JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Despite all the layoffs from Elon Musk's DOGE group earlier this year and furloughs during a record-time government shutdown, there are some people who are optimistic about serving in the federal government. Jay Price of member station WUNC found them.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: They're Virginia Tech students who won highly competitive spaces in a pilot program that trains civilian workers for the Pentagon.
PEYTON COLEMAN: I think it's the mission, knowing that I'm going to go to work every day and be supporting the warfighter and doing something that's making a real impact out in the world.
PRICE: That's Peyton Coleman, a graduate student in business analytics, explaining what drew her to the program. It's called the Defense Civilian Training Corps, or DCTC, but think of it as a kind of ROTC for civilians. Students earn scholarships and get summer Defense Department internships. And just like ROTC cadets, they incur an obligation to serve, only in civilian positions. Greg Lowe is program director at Virginia Tech, 1 of 4 universities where DCTC is offered.
GREG LOWE: The purpose of this program is to serve as a talent factory for the Department of Defense. Traditionally, the department hires new graduates out of college, and you have to teach them the fundamentals of what we do.
PRICE: But by the time DCTC students graduate from the two-year program...
LOWE: They understand the lingo. They understand the concepts and the processes. They are ready on day one, but they're also adaptable for the future.
PRICE: For now, DCTC is solely focused on training them for jobs in acquisitions. Lowe says they work on real DOD problems during their internships.
LOWE: And then the goal is that those same agencies are the first to offer positions to them upon graduation.
PRICE: There are almost 60 students in the program at Virginia Tech and more at North Carolina A&T, Purdue and the University of Arizona. Brynt Parmeter was the Pentagon's chief talent officer until early this year. He said during the Biden administration, the Pentagon had hoped to expand the program to more universities and beyond acquisitions and to other types of DOD civilian work. But that was before the DOGE cutting chaos began. Parmeter, now at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, says when he left the government, DCTC was on the chopping block.
BRYNT PARMETER: There's no interest in pipelines of people. It was the cuts that mattered. And DCTC was perfectly ripe for that kind of thing.
PRICE: The Pentagon didn't respond to a question about the future of DCTC, but some in Congress continue to support it and are trying to mandate that the Trump administration must continue it. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution's foreign policy program says eliminating it would be irrational.
MICHAEL O'HANLON: It sort of eats the seed corn. The young, hungry, curious people are the ones you should want to incentivize to stay. We should want to promote those sorts of programs, not decimate them.
PRICE: And at some point, he says, the Pentagon will have no choice about prioritizing hiring again.
O'HANLON: We have 800,000 full-time government-employee civilians who do not wear the uniform to work doing various kinds of support activities for the Department of Defense, virtually all of which are crucial.
PRICE: Crucial workers who eventually leave or retire and must be replaced - some of them with hopeful young graduates like Peyton Coleman, who interned at the Defense Logistics Agency.
COLEMAN: I think it was really good seeing within DLA this summer how they handled the hiring freeze and seeing that they still were putting their people where they needed to be.
PRICE: And she figures where she needs to be is working for the Pentagon.
For NPR News, I'm Jay Price in Blacksburg, Virginia. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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