On Monday, the Washington Post ran an article with the headline “Millennials exit the federal workforce as government jobs lose their allure.”
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My first thought was: “Wait, people actually supposed working for the government would be a sexy endeavor?” As a former full-time government employee, I can attest to the fact that such a career path is rarely, if ever, tantalizing.
Then I read the first sentence and the article title made more sense: “Six years after candidate Barack Obama vowed to make working for government ‘cool again,’ federal hiring of young people is instead tailing off and many millennials are heading for the door.”
Back in 2008, Barack Obama guaranteed the throngs of young voters spellbound by his message of “hope and change” that they, themselves, would be the drivers of his national renovation.
During the early days of the Obama administration Millennials took the president up on his assurance that federal employment would become a lustrous pursuit. According to the Post article, there was an initial “hiring boom of young employees” who were drawn to the prospects of meaningful service.
Two years into the president’s second term, though, it now looks like the promise to increase the hip factor of government work was more hope than change.
Should we be surprised by this development? Hardly.
If there is anything that can squash youthful idealism better than government bureaucracy, I can’t think of it. Unsurprisingly, the grander the scale of a bureaucracy, the more suffocating it is. I once was an employee of my home state, and during my 40-hour workweek I was shuffling paper more than half the time. With that experience behind me, I cannot imagine the soul-crushing amount of pencil pushing most federal jobs require.
And it’s not just workplace tedium that’s running young professionals away from D.C. The federal government is having a hard time getting twenty-somethings in the door at all. Why? Because the bureaucracy is so inefficient, it struggles to even hire for itself.
The Pathways internship program, which was designed to fill government rosters with promising talent, “continues to suffer from agencies’ poor training of hiring staffs, widespread confusion over who is eligible, and a weak system for reviewing a deluge of applications.”
President Obama has been called out for his penchant for fibbing (i.e. “You can keep it”), but promising to elevate the coolness of government work might be one of his biggest whoppers.
Was it one of his most damaging deceptions? No. But there was no way it would ever become a reality.
Here’s why: the problems Millennials have with federal work are directly related to the immensity of the government. The lumbering enormity of the bureaucracy limits the young worker’s ability to feel they are meaningfully contributing to the betterment of their country.
New federal workers compound bureaucratic heft, which makes it increasingly difficult to accomplish anything. This circumstance creates frustration among the younger idealists, who eventually decide to pursue other professional opportunities.
President Obama’s desire to increase the number of young workers in his administration ironically helped make them want to leave.
Impassioned Millennials are realizing that due to the problematic size of bureaucracy, they can make bigger differences in the private sector. This flies directly in the face of liberal philosophy, which views government as the most effective vehicle for bettering a society.
Washington’s youth exodus is a testament to the incompetence of large government. It also highlights the fact that Washington bureaucracy will never be cool.
At least not until it shrinks considerably.