On Tuesday, many law students received a rather unfortunate email from the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Office of Attorney Recruitment & Management. The email read: “This email is about your application to the Attorney General’s Honors Program. Pursuant to the hiring freeze announced January 20, 2025, your job offer has been revoked.” Soon, rumors spread through the academy that many students had lost their post-graduation employment. By mid-day Wednesday, the New York Times had published an article confirming the rumors. 

DOJ justified its revocation of the job offers as necessary to implement President Trump’s memo ordering a hiring freeze. The memo instructs all agencies to freeze the hiring of civilian employees pending the issuance of a formal plan to reduce the size of the federal workforce. With one exception, the hiring freeze expires once the plan is issued. The hiring freeze remains in effect for the IRS until the Secretary of Treasury, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and DOGE determine that “it is in the national interest to lift the freeze.” The memo exempts “positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety” and positions that would “adversely impact the provision of Social Security, Medicare, or Veterans’ benefits.”

This is not the first hiring freeze ordered by a president. President Trump issued an almost identical memo during his first term in office.  The Office of Personnel Management imposed a hiring freeze on Senior Executive Service employees toward the end of President Obama’s second term. The Bush II Administration imposed a soft freeze by ordering that “no decision relating to hiring shall be made” until it is reviewed by the agency head. On the day of his inauguration, President Reagan issued a hiring freeze that looked similar to the one ordered by President Trump. President Carter imposed three hiring freezes during his presidency. Although not a hiring freeze per se, President Clinton instructed agencies to eliminate at least four percent of their civilian employees. 

Nor is this the first time that a hiring freeze has caused agencies to revoke job offers. President Reagan backdated his hiring freeze to November 5, 1980, resulting in the recission of some job offers. During the Reagan Administration, the DOJ sought an exception for the 114 lawyers offered jobs in the honors program. Although I was unable to independently verify whether the Reagan Administration rescinded jobs awarded through the DOJ Honors Program, recent law-school graduates hired by other agencies were certainly affected.

Ultimately, the National Treasury Employees Union brought a class-action lawsuit against the Reagan Administration on behalf of “all persons . . . who were issued written confirmation of their selection for employment within an [agency] between November 5, 1980, and January 20, 1981, and . . . were subsequently informed that the appointment was withdrawn.” The D.C. Circuit upheld the Reagan Administration’s decision to rescind the job offers in National Treasury Employees Union v. Reagan. In an opinion written by Judge Tamm, the court criticized the Reagan Administration’s decision: 

It appears to us that the federal government played hide-and-seek with job-seekers, assuring them that jobs awaited them and only later—on occasion, after the prospective employee had acted on the assurance of a job—reversing itself. Not one of the approximately 20,000 members of the class which is the subject of these cases received a letter stating that he had been conditionally selected, subject to budgetary factors. Not one received a letter stating that he had been conditionally selected, subject to the discretion of the appointing officer to change his mind at any time prior to the completion of the Standard Form 50. All class members received letters stating that they had been selected for employment and should report for work on a certain date in the future.

Nevertheless, the court concluded that the individuals were not “employees” under 5 U.S.C. §2105(a) because they had not “engaged in the performance of a Federal function under authority of law or an Executive act.” Therefore, the individuals did not enjoy the due-process protections afforded to federal employees by the civil service system.

The court also rejected the Union’s argument that the revocation of the job offers amounted to an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment. The court reasoned that “[t]he mere existence of a revocable appointment does not give a class member an entitlement. To hold otherwise would be to render meaningless the irrefutably revocable nature of the appointments, which is, as we have seen, a long-standing characteristic.”  

Finally, the court considered two statutory arguments. The first argument concerned a statutory provision that required OMB to provide the Veterans’ Administration with sufficient funds necessary to employ a certain number of employees. The court held that the hiring freeze would be void as-applied if it caused the Veterans’ Administration to fall below this level of employment. The second argument concerned whether the hiring freeze violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 because a hiring freeze “constitutes a refusal to spend appropriated funds.” The court refused to consider this question because it was advanced only upon appeal and was moot.

Other cases have emphasized that the federal government may rescind a job offer so long as the individual has not commenced their duties within the agency. Pratte v. National Labor Relations Board is the most relevant case to the decision to revoke the job offers of lawyers selected for the DOJ Honors Program. In that case, the Seventh Circuit upheld the NLRB’s decision to rescind a clerk position for a recent Harvard Law School graduate because of Reagan’s hiring freeze and subsequent budget cuts within the agency. Although the court was “sympathetic” to the plaintiff’s claim, it reaffirmed that “(1) an appointment to a federal job is revocable by a properly authorized person up to the time the employee actually commences the duties of the position; (2) the Government is not required to advise appointees that such revocation could occur; (3) a claim of estoppel will not lie if the appointment is so revoked because the appointee’s reliance thereon is unjustified.”

Law students are not the only individuals affected by the hiring freeze or President Trump’s personnel actions. On Lawfare, I have surveyed other consequences of the Trump Administration’s actions. Nevertheless, the decision to revoke the job offers of these young lawyers is misguided. The Department of Justice benefits from the Honors Program and its ability to cultivate the next generation of government lawyers. Many of these deserving students have worked hard for this opportunity. The fact that the federal government will not benefit from such a talented cohort of young lawyers is unfortunate.

Nicholas R. Bednar is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. His research interests include administrative law and bureaucratic politics.