The Trump administration ended the Presidential Management Fellows Program in an executive order Wednesday, axing a decades-old initiative that has long been celebrated as a pipeline to draw talent into civil service careers.

The two-year, full-time fellowship brings recent graduate students into agencies across the government with pay, benefits, training and mentorship. It bills itself as “the premier leadership development program” and has helped thousands of graduates get into government roles since its founding in 1977.

“This is one of the most unsettling, tragic pieces of news yet,” says Sean O’Keefe, University Professor and member of the presidential management program’s inaugural class. “This is a firing of convenience. They are looking for a headcount reduction; there is nothing qualitative about this,” he says.

“The very last thing you want to do in any period of financial squeeze is cut your professional development programs,” O'Keefe says. “That cuts you off from the next generation of talent and from new ways of looking at problems to come up with better solutions.”

Read more in the Washington Post article, “Trump ends federal leadership program, cutting off key talent pipeline.”