The senior job-search has never been a relaxed or uncomplicated process. This year, however, I fear students must be increasingly diligent about potential job opportunities due to the current political situation. Specifically, I’m writing to express my own decision to completely upend my career aspirations of working for the government, and why, I argue, other Bates students should do the same.
I was originally inclined to work for a variety of government organizations; particularly something in the cybersecurity sector. As a chronically-ill person, both stable benefits and healthcare were incredibly important to me in my job search, both of which the security of a government job could provide. I grow increasingly wary, however, of the weaponization of various governmental agencies to serve the interests of the president in an unconstitutional and unprecedented manner.
Partially, this issue is a non-starter. On January 20th, the day Donald Trump was inaugurated as president for a second time, he signed into effect an executive order putting an immediate freeze on all hiring within the government. The order’s language of exempting “military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety” from the hiring freeze portrays a clear intent to double down on the law enforcement sphere of government, while attempting to eliminate any agencies or organizations that do not align with the administration’s goals. Let it be said, this is incredibly dangerous to our democracy in innumerable ways.
Similarly, I would be remiss not to offer condolences to my peers who have been left completely directionless as the administration massively downsizes agencies like the E.P.A.
Pragmatically speaking, the chaos of a Trump-Musk presidency has put just about every government organization in jeopardy in terms of hiring. An order that has been temporarily blocked by a judge offering buyouts to government employees communicates a clear goal of the administration to gut federal agencies by any means necessary. Moreover, the means by which this buyout was offered via Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency lacks any form of security, decorum or organization, leading many federal workers to assume it was a scam.
It still remains that jobs in the sectors of national security and public safety remain open. Prior to the election, I had prepared materials for applications to a variety of these organizations. When applying for these jobs, ethics was a primary concern for me. The history of some of these organizations was not lost on me, and therefore, I was incredibly careful in my research into these organizations, as well in my communication with them. I had expressed the concern of administrative pressure influencing the operations of independent government bodies to one of the recruiters I connected with in this process. He had told me, anecdotally, that in his office you wouldn’t be able to tell if an election had even occurred because of how little changed.
I find this assertion incredibly hard to believe as President Trump attempts to push through yet another controversial appointment, this time to the FBI, in Kash Patel. Patel, despite denying he would use his station to seek retribution on behalf of the president, faced questions from house and senate democrats remaining skeptical that he had a so-called “enemies list”. Patel has likewise been scrutinized in his confirmation hearings over his inability to denounce the rioters at the January 6th insurrection, and his later promotion of fundraising efforts for the violent offenders that were jailed at the insurrection.
This is all to say, no agency or organization within our government are free from the coup and upheaval Musk and Trump are angling to create. They will attempt to weaponize, subvert and contort just about every government tool to their own advantage if given the chance, and will simply raze any that do not provide utility to their oligarchical fantasies. At no point in history could a government employee deny that they may be faced with a task that may call their ethics into question, but this has become an apparent inevitability in the current administration.
If you are at all like me, and have expressed interest in government work, I ask you to sit with your gut feeling for a moment. It has become abundantly clear this second Trump presidency brings with it a certain vindictive fervor that was not present in the first. I reiterate that government work as a whole often can provoke feelings of ethical unease, and I certainly have felt it. What makes the current situation uniquely disquieting is the totality; there will be no corner of government that the administration will not try to leverage to its ends. It’s a role in history I am not willing to be complicit in and certainly will not be contributing to anytime soon.
