WASHINGTON—The Federal Career Intern Program (FCIP), enacted by executive order in 2000, was designed to provide two-year training and development internships to help ensure that the best and brightest could join the federal workforce.
But over time, the FCIP, which is marketed heavily to students, may have deviated from its original intent, becoming more of just a hassle-free way to hire.
It has become the hiring method of choice for many agencies. It allows recruiting to be done through narrow channels, such as college campuses, and for recruiters to avoid longer competitive hiring procedures.
The program has been under scrutiny by the Obama administration since earlier this year, and the Washington Post reported that President Obama may issue an executive order to end the program as early as this week. The president issued a memorandum in May telling the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review FCIP and make confidential recommendations.
The Merit System Protection Board (MSPB), the executive branch body charged with handling employee merit system complaints, has issued multiple reports detailing alleged abuses of the program. By far the biggest impact has been limiting public competition for government jobs.
When the FCIP is used for recruitment, unintended consequences can occur. Thousands of prospective applicants, including qualified veterans, can be effectively shut out from knowing about the government job postings, and this has upset federal employees unions and veterans, who feel their rights to jobs under the veterans’ preference provisions are being violated.
Larry Evans, a Department of Veterans Affairs file clerk, complained to MSPB that Veteran Affairs violated his preference rights as a veteran when it used FCIP to fill nine openings for veterans’ service representatives in its Columbia, S.C. facility.
Evans received a positive ruling in November, which also heightened public awareness of unfair practices under the program.
MSPB ruled the federal government has improperly placed FCIP positions in the excepted service category, which allowed agencies to avoid the legal requirement to notify the public that competitive service vacancies were available.
Further, it ruled FCIP violates veterans’ preference laws because it doesn’t require the government to justify the placement of positions in the excepted service. It said FCIP had been used to fill positions with non-veterans, who ordinarily should not have been picked ahead of qualified veterans.
MSPB has also stated in previous reports that the program’s mandate of “training and development” is often not being fulfilled, or fulfilled to a satisfactory level. There are also concerns that the program's two year probation period is unfair to new federal hires, who normally go through one year of probation.
According to MSPB, by 2005, FCIP had become the third most commonly used hiring authority in the government, rising from 400 employees in the first year, to nearly 10,000 by 2005. The program’s flexibility fueled its popularity, MSPB found.
Agencies use FCIP to hire mainly for lower-level positions, grades GS-5 through GS-9. According to the report, 81 percent of 2001 hires still worked for the government.
Under the original executive order, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was to provide oversight and “prescribe such regulation as it determines necessary to carry out the purpose of this order.” But actual recruitment, and administration is carried out at the agency level, resulting in a swath of differing practices.
Since 2003, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has used FCIP as its exclusive method for hiring all incoming Customs and Border Protection Officers, according to the National Treasure Employees Union (NTEU), the nation’s largest union representing federal employees.
“The FCIP turns the whole concept of an ‘internship’ program on its head, particularly by agencies like CBP and FDIC, which use FCIP authority to hire nearly all incoming entry level employees as ‘interns,’” said Colleen M. Kelley, National President of NTEU in testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management and the Federal Workforce, earlier this year.
The union has been leading the charge against FCIP for years. In 2007 it filed a federal suit against OPM challenging the legality of the FCIP regulations. In 2009, a favorable ruling allowed the challenge to proceed. Results are pending.
“Because it is easy to see how FCIP is not an internship program, NTEU believes that it is crucial that FCIP be recognized for what it is, and be terminated without delay,” said Kelley.
