A woman holds a sign outside the Department of Education during a March rally in support of federal workers there who lost their jobs through a departmental reduction in force. (Photo by Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Capital News Service)
Maryland has lost 12,700 federal jobs since the beginning of the second Trump administration in January, a top state finance official said Thursday.
Ben Siegel, the Maryland deputy comptroller for policy, public works and investment, said the loss is the most significant in the state since the federal government’s budget sequestration from 2013-14, when about 8,000 jobs were lost over two years.
“These are people’s lives, right? These are individuals,” Siegel said. “We look at the stats and the data, but it’s really about people.”
A spokesperson for the state Department of Labor said Thursday that the cuts, which do not include federal contractors, are the largest of any U.S. state.
During the virtual meeting with state lawmakers and members of the public Thursday, Seigel and Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman spoke about the impacts federal policy changes and funding cuts have had on Maryland’s workers and the economy.
“In a nutshell, we’ve had a special relationship with the federal government for many years,” Lierman said Thursday. “It’s been a symbiotic relationship. Not only do we benefit from having a large number of federal employees, employees who work at the federal government in Maryland, but the federal government has benefited from our highly skilled workforce, our fantastic universities and public school system.”
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But as President Donald Trump continues his efforts to slash federal spending and lower payrolls, few states feel as much of an impact as Maryland, which has the third-most federal workers in the U.S. — behind only Virginia and Washington, D.C., itself.
Last month, Lierman’s office released a report conducted alongside the University of Maryland, College Park’s Robert H. Smith School of Business that analyzed the state’s relationship with, and economic dependence on, the federal government.
That report called the federal government Maryland’s “economic engine.” Last year, the state received more than $150 billion in federal wages and retirement income, contracts, grants, and direct payments, which includes Social Security. That makes up 10% of the state’s entire Gross Domestic Product.
All told, there are almost 230,000 residents employed by the federal government, making up about 6% of the total workforce and almost $27 billion in wages, the report said.
Lierman said the report was created to give the state a baseline understanding of the importance of federal support for Maryland’s economy as it tracks changes going forward.
“We have had a happy marriage,” Lierman said. “But we are really teetering now and sort of counting up the assets, because we may be splitting.”
The meeting came less than a week after the U.S. Department of Labor released its monthly jobs report, which showed that Maryland lost about 8,500 jobs in June. Of those positions, there was an estimated decrease of 3,500 federal jobs — the largest single-month drop in almost three decades.
“We saw pretty major job losses in the June jobs report for Maryland, and that data will eventually find its way to our revenue,” Lierman said.
In March, the state’s Board of Revenue Estimates projected that about 30,000 federal workers in Maryland would lose their jobs this year. That would see a total loss of about $3 billion in wages, the board estimated.
Seigel said at the board’s next meeting in September, it will release updated estimates for the year.
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