funded by the U.S. government, on Feb. 7.
Lyons said she worked there for ten years under several different programs funded by the State Department until the government issued a stop work order. The company said in March it stopped receiving federal funding for its ongoing programs reliant on U.S. government grants and contracts and was forced to lay off roughly 30 percent of its staff, Lyons being one of them.
Lyons said many around her, such as AU’s career center, encouraged people to apply for new jobs early on. However, she questioned this approach.
“I had to pause and say, ‘Wait a minute, I have to take a step back and figure out how am I going to put one foot in front of the other,’” Lyons said.
Before job hunting, she said she first stabilized her basic needs; she determined the status of her health insurance and personal expenses and whether she qualified for food assistance and rental programs. She said she needed to register for Medicaid and apply for D.C. unemployment. She was unfamiliar with the unemployment application process, so understanding it — on top of completing the steps — was a challenge in itself.
“It felt like everything was urgent all at once,” Lyons said.
She said applying for these programs is more challenging than many expect it to be, as not everyone has the resources, knowledge and tools to take next steps or advocate for themselves.
“It requires having stable internet. It requires being able to vouch for yourself because the person on the phone who answers your call, they might not be empathetic,” said Lyons. “They might not explain everything. They might not even have all the information that you need.”
Lyons said many focus on the obstacles of reentering the job market, overlooking how applying for D.C. financial assistance can be a hurdle of its own. She added that when she received advice on job hunting, many disregarded her unemployment status and how that added layer reframes her search.
“I have no choice but to work on my resume now in a situation that was unexpected, and you have to realize that I’m not revising my resume because I’m currently employed and looking for other opportunities,” Lyons said. “I’m revising my resume whilst also being unstable, while having the rug pulled out from underneath me.”
The SIS Office of Career Development issued a request for University community members to notify them if they have been furloughed, fired or had job offers rescinded, according to Sara Jones, the director of the office. She said that a total of 277 people contacted the office — 252 SIS alumni and 25 SIS undergraduate and graduate students.
Jones said the freeze has impacted contractors, adding that many AU alumni who worked for USAID and organizations funded by them were furloughed and later fired.
Peter Botjer, an AU graduate, said he was furloughed as a senior program associate at Chemonics International, a significant for-profit contractor for USAID.
A March 7 Devex article said the government issued termination notices for 92 contracts and cooperative agreements with Chemonics.
He said he often watched the news, trying to better understand how the hiring freeze would impact his career.
“None of it makes sense,” Botjer said, referring to the information he heard on the news.
He said some Chemonics contracts were cancelled only to be activated again.
“We’re going back and forth with these different informations,” Botjer said. “I will say I appreciate [how] my organization has gone above and beyond to keep us updated, but sometimes they really feel like non-updates because they don’t have the information.”
Botjer said the company appears to be doing its best to communicate the limited information it has.
“I spent so much time and effort and [a] huge amount of passion in international development,” Botjer said. “And now I’m looking at it and I’m like, will I ever actually be able to do that again? Will this exist?”
With this hit to the industry, Botjer said he is unsure whether high school students will still want to pursue degrees in international development.
“Because if I was in high school and saw the collapse of a sector that I was thinking of majoring in, I would not be doing that,” Botjer said.
He said the SIS Office of Career Development has encouraged people to examine all their options, specifically exploring opportunities abroad.
Botjer recalled thinking, “‘The world is my oyster’” when he was younger. Upon returning to this phase in life after he had found stability and secured the job he wanted, he does not feel as optimistic as his younger self did.
He said that he submitted job applications, only to figure out the position no longer existed. He also came across job postings of programs funded by USAID, which potentially no longer exist either.
He said it is difficult to identify which organizations have been affected or eliminated by the freeze.
“Already before the hiring freeze, there was a lot of stress for the job market,” said Ryan Brennan, a senior in SIS. “Even before Trump got into office, all of us had been talking about graduating with a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear and just uncertainty about what's available to us.”
Gihan Fernando, assistant vice provost of AU’s career center, said the University had historically and consistently ranked among the top ten U.S. universities for producing Presidential Management Fellows finalists, with many of those finalists becoming named fellows.
Finalists and semifinalists were not exclusively from SIS; others came from different schools. Samantha Noland, a graduate student in the School of Communication, was a PMF semifinalist.
She said she applied in early Sep. 2024. According to the PMF Applicant Handbook that was last revised in 2023, the initial application required candidates to take two online assessments. Candidates were notified whether they were semifinalists two or three weeks after they finished.
If selected as a semifinalist, applicants had to prepare for a structured interview assessment. According to the official PMF website’s page on the 2025 application, semifinalists were interviewed roughly 10-12 weeks after they were selected. Noland said another “long waiting period” followed her interview.
Noland said that she read a Feb. 20 article indicating that Trump ended the program before she received official confirmation from the PMF through an email on Feb. 26.
“It's a pretty lengthy, slow moving application, and then [Elon Musk] comes in and just ends it in one fell swoop,” Noland said.
She said the program’s delayed communication indicates how quickly the Trump administration and DOGE acted.
“[Trump is] axing everything in this really rapid succession, which is really the opposite of how government is supposed to work,” Noland said.
For the 2024-25 cycle, 22 AU participants progressed to the semifinalist round, 12 of which were SIS students, according to Fernando. Since PMF has been eliminated, none of these semifinalists will learn whether they advanced to the final round.
“It was kind of like the amount of effort and the amount of months of effort that went in...to not even then be considered and not even to know whether I got to be a finalist,” Noland said. “It was just that feeling of, you're getting cut off at the knees when you've put so much hard work into something.”
DOGE’s cuts affected Noland beyond her involvement in the PMF. She said the impact of job cuts and reduced funding for non-federal workers emphasizes how uncertain the job market is.
“There’s been a chaotic rollout to the reduction in government … Federal service was a very stable employer up until now,” Rowe said. “It was unusual to see significant reductions and abrupt layoffs within that sector.”
Gabrielle Bertrand, a senior in the School of Public Affairs, said this situation is a “debilitating blow” for all students.
“I feel like I’m graduating into the worst situation available,” Bertrand said.
Bertrand said she took all the right steps to build a stable career, such as applying for at least 20 internships every spring semester. By losing out on those opportunities, she said, it’s harder for students to gain credits like she did through her internship with the post office.
“You put in the extra effort during college to put yourself on a pathway towards a job opportunity that is now seemingly evaporated,” Bertrand said.
As for next steps AU could take to help affected community members, Lyons shared a couple ideas.
Lyons said she wishes AU would guide people through the immediate steps someone should take after losing their job — like applying for unemployment — as opposed to jumping to the resume and application process. She added that the University may not have the tools to follow her suggestions, as this situation strays from the typical, more linear job-seeking journey the school and its students may be accustomed to.
Lyons suggested that AU publishes a page that offers guidance on stabilizing basic needs before focusing on job searches. She proposed it writes articles that suggest, for example, “10 things you’ve got to make sure are good before you can [move forward].”
In an interview with The Eagle, Rowe said the AU Career Center published a news and resources page dedicated to the freeze.
The Office of Career Development for SIS also provides resources to help students and alumni. Jones said it posted a federal worker support page that is consistently updated.
Lyons said that her professional network was key to the next steps she took. Two former colleagues offered her part-time gigs, one of them being Teens of Color Abroad. On top of those two temporary jobs, she pet sits for Rover.
“That’s when the value of networking comes in … developing professional friendships. … There's a lot around our professional interests that bond us,” AU career advisor Alyssa Best said in an interview with The Eagle.
It is important to be “aware of the skills you have and are developing. That never ends until you retire,” Rowe said regarding how people can “pivot” by applying their skills to different fields.
“The career center has experienced these disruptions before … different types of disruptions, but disruptions to the labor environment,” Rowe said. “There's been some economic downturns in the past that many career advisors have lived and worked through,” such as Best, who graduated six months after 9/11.
Many of those affected by the hiring freeze, like Lyons, worry that people will oversaturate certain job markets. However, Rowe said this is not the case.
“We’re not all competing for the same job all the time,” Rowe said.
Lyons attended the AU career center’s Feb. 19 information session led by Rowe and Best.
“Summar, you're not alone. There is a community of folks dealing with what you're dealing with, and they're uncertain too,” is what Lyons said she took away from the event. “And when you're ready, you can come back to this community to get the support that you need.”
This article was edited by Cara Halford, Tyler Davis and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Luna Jinks, Sabine Kanter-Huchting and Ella Rousseau.
