200,000 federal employees have left in 18 months. The ones who left had decades of experience. At the EPA, departing staff had 30.3 years of median tenure. The staff who stayed had 10.8. That 20-year gap is the difference between a nuclear inspector who spots a failing pattern and one who follows a checklist.
Dam safety, food testing, air traffic control, weather forecasting, and veterans' healthcare all lost their most experienced people at the same time. These are not jobs you backfill with a posting. A nuclear safety inspector needs years of field experience. A dam engineer needs decades of site-specific knowledge. A VA clinician needs relationships with patients who trust them.
The federal hiring freeze makes this worse. Agencies cannot replace what they lost. The mentorship pipeline that transferred knowledge from senior to junior staff was broken when senior staff left before training their replacements.
I am asking you to lift the federal hiring freeze for safety-critical positions, fund accelerated recruitment for agencies that lost more than 20% of senior staff, and require agencies to report institutional knowledge gaps to Congress quarterly. The public depends on experienced federal workers for safety. That expertise is disappearing and it is not coming back on its own.
