Law students, recent grads feel impact of federal job cuts

Lauren Ehrlich, a third-year student at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, was poised to work as an honors attorney for the IRS in Washington D.C. this fall upon finishing her studies.

But an email to her inbox in late January changed that.

Like many across the country, Ehrlich’s job offer was rescinded under President Donald Trump’s executive order issuing a federal government hiring freeze.

“I didn’t, like, have any inkling,” Ehrlich said. “I was definitely anxious, but I never assumed that it would actually happen.”

A Jan. 20 memo from the White House states that the freeze applies to all executive departments and agencies except for military personnel or positions related to national security, immigration enforcement, or public safety.

For many students nearing graduation and counting on a federal job, the freeze and other government efficiency workforce reductions sets them on a new path as they begin their legal careers. For some, the task of securing another job offer looms large.

IU Maurer and beyond

When news first began circulating online that students’ job offers had been rescinded under the executive order, the focus was primarily on those who had lost employment with the Attorney General’s Honors Program, a highly competitive federal attorney recruitment program under the Department of Justice.

But not every law student who lost their offer was in the DOJ program. Ehrlich, for example, was hired directly through the IRS.

“One of the really challenging aspects of this situation is that there isn’t a whole lot of transparency or information coming from the federal agencies,” said Nikia Gray, executive director of the National Association for Law Placement. “So the (law school) career service officers are really finding out … stuff from the students themselves.”

Gray said her organization, which provides career services for law students, won’t know how many students were affected by the freeze until months from now when they collect graduation data.

In the class of 2023, 954 graduates nationwide went to work for the federal government, according to data from the NALP. That number doesn’t vary much from year to year, Gray said.

Of that total, 252 students in the class of 2023 were in the DOJ honors program.

At IU Maurer, Ehrlich is the only prospective 2025 graduate impacted by the freeze, according to Anne Newton McFadden, dean of students at Maurer. But several other recent graduates have lost their federal jobs over the past few weeks, and another alum who was supposed to start a government honors position lost her role as well, McFadden said.

Officials at the Indiana University McKinney School of Law told The Indiana Lawyer that they didn’t immediately know if any of their students were impacted by the executive order. The University of Notre Dame Law School did not disclose whether any of their students were impacted.

For right now, the NALP has been working with law schools across the country to connect students who lost their jobs with new opportunities.

“Some students are being told by their contacts, just to hold on, and things might change. Other ones, they’re not able to get a response at all. So the information is coming in in kind of drips and drops from different sources,” Gray said.

At Maurer, faculty have been reaching out to alumni to see what positions are available for students, and vice versa.

“We’ve had a number of alums reach out to us to ask if there is any service they can provide and help they can provide to students who might be in vulnerable employment scenarios,” said Christiana Ochoa, dean of IU Maurer.

The law school has also created an online form that alumni and others can fill out if they have or know of a job opening.

Ehrlich was able to secure a new job quickly but is still grappling with the loss of the position.

“It was my whole dream, it was like, my life’s goal, and the fact that it was happening, everyone around me was like, ‘I knew that you were going to get there,’” she said. ..But it’s not happening anymore.”

Ripple effect

While this is not the first hiring freeze a president has implemented on federal agencies, this one has more immediate and deep effects, Ochoa said.

Trump issued a hiring freeze in 2017 during his first term in office, and former President Ronald Reagon implemented a freeze when he took office in 1981.

“It’s not the hiring freeze that is unique here,” Ochoa said. “It’s the speed at which it is being implemented and the broadness and the depth of the individuals being impacted.”

On top of the individual impact the freeze is having, the order is disproportionately impacting law schools not among the super elite likes of Harvard University, the University of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame or the University of Michigan.

Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame, wrote in a Jan. 23 blog post that most of the elite law schools send few students into government jobs.

In the class of 2023, 3.9% of Michigan students went into government jobs, while just 0.5% of Chicago students chose that path. Ochoa said that 22.4% of students from IU Maurer’s 2023 class entered government jobs.

“There will be a disparate impact on the graduates of schools across the country, and the career prospects for students who are not in that super elite group of law schools,” she said.

On top of law students having their job offers rescinded, countless other government employees are losing their posts.

Across the country, more than 200,000 federal workers have lost their jobs since Trump took office, according to ABC News. This number includes both employees that were fired from their positions and the 75,000 workers who accepted buyouts from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Lawyers who lost their positions and law students whose offers were rescinded will now be competing for the same openings elsewhere, Gray said.

“It’s a supply and demand problem. At the moment, there are more individuals looking for positions than there are positions to fill. So I think it’s a real challenge, and for some of these students, it’s going to interrupt their career a bit,” she said.

She’s hopeful for students, however, because the legal market is good at the moment. It may just take them longer to land on their feet, she said.

But the freeze could have a lasting effect on how law students see the federal government in the future. While government jobs were once considered more stable than jobs with law firms, younger students are watching what their peers are going through and may second guess how reliable these jobs really are.

“I think there’s going to be some long-term reputational damage that’s been done to the federal government as result of this, and they’re going to have to do a lot of work to build back up their pipeline,” Gray said.•