In December, Ryan Silien found out that he had secured an internship working on a United States Agency for International Development program in the Philippines. Mr. Silien, then a freshman at William & Mary, was elated.
His plans started to unravel once President Trump took office in January. U.S.A.I.D. was among the organizations targeted by Mr. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. By March, Mr. Silien’s internship offer had been swept away along with at least 7,000 jobs the department had deemed a waste of taxpayer dollars.
Beyond his panic and disappointment, Mr. Silien said he was a bit baffled that in its push for efficiency, the department championed by Mr. Trump and Elon Musk had done away with his unpaid internship.
The government was passing up “free labor by, arguably, some of the people who will be most passionate and excited to get involved in this work,” said Mr. Silien, 18.
The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts have pushed many lifetime civil servants out of their roles They have also disrupted people at the other end of the career spectrum: summer interns, those energetic new arrivals who count on internships to serve as the on-ramp to their professional lives. (Some, but not all, are paid for their efforts.)
Young people who hustled for competitive internships and research positions said they felt dejected when those offers were taken back. Their optimism gave way to a stressful scramble to find other roles or sources of income on short notice. Several second-guessed whether they really wanted to enter fields that seemed to be crumbling before their eyes.
“It made me question a little bit — to what extent do I really still want to work for the government?” Mr. Silien said.
Mr. Trump has described the federal layoffs as a way to cut costs and rid the government of diversity initiatives. After Mr. Musk retreated from the government in May, a White House spokesman told The New York Times that his team had “delivered remarkable results at an unprecedented pace.”
It is difficult to say just how many internship offers have been rescinded by federal agencies this year, said Carlos Mark Vera, a co-founder of the advocacy organization Pay Our Interns. He said he had heard from at least 100 students who had lost internships supported by federal funding.
Some had already bought flights and signed summer leases, he said. He worries that these students may next be boxed out of entry-level roles that are looking for applicants with internship experience.
“It’s depressing,” he added. “We’re losing an entire generation of people that aspire to be public servants, and now they’re like, ‘Screw that.’”
Summer roles have been rescinded from students who were offered positions supported by U.S.A.I.D., the National Institutes of Health, the Department of State, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, among other agencies. (Other positions survived: The White House still advertises its own unpaid internship program.)
Mr. Trump has also slashed medical research funding, affecting research programs for students studying science. Marlene McKinney, 20, an aspiring neurosurgeon at the City College of New York, had planned to spend her summer in a lab in Manhattan, studying the thermodynamic properties of elastic tissue proteins.
Her work had been funded through the U-RISE program, which provides financial support and mentorship to students from underrepresented backgrounds conducting biomedical research. In late March, Ms. McKinney found out that the grant, which received N.I.H. funding, was being suspended.
She began furiously searching for part-time jobs. “I was like, ‘Oh, great, I can’t work at the lab anymore,’” she said. “‘How am I going to pay my rent?’”
Ms. McKinney eventually found a new role, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. On the weekends, she goes into the lab where she had originally planned to spend her summer — working without pay, because she needs the research experience for her graduate school applications.
She is not giving up on working in health care. “I can’t see myself doing anything else,” she said.
Aidan Jimenez, another City College student whose research funding came under threat, said he was not sure how to build a career on such an unstable foundation. “There’s not a lot of point in planning what is going to happen when no one really knows what is happening with this current government,” said Mr. Jimenez, 19, who is studying math and applied physics.
Students whose programs were cut said opportunities were scarce by the time that their plans disintegrated. Mr. Silien had resigned himself to returning to his part-time job at a smoothie shop when a contact at U.S.A.I.D. helped him find a new role with a network of nonprofit organizations in the Philippines.
Anuva Wardah, 20, a student at Stony Brook University, said she sent in more than 100 fresh applications after her spot in the State Department’s U.S. Foreign Service Internship Program was rescinded. She eventually landed an internship in the Queens district attorney’s office.
Other students she knows who missed out on public service internships seemed to rapidly shift their focus. “I like to joke, they all switched to the evil side, and they all want to do consulting now,” she said.
Aziza Rashid, 21, a student at the University of Arizona, has become accustomed to being offered internships only to have them taken back. First, the psychology lab where she planned on working was defunded as a part of the N.I.H. cuts.
She regrouped and got a second internship offer, for a role in marketing at a skin care company. That one was rescinded, too. (The interviewer had mentioned that tariffs had taken a toll on the company.)
“I always knew it would be hard” to secure a summer position, she said. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
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