The Trump administration ended the Presidential Management Fellows Program in a late-night executive order Wednesday, axing a decades-old government initiative that has long been celebrated as a pipeline to draw talent into civil service careers.
The two-year, full-time fellowship brings recent graduate students into agencies across the government with pay, benefits, training and mentorship. It bills itself as “the premier leadership development program,” and has helped thousands of graduates get into government roles since its founding in 1977.
President Donald Trump instructed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to “promptly terminate” the program in the executive order, which targeted “elements of the Federal bureaucracy” that he had “determined are unnecessary.” The order also eliminated or dramatically diminished a handful of other programs and federal advisory committees, including the U.S. Institute of Peace, which works to prevent and resolve violent conflict, and the U.S. African Development Foundation, which invests in African grassroots enterprises.
