Goodbye Foreign Policy Internships in the Executive Branch

Many posts have discussed federal employment and bureaucracy.

 Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff at The Washington Post:

Yasmine Mirhaji had planned out her last three years at American University’s School of International Service meticulously, taking classes on diplomacy and power. Inspired by her parents’ experience fleeing Iran to the United States decades ago, she dreamed about joining the State Department, which deals in foreign policy, and had applied for an internship at the agency

But moves by the Trump administration, in its first days in power, to slash funding and jobs across federal agencies has upended civil service prospects for scores of local college students, many of whom chose D.C. universities for their pipeline to federal and international careers.

First, Mirhaji, a 20-year-old junior, learned she’d have to reapply or start her internship search all over again. Then she wondered whether her degree was becoming obsolete. Now she is leaning toward law or graduate school, rather than trying to work in the federal government.
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“All my plans are scrapped,” said Mirhaji, who was raised in Westchester County, New York. “So many of the jobs our professors have proposed to us as potential opportunities don’t exist anymore.”

Government Data Visualization

 Philip Bump at WP:

The office of Los Angeles County Controller Kenneth Mejia is an exception.

Mejia, elected to the office last year, has a dedicated portal at which his team shares visualizations it has created. Below is a grim example, showing the locations in the city where unhoused residents have died in recent years.

(Los Angeles City Controller)

Sergio Perez, chief of accountability and oversight for Mejia’s office, explained that the visualizations were part of an effort to make the large amount of information gathered by the office more accessible. There are public-facing ones, like the map above, and ones created for policymakers that remain private.

“We think that the data should be leading public policy decisions, not assumptions or untested beliefs,” Perez told me when we spoke by phone on Friday.

That means a particular focus on housing issues, obviously a key concern for Angelenos and an issue that overlaps with homelessness. The controller’s office also has a map of affordable housing agreements enacted by the city over the last decade, essentially providing an index of places that housing is not (necessarily) egregiously expensive.

(Los Angeles City Controller)

The person behind these visualizations is the office’s director of technology and innovation, 19-year-old Kyler Chen. (“I’ve never felt older than when I’m in a meeting with him," Perez told me.) He and two interns collect and organize data before creating the presentations that are shared with the public. The intent, Perez said, was to “fill public data vacuums” that exist either because data is inaccessible or out-of-date.

A map showing areas where unhoused people are prohibited from congregating. (Los Angeles City Controller)

"Sometimes, the interns themselves appear to be running the show."

 Annie Karni at NYT:

When an alarmed Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, called the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, demanding to know why the president of the United States had suggested he was coming to the Capitol while Congress met to certify his election defeat, the person on the other end of the line had just turned 25 years old.

“I said, ‘I’ll run the traps on this,’” Cassidy Hutchinson, now 26, testified this week before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, recalling what she had told Mr. McCarthy, Republican of California. “I can assure you, we’re not coming to the Capitol.”

Ms. Hutchinson’s two hours of testimony provided a riveting account of President Donald J. Trump’s mind-set and actions the day of the mob attack and situated the young aide — an assistant by title, but a gatekeeper in practice — at the very center of some of the most sensitive conversations and events of that day.

It also pulled back the curtain on a little-acknowledged truth about how Washington works: The capital’s power centers may be helmed largely by the geriatric set, but they are fueled by recent college graduates, often with little to no previous job experience beyond an internship. And while many of those young players rank low on the official food chain, their proximity to the pinnacle of power gives them disproportionate influence, and a front-row seat to critical moments that can define the country.

Sometimes, the interns themselves appear to be running the show.

After the House investigative committee accused Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, of attempting to hand-deliver to Vice President Mike Pence a slate of false electoral votes for Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson, 67, blamed the incident on a young underling. He claimed that an unidentified “House intern” had instructed his staff to give the list of fake electors to Mr. Pence.

Other former Trump aides who have appeared in video testimony during the Jan. 6 hearings include Nick Luna, now 35, Mr. Trump’s former body man; Sarah Matthews, now 27, a former deputy White House press secretary; and Ben Williamson, now 29, like Ms. Hutchinson a former aide to Mark Meadows, the final Trump White House chief of staff.

The committee has also featured some of its own young-looking investigators in videos laying out its work.

Summer Jobs, Internships, and Inequality

Ben Casselman writes at FiveThirtyEight:

Young Americans from low-income families have been especially hard-hit by the decline in summer employment. According to data from the Current Population Survey, teenagers whose families make less than $20,000 per year are now less than half as likely to work as those from families who earn at least $100,000, and, unlike their wealthier peers, low-income teens have seen hardly any rebound in employment since the recession ended. (Black and Hispanic teens, too, have far lower employment rates than whites.)

Teens from less privileged backgrounds face numerous barriers to finding jobs. They are less likely to own a car (or have access to one), and often live in areas where jobs are scarce. Their parents are less likely to be able to help them get a foot in the door at a local business. They may attend schools that are, or are perceived as, inferior, making them less attractive to prospective employers. And they may face discrimination based on race, class or other factors. None of those barriers is new, of course, but they may have grown higher as the U.S. has become more unequal and more segregated by class.

The Ford Foundation's Darren Walker writes at The New York Times:

We often hear that success is “all about the people you know” — as if it’s just a matter of equal-opportunity relationship building. We rarely talk about how one knows them, or about the privilege that has become a prerequisite to knowing the right people. I sometimes get calls and emails from friends seeking help in landing internships for their children. I understand what they’re doing; this is part of being a parent. Still, it’s a reminder that America’s current internship system, in which contacts and money matter more than talent, contributes to an economy in which access and opportunity go to the people who already have the most of both.

The stakes of America’s broken internship system are high. As report after report reminds us, this generation of students faces significantly worse job prospects than its predecessors. Without the short-term opportunities to help them learn, grow, connect with mentors and begin climbing the earnings curve, many promising young people with limited means are denied the chance to rise as high as their talent will take them.

Campaign Internships and Hard Lessons

At The Los Angeles Times, Jason Song reports on a program at Occidental College.

In what is believed to be the only college program of its kind, the undergraduates in the Campaign Semester course spent at least 2 1/2 months, often seven days a week, 12 hours a day, working on behalf of candidates in contested states.

None won.

Many were resoundingly defeated, although two students worked for the reelection campaign of Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who is in a runoff. All of the students worked for Democratic candidates; Republicans swept the mid-terms and took control of the House and Senate.

...
Students participating in the program receive full college credit for volunteering. They can work for candidates in either party but it must be in a battleground state. In the past, undergraduates have worked for such candidates as Mitt Romney and Linda Lingle, a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for a Senate seat in Hawaii in 2012.

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Most said they were shocked when their candidates lost. Kaminsky was so sure that Udall would be reelected that when the race was called in his opponent's favor, the news didn't sink in for a few moments, she said.

"It was devastating," Kaminsky said, especially since she realized that many of the other people she had been working with didn't know what they would do next. "Everyone was out of a job," she said.

Other students were even more emotional. Early election night, Tieman started driving from one campaign office to another when Hagan was in the lead. She sang aloud as she drove, excited for the victory.

When it was clear Hagan was going to lose, Tieman began "gross-sobbing and ugly-crying."

"It felt like everything I had poured my heart and soul into ended up not meaning anything," she said.

The two professors teaching the course — Peter Dreier and Regina Freer — were concerned enough that they asked the religious counselor to visit the class. They said their students seemed to be coping well.

Interns, Harassment, and Civil Rights

ProPublica looks at the civil rights of unpaid interns, starting with a 1994 harassment suit by Bridget O'Connor:

Yet when O’Connor filed a lawsuit, her sexual harassment claims were dismissed because she was an unpaid intern. A federal appeals court affirmed the decision to throw out the claim.

Unpaid interns miss out on wages and employment benefits, but they can also find themselves in “legal limbo” when it comes to civil rights, according to law professor and intern labor rights advocate David Yamada. The O’Connor decision (the leading ruling on the matter, according to Yamada) held that because they don’t get a paycheck, unpaid interns are not “employees” under the Civil Rights Act — and thus, they’re not protected.

Federal policies echo court rulings. The laws enforced by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including the Civil Rights Act, don’t cover interns unless they receive “significant remuneration,” according to commission spokesperson Joseph Olivares.

“At least with respect to the federal law that we enforce, an unpaid intern would not be legally protected by our laws prohibiting sexual harassment,” Olivares said in an email to ProPublica.

Careless Journalist, Reckless Intern

An incident in Oakland is a cautionary tale about haste in reporting and the hazards of internships.

KTVU in Oakland has apologized after a news anchor read offensive fake names of Asiana flight 214 pilots. KTVU's statement:

We made several mistakes when we received this information. First, we never read the names out loud, phonetically sounding them out.

Then, during our phone call to the NTSB where the person confirmed the spellings of the names, we never asked that person to give us their position with the agency.

We heard this person verify the information without questioning who they were and then rushed the names on our noon newscast.

Shortly before 6 p.m. Friday, the NTSB issued the following statement:

The National Transportation Safety Board apologizes for inaccurate and offensive names that were mistakenly confirmed as those of the pilots. A summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft. We work hard to ensure that only appropriate factual information regarding an investigation is released and deeply regret today's incident. Appropriate actions will be taken to ensure that such a serious error is not repeated.

The full NTSB statement can be found here.

Even with this statement from the NTSB, KTVU accepts full responsibility for this mistake.

We issued an apology later in the noon newscast, and we also apologized on our website and on our social media sites.

We have a lot of good people here at KTVU Channel 2. We pride ourselves on getting it right and having the highest of standards and integrity.

Clearly, on Friday, that didn't happen. So again, from everyone here at KTVU, we offer our sincerest apology.

The statement does not answer a couple of important questions:

• If the station called NTSB just to "confirm," then where did it get the fake names in the first place?
• Could anyone have made a phone call about the names without ever saying them out loud? 

Internships

An earlier post dealt with federal policy on internship programs. Today, Inside Higher Ed reports:

Colleges want to graduate seasoned workers who've had myriad internship opportunities, but can’t always tell which internships are legitimate and don’t want to scare off potential employers by cracking down on what they offer.

Well-meaning businesses want productive interns, but many say they can’t afford to pay them anymore.

Ross Perlin, a veteran of the unpaid internship and a researcher for the Himalayan Languages Project, in China, decided three years ago to investigate some of the issues that arise when these conflicting interests collide. What he found can be inferred through the title of his new book – Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (Verso).

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“I do think that schools have to look at what they’re doing in terms of promoting unpaid, unstructured opportunities at for-profit companies that seem to be illegal under U.S. labor law,” Perlin said. “It’s something that we really need to pay attention to, and is a contributor at the deepest level to widening inequality.”

There is less controversy surrounding structured internships in government and the nonprofit sector. Here are examples of such programs in Washington, DC:

• The Central Intelligence Agency
• The State Department
• The Secret Service
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Labor
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Center for American Progress (liberal nonprofit)
• Heritage Foundation (conservative nonprofit)
• Cato Institute (libertarian nonprofit)
• The White House

Hero Intern

Daniel Hernandez, of the University of Arizona, is an intern for Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). On the day of the shooting, his quick thinking proved crucial. NPR quotes his account:

I came in at about 9:15 and I was assigned to help staff this event as an intern. I helped set up. At about 10 a.m. the event started. A few minutes later we heard gunshots. I then ran toward the congresswoman and those who I assumed would likely be injured.

The first thing I started to do was to try and check for pulses as well as to see who was still breathing. I got to do that for two or three people before I actually realized that the congresswoman had been one of the people who had been hit. When I realized that congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been hit, she became my top priority because she had not only been hit with a bullet but she had also been hit in the head.

I didn't notice any other injuries but I did notice that the position in which she was in was one where there was some danger of possible asphyxiation from the blood loss. So the first thing I did was to pick her up and prop her up against my chest to make sure that she could breathe properly. Once I was sure that she was able to breathe properly and wouldn't asphyxiate, the next thing I did was to apply pressure to her wound to make sure that we could stem the blood loss.

He did, and she survived.

Internship Politics

The Washington Post reports:

President Obama plans to issue an executive order, perhaps as early as this week, ending a federal internship program that critics say circumvents proper hiring practices.

Since it began in 2001, the Federal Career Intern Program has been used to hire more than 100,000 people - few of them interns as traditionally understood and many of them border and customs officers who later became permanent-status federal employees.

The program has drawn fire from federal employee unions and from the government board that oversees federal hiring practices, which ruled in November that the program undermined the rights of veterans, in particular, who were seeking federal work.

According to a draft copy of the executive order, which The Washington Post obtained from a person involved with the review process, the program will be terminated in March and be replaced with a program clearly designed to provide short-term federal work opportunities for recent graduates of schools of all kinds.

The Post follows up:

The federal internship program that President Obama plans to shut down in March has been criticized by union leaders for "abuses" that led to thousands of new hires that short-circuited the government's sometimes lengthy process for filling jobs.

But what were abuses to some, including the board that oversees federal hiring practices, were to many managers a welcome system of recruiting the best talent to their agencies. And they say scrapping the program in favor of one geared solely to recent school graduates will leave them at a big disadvantage.

"Taking any tool away from us when we're trying to make it easier for people to get hired is a bit like throwing out the baby with the bath water," said Toni Dawsey, who is retiring this week as chief of human capital for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "It's a real disappointment. The federal government is an old workforce. We need to bring in a new generation faster."

In July, the New York Times reported:

But the willingness of many young people to sacrifice pay for experience has led a number of states as well as the federal government to take a close look at the legality of hiring young people to work free. In April, the Obama administration issued a fact sheet listing six criteria aimed at preventing employers from violating the Fair Labor Standards Act with their unpaid internship programs. Among the stipulations: that the training the intern receives must be similar to training that can be obtained in an educational setting, that unpaid interns don’t displace a paid employee, and that the employer does not derive any “benefit” from the intern’s work.

The guidelines, from the Labor Department, have left employers scrambling to bulletproof their internship programs, said Camille Olson, a management-side employment attorney, who represents companies who have been dealing with this issue. Some employers, she said, have converted to paid internships but in the process have cut back on the number of posts they can offer. Others have abandoned their programs altogether.

Oscar Michelen, a labor lawyer in New York, said his son, a junior at Penn State, had secured a paid internship for the summer, but during his last week of classes the company suddenly pulled back the offer. “Companies were cutting back on the number,” he said. “They said we can only offer paid positions to rising seniors.” (The young man was able to find a six-week paid position at another firm.)

Dave Phillipson, the organizer of CEO Space, a California-based network of entrepreneurs, said he had been working on starting an internship program this summer but abandoned it “because of this silly ruling.”