Donald Trump’s pledge to take a buzz saw to the federal bureaucracy has caused plenty of anxiety, but not an exodus of career civil servants hoping to land jobs at the Capitol, or at least not yet.
Instead, the post-election job market on the Hill largely resembles previous years, with things looking predictably rosier for the winning party’s workers.
Republican aides are enjoying their options, with the GOP set to secure a trifecta of control in the Senate, House and White House. For Democrats, it’s a hiring manager’s market, which can be a bittersweet perk for incoming lawmakers.
“You’ll be able to put together a top-notch office,” said one high-ranking staffer for a retiring Democratic representative, who asked not to be named as he conducts his own job search. “You have your choice of current Hill staffers and individuals from the [Biden] administration looking to get back on the Hill, as well as campaign staffers returning to D.C.”
Hiring is in full swing, with more than 60 newly elected representatives and 12 newly elected senators racing to staff up. Despite the GOP sweep, the margins in Congress remain slim, with Republicans flipping four seats in the Senate and Democrats actually picking up one in the House.
That sets up a tight game of musical chairs in members’ offices, where the average House member employed eight Washington-based staffers as of 2023 and the average senator had 25 as of 2022, according to the Congressional Research Service. On committees, the majority party employs more aides than the minority, which means that as Republicans take over the Senate, they will be busy adding staff.
Whenever control of the White House changes, around 4,000 political appointees from the outgoing administration (including roughly 1,200 requiring Senate confirmation) will be looking for work, and about the same number of roles will open up under the incoming president, sometimes luring senior talent away from the Capitol.
One staffer tapped for a job in the new administration is James Braid, who worked for Vice President-elect JD Vance in the Senate. Braid won’t be going too far; he will serve as Trump’s head legislative liaison.
On top of all that, K Street’s desire to curry favor with power means lobbying firms and trade associations are looking to add more Republicans to their ranks.
However tough it is right now for Democratic job-seekers, it’s nothing like the Republican wave of 2010, some aides recalled.
“That was, mathematically, the worst cycle I had ever been a part of,” said one chief of staff to an outgoing Democratic representative, who has worked on and off the Hill since 2008. “I had a lot of friends back then who were forced to move back home and leave politics altogether because they couldn’t afford to live without a paycheck here.”
This year, almost everyone in his office has already landed work, he said, except for two: a very junior staffer and himself, though both have some leads. “At the chief level, there’s definitely some frustration,” he said.
He’s been picky so far, aiming to advance to a more senior member, so he hasn’t looked at the lower-hanging fruit, like working for one of the more than 30 incoming freshman House Democrats or exploring opportunities back on K Street.
Meanwhile, outside groups are keeping tabs on the hiring landscape, watching for key moves and updating their Rolodexes. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a nonprofit that advocates for staff demographics that better match the country’s, recently launched a diversity tracker for top positions, which shows the Hill has a ways to go to meet that metric.
‘A lot of nervousness’
An added uncertainty looms over the broader job market in Washington, thanks to Trump’s plans to purge the executive branch. He has threatened to target career civil servants, in the name of promoting “government efficiency” and clearing out the “deep state.”
While the president can’t hire or fire workers in the legislative branch, some fear Trump’s quest could create a ripple effect that reaches beyond the executive agencies.
Toward the end of his first term, Trump sought to remove civil service protections from potentially tens of thousands of positions via an executive order, creating a new classification known as Schedule F. The Biden administration squashed Schedule F, but now Trump has picked a man who tried to start implementing it, Russell Vought, to once again run the Office of Management and Budget.
Even though he disavowed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint during the campaign, Trump has since tapped many of its authors for his administration, including Vought, who wrote a chapter on expanding the president’s executive powers.
On Tuesday, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., asked for unanimous consent to pass a bill that would block a federal employee reclassification like Schedule F; Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri objected.
The incoming administration has also signaled it wants federal employees to return to the office five days a week, after many have enjoyed flexible work-from-home policies since the pandemic. And the administration is once again expected to try relocating some federal offices out of the Washington metro area, which is home to about 320,000 federal workers. Trump’s allies have said they expect the moves will nudge thousands of career bureaucrats to quit.
Collectively, that would mean a deluge of well-educated, civic-minded workers with considerable government experience — people with similar resumes to Hill staffers — into the local job market.
So far, it hasn’t happened, said Stephen Springer, a managing partner at Major, Lindsey & Africa, a legal recruitment firm. “There’s a lot of nervousness,” he said, leading lots of people who thought they’d be federal government lifers to reach out to get a sense of the market, worried that they’ll be fired or forced out after Trump takes office.
Still, many have adopted a wait-and-see approach. They have updated their resumes, but held off on shopping them around. Executive branch lawyers don’t often compete directly for private-sector jobs with attorneys leaving the Hill, said Springer, who noted the latter tend to seek lobbying jobs rather than firm positions.
If the administration does manage to clear out huge numbers of federal lawyers, the private sector will have trouble absorbing them all, said Springer. “There are going to be a bunch of people that, if they are unlucky enough to get their jobs cut or relocated, they’re going to have a hard time, at least in this market.”
With the Trump administration promising to take an ax to the federal regulatory state, the impact, at least in the short term, could be chaotic. And “with chaos comes a lot of legal work,” Springer said.
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