The purging of the federal workforce by the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency will hit the economies of cities and towns across the US. Tens of thousands of workers have been dismissed or placed on leave, others have left their jobs via buyouts, and more than 175,000 layoffs are in the works.
But for local governments, the firing spree could represent a hiring opportunity.
From Maryland to Hawaii, states, cities and counties have signaled their openness to hire federal workers who have been fired by the Trump administration, with jobseekers packing job fairs and flooding online employment portals. Recruiting civil servants dismissed by DOGE could have several benefits for local governments. Many cities have staffing gaps that haven’t been resolved since the Covid-19 pandemic, and federal agency veterans can have expertise in fields like information technology and taxpayer services that are particularly valuable to local governments.
“We have our arms wide open here in the state,” said New York State Department of Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon. “We really would love to have them come work for the state. I hesitate to call it a win-win. I would say we’re getting a small glass of lemonade out of some very gigantic lemons.”
New York’s recruitment campaign includes cheeky video advertisements seen in commuting hubs in both Manhattan and Washington, DC, which direct ex-federal workers to a new website for state hiring featuring a welcoming message from Governor Kathy Hochul. The site highlights benefits such as paid parental leave, flexible schedules and competitive salaries. The state is targeting specialists such as attorneys, data scientists, investigators and inspectors in their efforts to fill 7,000-plus open positions.
So far the state has hired 28 former federal workers, according to Hochul’s office. Among them are 19 former Internal Revenue Service workers who were picked up by the NYS Department of Taxation and Finance as the Trump administration slashes the IRS.
Honolulu’s program, meanwhile, focuses on those with experience in law enforcement, infrastructure development, administrative services and climate resilience, while Atlanta’s City Council passed a resolution urging state and local governments to expedite hiring workers let go from the locally headquartered Centers for Disease Control. In Chicago, more than a dozen state agencies were on hand at a March 20 job fair aimed at federal workers.
Staffing Up
For cities, the appeal is clear. Even before the Trump administration layoffs, workforce development ranked as the top priority among US mayors, according to the 2024 State of the Cities report from the National League of Cities. In 2024, the NLC and the Biden administration launched an initiative called Good Jobs Great Cities in an effort to boost hiring for hard-to-fill municipal positions.
There’s a particular need for former federal employees with a detailed understanding of programs and services that can benefit cities. Monroe Nichols, mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma, recalls the topic coming up during a US Conference of Mayors convening in January. “For a lot of mayors it was like, ‘If the environment gets tougher with funding flows, well, it would be nice to recruit some people who know how the money moves,” he told Bloomberg in February.
In 2024, the nonprofit Work For America launched to connect former federal workers with jobs in state and local government. Applications to its Civic Match program have skyrocketed since Trump’s inauguration, says group founder Caitlin Lewis. The group has been getting 500 or more applications a week, up from about 75 a week, with bumps after significant layoffs, such as the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, or USAID.
More than 350 local hiring managers have reached out to Work for America to seek out talent, and the nonprofit has built relationships with states like Maryland, where one in every 10 workers is a federal employee. Maryland Governor Wes Moore announced a partnership with Work for America on March 17 to match federal workers with state and local government jobs.
But it can be hard to match applicants when the job market gets flooded with so many similarly skilled employees. Roughly 1,000 IRS staffers in Kansas City were laid off at the same time, for example. Many federal employees have very specialized skills and experience that don’t always neatly fit into state and local work. Municipalities are also facing their own budget strains, limiting their hiring capacity.
Former federal workers can expect to have to move, as well as adjust their salary and benefits expectations — state and local government roles are typically less well-paid than federal positions. They’ll also have to be patient: Lewis said that average days to hire in a local government job is 136. (WFA had its first hire 77 days after launching the platform, and has 168 candidates invited to start the hiring process.) Many thousands of federal workers are currently sitting in a legal limbo, placed on paid leave as lawsuits challenging the legality of firings by DOGE and via executive order proceed.
“The reality is it’s an extremely difficult situation,” said Lewis. “There’s not an easy answer for a lot of these folks who have found themselves unexpectedly fired from a job they’ve quite literally been in for decades and had no intention of leaving.”
Like other municipalities, DC’s city government put up a resource center for federal workers with information on unemployment compensation, retirement, workers’ rights and more, and the city also held job fairs. One attendee at a virtual event, who was fired from her role as a contractor at the Department of Energy on Feb. 21, said that participating made her feel more connected amid the great uncertainty in the job market, but ultimately, but it remains to be seen if any job opportunities emerge. (Several workers contacted by Bloomberg CityLab requested anonymity because of their unsettled employment situation.) She ended up meeting a potential employer about a role she was interested in, only to learn the posting hadn’t even been listed and that she’d need to wait to apply.
The Match Game
Agency layoffs have hit particularly hard in Northern Virginia, where many residents commute to federal jobs in and around Washington, DC. In early March, the Work in Northern Virginia website, which advertises open positions in the area, listed about 43,000 open jobs in the private and public sectors. The week before, that figure was 90,000, says Jeff McKay, chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.
The plunge underscores how much federal contracting contributes to the local economy. “At the end of the day, you’re going to have way more people who lose their jobs here than could ever possibly gain jobs,” he said.
McKay added that he’s not sure it will be easy to connect people with very specialized federal skill sets to the job openings that exist in Fairfax County. “I think there’s a false narrative out there that somehow there’s enough other jobs to accommodate all these people, and that somebody who is working in a federal job that provides veterans affairs services is all of a sudden going to be able to be a high school teacher,” he said. “I think that has been used as an excuse, frankly, to ignore the real elephant in the room.”
WFA’s Lewis said it’s “shocking” how many places across the US, not just the DC area, stand to experience high concentrations of job losses as a result of the DOGE firings. More than 80% of the US government’s roughly 2.4-million-person workforce lives outside of the DC region, and many of the hardest-hit communities are smaller towns where the local economy depends on federal jobs, according to an Urban Institute study. With a federal workforce of roughly 315,000 out of a pool of 3.5 million workers, the DC area ranks just 17th in the country by share of the labor force who are federal employees.
Beyond the job losses themselves, the ripple effects of the Trump administration’s mass firings have layered complications on the lives of former workers and those who want to hire them. In New York, Reardon said, some workers who the federal government says were dismissed “for cause” are having trouble collecting unemployment benefits, for example. When state officials call federal partners to verify the income of former workers applying for unemployment insurance, no one returns their calls.
Cuts have strained local providers of safety net programs, too, like New York’s Office of Children and Family Services.
“There’s only so much state budget that you can stretch to pick up what is left out of the federal budget,” said Reardon. “When the federal workforce is diminished, our ability to continue working is diminished.”