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.
