Last year, when I had finally navigated the U.S. government’s new online retirement portal for federal employees and hit the button to submit my application, a message appeared on my screen that said, simply: Thank you for your service. Nearly three decades after starting my government career, I was surprised to find that those five words meant a great deal to me, automated or not.

Working for the federal government as a newly minted lawyer is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. I spent the entirety of my federal tenure at the U.S. Department of Labor, the steward of many of the seminal labor laws that protect our nation’s workers: their pay, health and safety, and retirement. It was a thrilling place to be. When I started at Labor in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich had just reinvented government, Bill Clinton was in office and the front entrance of the federal courthouse across the street from the Department’s headquarters was teeming with reporters covering Ken Starr’s grand jury proceedings. We had brand-new desktop computers that were hooked up to something referred to as the World Wide Web, but there were plenty of typewriters still in use throughout the building. The excitement of being part of the inner workings of government was tempered by the magnitude of a potential misstep; an oft-cited mantra by D.C. policymakers was (and still is), what would this look like if it was written up in The Washington Post? With this warning in mind, I commenced my 27-year-long career as an employee of the federal government.

What is it like to have the government as your client? One of my roles as an attorney for the Labor Department was to argue cases in the U.S. Courts of Appeals across the country. In private practice, senior partners represent their clients in court, supported by their less experienced associates. The federal government flips that script, sending its greenest attorneys into the line of fire to learn their trade. Standing up in federal court and announcing that you are there as a representative of the United States is a pretty awesome thing. But the stakes are high. As a federal attorney you are there to articulate your client’s position, every syllable of which has been cleared through the highest levels of government, and you do not have any authority, whatsoever, to deviate from your brief. Which means, in the worst case scenario, standing in front of three highly intelligent individuals wearing black robes for what seems like an interminable period of time, continuing to defend a position that one or more of them have already declared to you, loudly and forcefully, to be indefensible–because unlike a private sector attorney, your position is the position of the United States of America and you are stuck with it even if changing it might help you to win your case, or at least to sit down.

As a government attorney, Supreme Court rulings dictate much of your practice. Over the course of nearly 30 years, I witnessed both the rise and the fall of judicial deference to agency decisionmaking, effectuated through a series of Supreme Court opinions. Agency rulemaking, particularly in a worker protection agency with laws dating back to the 1930s, is a big deal, because it gives each administration the opportunity to put its stamp on the way in which the law is interpreted and ultimately enforced. Regulatory timelines are set, briefing memos are written, stakeholder and Congressional and White House meetings scheduled, economic analyses and various number crunching exercises commence, public comments are sought and reviewed, internal positions change and further evolve, and daily deadlines morph from COB (close-of-business) to HOP (heads-on-pillows). And then, after the regulation is published, you are usually sued, which means that all of that hard work might go down the drain, either to be shelved for a later date or to be abandoned forever. But if the regulation survives the gauntlet of judicial review and the buffeting of political winds, the agency can enforce its regulations and, in the case of my agency, fulfill its mission of protecting workers.

It goes without saying that there have been seismic shifts in the federal workforce over the past year. In the wake of those changes, the Northeastern Law and Policy Fellows fielded many questions from students wondering whether it is still possible to have a career in the federal civil service. While it’s hard to know for sure, I certainly hope so. Government work provides tremendous learning opportunities that come with serious and consequential responsibilities. You are held to the highest standards, and work with some of the brightest people in the country. You have some of the most inspiring and supportive colleagues you’ll ever encounter. Your work has an impact on people across the nation, and in the case of some federal employees, the world. To my mind, the country stands to greatly benefit from the energy and enthusiasm that attracts someone to government service. And it is service to your country, an honor and a privilege, whether you work for the government for a year, or for decades. So to those students I would say: I hope you’ll give it a try.

July 2026