The federal government shed 385,000 employees last year. Now the Trump administration is on a blitz to hire Gen Z workers |
The federal government shed 385,000 employees last year. Now the Trump administration is on a blitz to hire Gen Z workers
A year after firing thousands of probationary employees, the Trump administration indicated it needs more early-career workers to sustain the federal workforce.
“We’ve got close to half of our population that’s within 10 years of retirement age,” Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), told Fortune. “So if you just did nothing else, you’ve got this major demographic challenge of a large number of people who will likely either retire or certainly be retirement-eligible over the near term, without us actually replenishing the pipeline of early-career people coming in.”
On Monday, OPM launched the Early Career Talent Network, a recruitment push for entry-level workers to join the federal payroll. Spanning across finance, human resources, engineering, project management and procurement roles, it will offer young workers the chance to dip their toes into government work, without the commitment of decades in the public sector, according to Kupor.
Early-career individuals—those with five to seven years of experience—make up only about 7% of the 2 million civilian federal workforce, compared to more than 20% of the broader U.S. workforce, he said.
The recruitment push comes as Gen Z has entered into a stagnant labor market that’s particularly punishing to early-career individuals. According to an analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 reached 5.6% at the end of 2025, above the 4.2% overall unemployment rate at the time and up from 4.2% unemployment for college graduates in........