| What: | Creation of the Pathways Program |
| When: | President Barack Obama created the program by executive order in 2010. The Office of Personnel Management then launched Pathways via federal regulations in 2012. |
| Why it matters: | The Pathways Program shaped the way the government now recruits and retains early-career talent. Hiring young people into federal jobs has long been a pain point for many agencies. Despite the program’s challenges, it has continued to be the primary way agencies onboard young federal talent, now for 15 years running. |
The creation of the Pathways Program came from the simple need to replace the government’s internship program. But it quickly turned into an opportunity for agencies to completely rethink how they hire early-career federal employees.
Launched by a December 2010 executive order from then-President Barack Obama, the Pathways Program overhauled the way agencies were recruiting interns and other early-career talent. Pathways broadened the number of inroads for young federal employees, while aiming to ease the recruitment process for agencies.
Obama’s executive order highlighted the need for a federal workforce that encompasses the “enthusiasm, talents and unique perspectives” of students and recent graduates.
“The existing competitive hiring process for the federal civil service, however, is structured in a manner that, even at the entry level, favors job applicants who have significant previous work experience,” the 2010 order reads.
Once the executive order was in place, the Office of Personnel Management began the process of shaping the new early-career recruitment program. By May 2012, OPM had issued the final regulations to establish the Pathways Program, which over time became the federal government’s premier pipeline for early-career talent recruitment.
“We were struggling to bring early-career talent into the federal government — and when we were bringing in interns, we weren’t converting them into permanent jobs,” former OPM acting Director Rob Shriver said in an interview. “We thought that by centralizing and branding a governmentwide internship program, that could turbocharge agencies’ abilities to bring in more interns … and then convert successful interns into permanent job holders. That was the vision that we were trying to realize through Pathways.”
At the time Pathways was founded, Shriver was serving as deputy general counsel for policy at OPM. His role was to ensure any new or existing OPM programs, including Pathways, were legally sound.
For Pathways in particular, one critical part was ensuring the program wouldn’t run into the same legal issues as its predecessor.
The legal battle that led to Pathways
The Federal Career Internship Program, the predecessor to Pathways, was initially created in 2000 during the Clinton administration. The program was framed as one for federal interns, and meant to boost early-career hiring. But for years, FCIP received heavy criticism from federal unions, who argued agencies were using FCIP’s hiring authority to circumvent the government’s standard hiring rules for positions well past just federal internships.
Over time, it became clear that FCIP’s use was going beyond its intent, as the number of applicants agencies onboarded through the FCIP’s hiring authority increased steeply. In 2001, agencies made 411 hires through the program. Eight years later, there were 26,709 new hires through FCIP — a nearly 6,400% increase.
The National Treasury Employees Union took on a multi-year legal battle on behalf of two veteran applicants who were passed over for positions with the Department of Veterans Affairs. NTEU’s lawsuit eventually resulted in the dismantling of FCIP.
Once FCIP was taken down, there was an opportunity at OPM to change how the hiring process worked for early-career individuals who were interested in public service.
“This federal career intern program wasn’t really a recent graduates program. The Presidential Management Fellows program was strong, but was quite limited in scope. And the existing intern programs were not very widely used, resulting in a lot of interns that came and worked for the government, but never got converted into permanent positions,” Shriver said. “[For Pathways,] we did an extensive analysis about what the gaps were.”
The Pathways Program ultimately created three separate pipelines for ushering in early-career talent to the federal workforce. The Pathways internship program consolidated previously fragmented internship opportunities for current students. The brand-new Pathways recent graduates program opened doors to those who had recently completed a college degree. And the existing Presidential Management Fellows program was folded into Pathways, reserved for those who had completed an advanced degree.
“The approach makes all the sense in the world — that you would have one large, consolidated wraparound program with lanes within it,” Peter Morrissey, senior director of talent and strategy at the Volcker Alliance, said in an interview.
Mixed results in Pathways hires
The vision of what Pathways should be, however, didn’t exactly line up with reality. Because FCIP previously ran into legal trouble, Shriver said OPM created the Pathways Program to be “quite conservative from a legal risk perspective.”
Rather than the broad hiring flexibilities that FCIP had allowed, the new Pathways Program created a process similar to the standard competitive service hiring process. That made it less appealing for agencies to use, according to Shriver.
“I don’t think we were able to drive the kind of governmentwide uptake that we hoped to get — it wound up being pretty restrictive and not as streamlined as we had hoped,” Shriver said.
Despite the challenges, agencies were still able to recruit significant numbers of early-career talent through the program — at least at first. In fiscal 2013, the Pathways Program brought in 28,423 new hires, according to the Government Accountability Office.
But the governmentwide use of Pathways has evolved over time, with largely mixed results. Since the program’s creation, 10 agencies have decreased their use of Pathways, while six agencies have increased their use of the program, according to a 2021 OPM study.
As a result, the Pathways hiring numbers seen in 2013 had dropped by about two-thirds a decade later. In 2023, there were 10,299 new Pathways hires.
The declines in Pathways hires hit federal interns particularly hard. According to GAO, interns represented 93% of total Pathways hires in 2013 — but comprised just 63% of Pathways hires in 2023.
And GAO said because OPM wasn’t collecting information on why agencies stopped using Pathways, it was unclear how the program could be changed to make it a better option governmentwide.
“Without a process in place to collect and share lessons learned,” GAO wrote, “OPM is missing an opportunity to leverage stakeholders’ knowledge to improve the government’s ability to recruit, hire, retain and manage its early-career talent pipeline.”
The 2024 Pathways overhaul
Agencies’ pervasive challenges with Pathways led the Biden administration’s OPM to look for ways to revamp the program. In April 2024, OPM issued new final regulations for Pathways. The updates aimed to make the hiring authorities easier to use, and the program requirements easier to complete.
The Pathways overhaul last year marked the first major update to the program since its creation.
“We worked with colleges, universities, trade schools and community colleges to get their input on how Pathways was working,” Shriver said. “There were a number of places where there were bottlenecks, or where the eligibility criteria weren’t quite up to modern times.”
The new regulations made a number of changes, including lowering the requirements interns needed to complete to convert to a full-time position; giving agencies more time to convert interns into permanent positions; making individuals who have completed alternatives to four-year college degrees, such as Peace Corps or AmeriCorps, eligible for the program; and raising the General Schedule pay cap from GS-9 to GS-11 for recent graduates.
“The regulatory changes were really important at addressing some of the growing pains in the program’s first decade,” Morrissey of the Volcker Alliance said. “I think these were all the revealed lessons of the first decade, and it was important to have responded.”
The Biden administration took many other steps attempting to strengthen agencies’ ability to recruit and retain younger federal employees. For the summer of 2023, OPM created a “federal internship experience program” to offer current interns cross-agency opportunities for training, events and resources.
And in 2024, OPM created a governmentwide database for agencies to view and select eligible Pathways interns for permanent or term positions outside their home agency.
In its fiscal 2023 budget request, former President Joe Biden set a governmentwide goal of hiring 35,000 interns. Despite never reaching that goal, Shriver said there were still promising signs from the administration’s efforts.
“The federal government was on a very unhealthy trend of fewer and fewer people coming in under age 30,” Shriver said. “We were able to reverse that and see some pretty significant increases.”
Notably, the share of federal employees under age 30 increased by 13% during the Biden administration, according to data from the Office of Management and Budget. That increase brought young employees’ representation in government from 7% up to 8%. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of federal interns also increased by 33%.
Future remains uncertain for early-career hiring
Though the new Pathways regulations and many of the efforts toward better early-career recruitment are technically still in place, some federal workforce experts cast doubt that any resulting changes will show through over the next several years.
The Trump administration has, in many ways, taken steps in the opposite direction for the federal workforce. Agencies fell under a hiring freeze on President Donald Trump’s first day in office. And the last few months have revealed the administration’s push toward a much smaller federal workforce, with efforts underway to downsize through terminations and reductions in force (RIFs).
Michelle Amante, senior vice president of government programs at the Partnership for Public Service, expressed concerns that the Pathways Program’s recent overhaul won’t see the light of day because of the current and rapid workforce changes.
“All of that has been put aside,” Amante said. “Agencies are so overloaded right now with RIF plans and downsizing that this is not going to be a priority for anyone.”
Shriver called the Trump administration’s actions on the federal workforce “disastrous” for early-career recruitment. Many younger federal employees, in their first year or two on the job, were swept up in the recent terminations of probationary employees.
“Lots of young people have now had their experience with working for the federal government be that they were terminated,” Shriver said. “That’s going to be tough to recover from.”
Trump eliminates a Pathways branch
In February, Trump also signed an executive order to cut off one of the Pathways Program’s three branches: The Presidential Management Fellows program.
The PMF program, founded in 1977, focused on developing the next generation of federal leaders. The program is highly competitive, with just about one-tenth of applicants becoming finalists. During their two-year stint, PMFs are appointed to work at an agency. They can choose to take on six-month rotational assignments, and they have the option to participate in a leadership development program.
The main goals for fellows in the PMF program include finding opportunities to collaborate across agencies, learning multi-disciplinary skills and looking for creative ways to solve problems. There’s also a strong chance PMFs stay in government once they complete the program. According to the Federation of American Scientists, 87% of PMFs accept a permanent or term federal position once completing the two-year fellowship.
But Trump’s recent order called for the dismantling of the PMF program, saying that it was “unnecessary,” and that its removal was an effort toward reducing the size of the federal government.
The cancelation left fellows at a loss for what comes next. Many had already been terminated from their positions as part of the firings of probationary employees — even before Trump ended the PMF program. Many PMFs have since been reinstated, though they are currently on administrative leave while awaiting further instructions.
“I fought so hard to become a PMF and worked to prove my value as an accountant for the Forest Service,” Sydney Smith, a current PMF, said. “I wish I could return to work to bear some of that burden. It’s frustrating to be stuck on the sidelines.”
“The leadership potential for our cohort, and for PMFs across the government, is really high,” Smith continued. “I was heartbroken for the potential finalists and potential fellows who would never get the opportunities that I had. For decades and decades, we’ve brought a lot into the government, and I think we’ve really put our heart and soul into it.”
“Cutting the Presidential Management Fellows program just cuts federal hiring at the knees. It ensures that there is no easy way for very qualified, very bright people to enter the federal service,” another current PMF said, speaking anonymously for fear of professional retribution. “We’re hoping that if we keep highlighting all of the successes that come out of this program, and how much it helps federal service, that we can get the point across that this program should not have been terminated.”
Future possibilities for Pathways
John Berry, the OPM director at the time of the Pathways Program’s creation, saw a need for an influx of young federal talent. When he resigned from his position in 2013, he expressed hope for the future of the federal workforce.
“We’ve revitalized our appeal for students and recent graduates, with three clear and streamlined pathways that will keep the best talent coming into public service,” Berry wrote in an exit email to OPM staff. “We’ve taken the lead in boosting diversity and inclusion, with comprehensive plans from every agency, and partnerships both in and out of government.”
But it will be difficult to measure the long-term impacts of the Pathways Program, particularly after the recent shifts of the Trump administration.
“There is going to be a generation of feds who would have started at relatively junior positions, who will not have been hired,” Morrissey said. “We could be missing an entire generation of federal talent. That is going to show up over the coming decades.”
Amante, of the Partnership for Public Service, said even with the established early-career programs, she believes it will be a challenge to attract young talent moving forward.
“The federal government is no longer seen as a stable employer,” she said. “Even after the downsizing is in place and the government reaches the size that the Trump administration is expecting, you’re going to continue to lose staff. It’s unclear how you’re going to rebuild that workforce and keep that institutional knowledge that you need.”
Despite the Trump administration’s current push for agency RIFs and a federal hiring freeze, neither of those efforts will last forever. Eventually, the federal workforce will take on a new shape.
And once the federal workforce reaches that inflection point, Shriver said early-career employees will be critical.
“I don’t know whether it’s going to happen next year, or three years from now, or five years from now, but I do hold out hope that there will be an opportunity to rebuild,” Shriver said. “And when we’re doing that, I think it will be an enormous opportunity to take a fresh look at the ways that we bring early-career talent into the government and retain them.”
Join Federal News Network in celebrating our 25th anniversary as we recount 25 years of major federal moments that forever changed the government, and helped shape today’s federal workforce.
Copyright
© 2025 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.