Interest in government careers dipped after 2025 federal workforce purge, Harvard research finds

Following the Trump administration’s federal workforce purge in 2025, Americans’ interest in public sector careers has declined, a Harvard survey found.

Read more Cambridge emerges from intense back-and-forth battle with Natick in Division 1 baseball tourney

The research, conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s People Lab from December 2025 to March 2026, showed a 9 percent decrease in public service career attractiveness among all survey respondents. Among Democrats, the decline was more pronounced at 18 percent. Meanwhile Black Americans surveyed reported a whopping 41 percent decrease in government career interest.

“It’s really striking that we’re seeing such large gaps even in just a three-month period. And so, I want to see if this is something that will continue as we do more quarterly surveys,” said Elizabeth Linos, a Harvard public policy professor and faculty director of the People Lab. “People’s interest in government is very correlated with their trust in government.”

Last year, the federal workforce shrank by about 220,000 people following the Trump administration’s bureaucracy-slashing directives, led early on by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Black employees, especially women, were disproportionately affected by the job cuts.

Linos said the survey results cannot be separated from the context of this political moment.

“When the Trump administration came in — and DOGE in particular actively elevated that discourse that was attacking public servants, attacking the work that they did, eliminating agencies — [the government’s recruitment] problem becomes much more complicated,” she said. “Not only did we lose a lot of the talent that was already in the federal government, but now the discourse around what it means to be a government worker is much more negative than it needs to be.”

Even so, the survey found that a majority of Americans view public servants favorably.Sixty-eight percent of respondents found government workers to be competent, while 57 percent gave them positive marks for integrity. Still, private sector employees were generally more well regarded. For example, the survey recorded a 36-point gap between respondents’ evaluation of private sector employees’ ability to innovate compared to government workers.

Read more Patriots’ schedule of three preseason games announced

The strongest predictor of how Americans perceive government employees, the survey found, is party affiliation. Democrats generally hold more favorable views on public sector workers than Republicans and Independents. Partisan differences were especially prominent when respondents were asked about specific occupations within government.

Democrats were more than twice as likely to rate the integrity of election officials favorably. On the other hand, Republicans were more than four times as likely to hold positive views of ICE agents’ competence. Firefighters, meanwhile, were rated highly across the political spectrum.

“It’s hard to know what came first,” Linos said, “like whether or not this [perception] is a product of existing political polarization or if it’s causing it.”

What’s clear from the research, however, is that language matters when describing public employees. When called “bureaucrats,” the survey showed, government workers were more likely to be imagined as white, male, and belonging to the opposite political party of the survey respondent.

For Linos, the relationship between Americans’ perception of public employees and their faith in government services is inextricable.

“If you don’t invest in the people of government, in producing public sector agencies that can deliver, then people are going to assume that the agencies can’t,” she said. “That creates the sense that [government] is inefficient and wasteful over time.”

Read more Jaylen Brown’s Fort Point penthouse is back on the market for $4.9m