WASHINGTON — A young economist who had uprooted her life for civil service. A fierce housing advocate terminated just before buying her first home. A semifinalist whose dreams were dashed before they materialized.

For decades, the Presidential Management Fellows program was seen as a building block for the civil service with the expectation that the few who earned the position would one day become leaders in the federal workforce. Now the road ahead is uncertain. Hundreds of the fellows have been terminated or placed on administrative leave amid a nationwide slashing of the federal workforce.

One of President Donald Trump’s executive orders ended the program, which was created in 1978 to entice highly qualified workers with advanced degrees to join the federal government.

Trump’s Republican administration had ordered agencies to lay off nearly all probationary employees, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of workers in one fell swoop. That included recent classes of the fellows program, which has a two-year probationary period.

Fellows had persevered through an intense selection process that included multiple tests and evaluations as well as a blind interview. The agency website said about 10% of applicants are accepted, although that number has been recently as low as just 3%.

Charles Conyers, an Office of Personnel Management retiree who was a fellow in the class of 2003, said he was saddened and puzzled about the administration eliminating a program that brought to the government some of the “brightest minds in America.” He said losing their skills and ending a program that attracted and groomed exceptional future leaders was tragic.

While many fellows affected by the job cuts were reluctant to speak on the record, several did. As a group, they said they loved their jobs and see federal civil service as a way to serve their country. All would welcome, if given a chance, the opportunity to get back to work and use their expertise.

Jenn Kauffman, who has a background in public health and labor studies, was a semifinalist for the fellows program this year and had been waiting to hear if she would be accepted. As layoffs were announced, she began to worry if it would continue.

“I worked really hard and wanted that satisfaction to see it through,” she said.

On Feb. 19, during the week finalists would have been named, the Trump administration announced an executive order cutting the program.

Kauffman, 45, said she was crushed by the decision and worries that the mass layoffs and dissolution of the fellows program will forever change public service.

“It’s so easy to decimate something but so much harder to rebuild,” she said. “And I worry that the incredibly talented people who may have been my cohort or colleagues are going to go elsewhere, and there will be an incredible brain drain. It’s such a loss for the American people.”

Sydney Smith, 28, said many of the fellows were shocked at being let go because they came in to the government with ideas on how to make it more efficient.

Smith studied chemistry as an undergraduate student at Willamette University in Oregon before going on to study accounting at George Washington University. She heard about the presidential fellows program but was skeptical she would get in because of the low acceptance rate.

After she made it as a finalist in 2023, she started working for the U.S. Forest Service as an accountant. She’s a backpacker who loves the outdoors and is passionate about making public lands accessible. It was a perfect fit.

Now Smith’s goal is to finish the CPA exams, something she was doing to make herself even more qualified for federal service.

“I’m hopeful that in the future that there will be room for me in the government,” she said. “I don’t know what that would look like, but I am hopeful that it still exists.”

McKenzie Hartman, 26, was an economist for the IRS research division in Ogden, Utah, when she received an email Feb. 19 that she should return to the office with all her equipment.

The next day, a manager collected her equipment and walked her out. On the way home, Hartman took a wrong turn because her mind was elsewhere.

“It felt surreal,” she said. “I had planned on working for the federal government since high school.”

Hartman lost access to her office’s video conferencing software and couldn’t join her colleagues for her own goodbye gathering. She had to call in instead. Her termination letter came the following weekend.

“It’s crazy to get a letter terminating you for performance when everyone around you is saying incredible things about your performance,” Hartman said.

Since then, she has been applying for jobs and embarked on a road trip with her partner through several national parks, where she’s seen protests against the Trump administration’s cuts.

“For a lot of us, there is a question on whether we’ll return to federal service,” she said. “Many of us would like to, and this was what we wanted for our careers, but it’s demoralizing.”

Bianca Nelson, 31, had been working for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the unit she calls the “front door of HUD.” She never planned to leave. On Feb. 14, she got an email that she was terminated, effective immediately.

Nelson and her partner were planning to buy their first home that month — their “dream apartment.” Now, they’ve had to lean on savings to keep them afloat. She called it “gut-wrenching.”

She had to forward the termination email to her boss, who had not been told she or others would be fired. Days later, she picked up her belongings, including a bell given to her at a New York City Housing Authority groundbreaking ceremony — a memento representing her love for her work.

Since then, she has spent her days organizing paperwork for unemployment and insurance, taking networking calls, volunteering with her union, organizing a resource fair for other fired federal workers in her area and volunteering with housing advocacy organizations.

Ending the program, she said, is “closing a pipeline to future leaders.”

Madeleine Parker’s fellowship began in September 2023, one month after she finished her doctorate degree in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley.

Parker, 32, chose to work in housing because of its importance in offering families stability. She said she had hoped to continue working for the federal government.

“It’s been hard to step back from that,” she said.

She is trying to strategize on what comes next while worrying about the people who need the help.

“There’s the personal impact of my own job, but I have this immense concern about the impacts on the people we serve, from the programs I worked on and that my colleagues worked on, from affordable housing development to disaster recovery,” she said.

Juliane Alfen, 25, left her workplace at the U.S. Agency for International Development in tears, exiting to cheers from supporters who protested the abrupt way one of the world’s preeminent aid organizations had been decimated.

A 2023 fellow, her goal was to build a life and career around federal service.

Alfen learned of the fellowship through her graduate school program in international affairs at the University of California, San Diego. The day she learned she’d made it to finalist, she said, “I literally screamed and called my mom on the phone.” There had been more than 10,000 initial applicants.

Now, when she looks at her LinkedIn account, everyone is job hunting. She said she would love the opportunity to return to USAID, though the prospects for that are uncertain given the Trump administration’s gutting of the agency through his adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and halting its humanitarian work.

“I feel,” Alfen said, “like we made a difference.”

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Fernando reported from Chicago.

WASHINGTON — Schools and colleges across the U.S. face a Friday deadline to end diversity programs or risk having their federal money pulled by the Trump administration, yet few are openly rushing to make changes. Many believe they’re on solid legal ground, and they know it would be all but unprecedented — and extremely time-consuming — for the government to cut off funding.

State officials in Washington and California urged schools not to make changes, saying it doesn’t change federal law and doesn’t require any action. New York City schools have taken the same approach and said district policies and curriculum have not changed.

Leaders of some colleges shrugged the memo off entirely. Antioch University ’s chief said “most of higher education” won’t comply with the memo unless federal law is changed. Western Michigan University’s president told his campus to “please proceed as usual.”

A memo issued Feb. 14 by President Donald Trump’s administration, formally known as a Dear Colleague Letter, gave schools two weeks to halt any practice that treats people differently because of their race.

Opponents say it’s an overreach meant to have a chilling effect. The guidance appears to forbid everything from classroom lessons on racism to colleges’ efforts to recruit in diverse areas, and even voluntary student groups like Black student unions.

Education organizations have been urging a measured approach, warning institutions not to make any hasty cuts that would be difficult to undo. Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, is telling colleges that if they were in compliance with federal law before the memo, they still are.

“There’s nothing to act on until we see the administration or its agencies try to stop something,” Mitchell said. “And then we’ll have the argument.”

A loss of federal money would be devastating for schools and colleges, but imposing that penalty would not be quick or simple.

The Education Department office that conducts civil rights investigations had fewer than 600 employees last year — before the Trump administration began cutting staff — while the U.S. has more than 18,000 school districts and 6,000 colleges.

Even when a school or state faces an investigation, it can take years to terminate funding. Under former President Joe Biden, the Education Department tried to pull federal money from Michigan’s education agency after finding it violated the rights of students with disabilities. The investigation began in 2022 and is still tied up in federal court.

“I hope very much that schools charged with providing inclusive, equal education to every student in their school community will stand for that principle,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led the department’s Office for Civil Rights under Biden.

Still, some education leaders say resistance is too risky. At the University of Cincinnati, President Neville G. Pinto said officials are evaluating jobs related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and removing DEI references from school websites.

“Given this new landscape, Ohio public and federally supported institutions like ours have little choice but to follow the laws that govern us,” Pinto wrote.

Tony Frank, chancellor of the Colorado State University system, wrote in a campus letter that he weighed taking a stand against the department. But he advised the system’s campuses to comply, saying there’s too much at stake for students and staff. “If we gamble here and are wrong, someone else will pay the price,” he wrote.

In many Republican-led states, education chiefs applauded the memo.

“We never felt it was appropriate to use race in making these types of decisions in the first case, so I do not foresee any interruptions in our day-to-day business,” Alabama’s state superintendent, Eric G. Mackey, said in a statement released by the Trump administration.

The memo said schools have promoted DEI efforts often at the expense of white and Asian American students.

It doesn’t carry the weight of law but explains how the new administration will interpret nondiscrimination laws. It dramatically expands a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the use of race in college admissions to all aspects of education — including, hiring, promotion, scholarships, housing, graduation ceremonies and campus life.

The guidance is being challenged in court by the American Federation of Teachers, which said the memo violates free speech laws.

While some schools are keeping quiet out of fear of being targeted, many leaders also are still struggling to grasp the implications.

“We are looking to our attorney general for guidance because it’s very confusing,” said Christine Tucci Osorio, superintendent of the North St. Paul School District in Minnesota. When a teacher asked if their school could still mark African American History Month, she assured them they could.

Despite concerns that schools would rush to comply, it appears “cooler heads are largely prevailing,” said Liz King, senior director for the education equity program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“Once a school sends the message that they are not going to stand up for a member, a community within their school, that is broken trust, that is a lost relationship,” King said.

Trump has vowed to use education funding as political leverage on several fronts, threatening cuts for schools that do not get in line with his agenda on topics including transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports and instruction related to race.

Usually, civil rights investigations by the Education Department take at least six months and often much longer. If a school is found in violation of federal law, department policy offers a chance to come into compliance and sign a resolution — typically a 90-day process.

Only if a school refuses to comply can the department move to revoke federal money. That can be done in the Education Department through a court-like process decided by an administrative law judge. If the judge decides the penalty is justified, the school can appeal it to the education secretary and, after that, challenge it in court.

Instead of handling it internally, the department can also refer cases to the Justice Department for prosecution. That route is no faster.

The last time the Education Department was granted approval to cut federal funding was in 1992, against the Capistrano Unified School District in California, which was found to have retaliated against a teacher for filing sex discrimination complaints.

Before the penalty was carried out, the district reinstated the teacher and effectively ended the case. It never lost any money.

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Gecker reported from San Francisco, and Mumphrey from Phoenix.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas would allow Bible-infused lessons in elementary schools under changes that were set for a final vote Friday and could test boundaries between religion and public education in the U.S.

The proposed curriculum narrowly cleared a preliminary vote this week at the Texas State Board of Education, whose elected members heard hours of sometimes impassioned pleas from both supporters and critics over the material that schools could begin using next year.

If adopted, the new Texas curriculum would follow Republican-led efforts in neighboring states to give religion more of a presence in public schools. In Oklahoma, the state’s education chief has ordered a copy of the Bible in every classroom, while Louisiana wants to make all of the state’s public school classrooms post the Ten Commandments beginning next year.

In Texas, it would be optional for schools to adopt the materials, but they’d receive additional funding if they do so.

If the board advances the curriculum, Texas would be the first state to introduce Bible lessons in schools in this manner, according to Matthew Patrick Shaw, an assistant professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University.

The Texas Education Agency, which oversees public education for more than 5 million students statewide, created its own instruction materials after a law passed in 2023 by the GOP-controlled Legislature required the agency to do so. The lesson plans were publicly released this spring.

The material draws on lessons from Christianity more than any other religion in the proposed reading and language arts modules for kindergarten through fifth grade, which critics say would alienate students from different faith backgrounds and potentially violate the First Amendment.

“This curriculum is not age-appropriate or subject matter appropriate in the way that it presents these Bible stories,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Children who would read the material, she said, “are simply too young to tell the difference between what is a faith claim and what is a matter of fact.”

More than 100 people testified at a board meeting this week that rung with emotion from parents, teachers and advocates. Supporters of the curriculum argued that the Bible is a core feature of American history and teaching it will enrich students’ learning.

“It is said that there are close to 300 common-day phrases that actually come from the Bible,” said Mary Castle, director of government relations for Texas Values, a right-leaning advocacy group. “So students will benefit from being able to understand a lot of these references that are in literature and have a way to be able to comprehend them.”

The 15-member board consists of 11 Republicans and four Democrats. It signaled support for the materials in a 8-7 preliminary vote on Wednesday.

One of the board members is a Republican who was appointed to the board just weeks ago by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to temporarily fill a vacant seat. Days after that appointment, a Democrat who ran unopposed was elected to fill that same board seat starting next year.

Abbott has publicly supported the instruction materials.

Whether the lesson plans will be considered constitutional is up in the air if the curriculum passes, Shaw said.

“The question is how is Texas going to frame what is done here to avoid the establishment question or tackle it head-on,” he said.

Texas’ plans to implement Biblical teachings in public school lesson plans is the latest effort by Republican-controlled states to bring religion into the classroom.

In Louisiana, a law to place the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms was blocked by a federal judge earlier this month. Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed the bill into law in June, prompting a group of Louisiana public school parents of different faiths to sue.

In Oklahoma, the state’s top education official has tried to incorporate the Bible into lesson plans for children in fifth through 12th grades. A group of teachers and parents recently filed a lawsuit to stop the Republican state superintendent’s plan and his efforts to spend $3 million to purchase Bibles for public schools.

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Lathan is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.