The AARP Spikes Investigation Into Age Discrimination by the U.S. Government

The AARP has canceled the publication of an investigative story in the 2020 edition of the AARP Bulletin about systemic ageism in federal recruitment and hiring, reports Forbes . According to an anonymous source, senior AARP officials killed the article due to political considerations and to avoid risking denial of federal grant funding. Since 2012, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been running the Pathways "Recent Graduates" Program, which permits federal agencies to discriminate based on age in the recruitment and hiring of workers. Under the initiative, agencies can limit applications for job vacancies to individuals who graduated from a qualified educational institution within the preceding two years. The program not only hurts older workers by arbitrarily excluding them from federal positions, but it endorses the acceptability of ageism among private enterprises. The OPM responded to a 2017 Freedom of Information Act request that about 93 percent of applicants hired for 92,193 jobs under the program from 2012 to 2017 were younger than 40.