Pretty famously, the current administration has laid lots of people off, applied loyalty tests, hired and fired based on ideology, shifted funding priorities, and strongly changed communication with the general public. To some extent this happens with every administration, but I think it has been more pronounced in this case.
If you work for a government agency or for an organization that in some way depends on government funding, have you noticed any changes in what your job is, how you are expected to do it, or how you are communicated with? Have leadership styles changed?
I'm especially interested in federal government connections, but state or local government jobs might also have been affected (or not affected). I'd like to shift careers and government was a top contender until recently, when it seemed, at least from the news headlines and a few social media posts here and there, to become both more complicated to work for, and more difficult to get hired.
I'm interested in any experiences you've had. If you need a throwaway account to dish the dirt, that's great. If you really haven't noticed any change, I'm interested in that, too (because that might mean I could still do something like this).
This is so dependent on the role. I’m in state government and at my agency there haven’t been any changes but if you’re working, for example, for an agency that provides public benefits in some way (Medicaid, snap, etc) you’re definitely going to feel the impact.
Oh, good to know. Those are the state agencies I've been most interested in.
I worked at a company where 80% of revenue came from government contracts for healthcare policy evaluation. DOGE capriciously canceled many contracts and the company laid off 30% of its workforce last year. I left shortly after. Things have somewhat recovered from what I understand, but the type of work has changed. More analytics and setting up LLM workflows, less policy evaluation.
Did you work at MITRE? Or did our companies just have almost exactly the same experience?
Thanks for that. It's great information.
I got laid off.
Damn. I'm sorry that happened.
the short term looks chaotic but honestly the 5 year view is what worries me more. a lot of this data infrastructure and institutional knowledge takes years to rebuild once its gone. the people who leave dont just come back when the political winds shift, they move on. some of the damage from defunding or reorganizing agencies wont show up in the data until way later.
Yeah, we got a few contracts cut, led to some layoffs. Nothing too disastrous but definitely not ideal.
i think one thing people outside government often underestimate is how much uncertainty changes day-to-day work, even before any actual policy changes reach your team. if funding, priorities, or staffing feel like they could shift every few months, people naturally become more cautious about starting long-term work. i'd be interested in hearing whether that's been a bigger factor than the policy changes themselves.
Don’t do it. I don’t want to get into the details on a public post, but I was a data scientist for the federal government for three years on a team of data scientists who genuinely loved the work we did. Over the past year, over half of us have left including myself. Many agencies are struggling now bc the RIFs and forced early retirements resulted in a lot of agency knowledge just evaporating as well as not having enough people to complete the work. Morale is terrible for a lot of reasons, including being overworked, having job security stripped away, and the administration actively trying to make life worse to encourage people to quit. And they are trying to make it easier to lay people off while also implementing things like new essays that require you to swear fealty to them. If you have any other options, I would explore them first and maybe try again after 2028.
I suppose this is aimed at USA based data scientists?
Oh, yes. Sorry. Should have specified.
My company lost 2/3 of its funding shortly after DOGE and there were layoffs and people who left to avoid layoff. We were doing research in remote detection of chemical warfare agents.
I work for an org that does a lot of work with state and federal gov. When the admin change happened all of our fed work got put on hold, with the assumption that everything that was there had a 50% chance of getting cut. I think <5 of the 50ish projects came back. Research projects that were finished got scrapped and we weren't allowed to talk to them, or the results. My job has mostly been left unchanged, but the overall inefficiency of the new administration for the sake of only posturing and sending a message has been almost unbelievable.
Just wait until the administration changes. People’s workload has increased immensely and upward mobility is being thwarted depending on the agency, unless you work for DHS or something. At least that’s what everyone is saying. You’d probably earn more money in private anyway. Just transition over to government when you have more experience under your belt. It’ll probably be better since mentorship is likely lacking due to everyone being stressed/having a lot of work to do.
Data scientist here in fed contracting. It has been pretty chaotic with DOGE cutting everything but it seems to be going a little more normal now. The big problem I have been seeing is change in leadership and tons of data requests from above clogging our workflows. Other than that the job itself is unchanged. I am worried about data quality across the government as with the firing a lot of departments were gutted.