Unpaid internships in the federal government operate under a statutory and regulatory regime unlike any other in American employment law. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) constrains internships that are hosted by nonfederal entities. The FLSA applies to the United States as an employer, but in practice, it has proven almost entirely irrelevant to federal unpaid internships, which instead owe their form to the interaction of appropriations law, the Antideficiency Act’s voluntary service prohibition, and 5 U.S.C. § 3111, which authorizes “student volunteer” service at federal agencies under strict, enumerated conditions.
This Note—the first comprehensive doctrinal and statutory account of federal unpaid internships—argues that the federal government’s legal authority to host unpaid interns is both narrower and more rigid than commonly understood. The Note first contextualizes federal “student volunteer” programs within the broader economy of unpaid internships, tracing the evolution of these programs and identifying how education-based exceptions have redefined the permissible boundaries of intern labor. It then turns to the federal sector, where legal authority to accept voluntary service depends on a statutory scheme that expressly bars compensation and classifies interns as non-employees for nearly all legal purposes. The Note synthesizes this landscape into a clear legal test for when unpaid internships in federal agencies are lawful.
Yet even lawful unpaid internships present profound problems. This Note identifies structural inequities, legal accountability gaps, and governance blind spots that arise when federal agencies rely on unpaid student labor. Because these issues are entrenched in federal statute, they are impervious to litigation or state-based reform. Accordingly, this Note concludes with legislative solutions to fix a Congressionally created quagmire that only Congress can properly fix.
