ANNAPOLIS – State officials are bracing for the effect of layoffs in Maryland, home to one of the nation’s largest federal employee populations outside Washington.
As federal agencies prepare for impending budget and staff reductions, state leaders say they are mobilizing resources to mitigate economic impacts and support affected workers.
Gov. Wes Moore recently launched the Maryland Public Servants Resource Website, a centralized hub offering programs and resources for former federal employees navigating job losses.
Lawmakers are discussing expanding the social safety net to provide additional support. And Maryland’s Department of Labor has also made some key changes, in part by expanding its unemployment and job search assistance services.
“We are doing the best we can to gear up,” Maryland Labor Secretary Portia Wu said in an interview with Capital News Service.
Wu said she is urging federal employees and contract workers to navigate to the department’s website, where they can apply for unemployment insurance, file in their duty station and receive a dedicated phone line. Maryland’s maximum unemployment benefit is $430 per week for up to 26 weeks.
Senate President Bill Ferguson noted potential fiscal challenges involved in increasing unemployment benefits.
“Everything costs money, and so it’s a challenge to see the dollars available there,” he said. “If it’s a couple hundred folks, it’s a little bit different than several thousand.”
The state is hosting weekly job assistance workshops on Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. These workshops offer resume reviews, skills assessments and career counseling.
The department is in regular communication with workforce leaders across Maryland, Washington and Virginia, Wu said, and is working with county governments to coordinate hiring fairs to connect people with open positions.
“These are people who have served our state and our country, and it’s important for us to serve them,” Wu said.
The department’s resource page has already seen tens of thousands of visitors seeking information and support. Still, Maryland has yet to see a significant change in unemployment, according to the department’s metrics.
“Talk again in two or three weeks, and I think it might look different, but we don’t know yet,” Wu said.
According to Wu, Maryland is home to approximately 160,000 federal jobs and around 300,000 residents are employed by federal agencies in the state as a whole. With the immediate dismissals of employees, the economic impact could be consequential.
Sen. Guy Guzzone, a Democrat representing Howard County and the chair of the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, emphasized the wide-ranging economic implications.
“Moody’s Analytics came out with some information the other day that suggested over the course of the next three years, we could lose up to 30,000 jobs, federal jobs. That’s about 20% of Maryland’s federal workforce,” Guzzone said.
“If some portion of that happens, obviously that has huge effects on revenues,” he said. “We may need to provide unemployment insurance, all a host of things. Multiple calculations have to go on because of all the things that could come down our way.”
Meanwhile, the state is working to ensure the funding of essential services.
The Maryland Department of Health informed the behavioral health subcommittee in a House hearing Wednesday that the state’s 988 crisis hotline program will be funded through a supplemental budget, according to CNS reporter Paul Kiefer. The amount remains unknown.
Even as the future remains uncertain, state officials continue efforts to protect workers and the economy from the potential fallout of the federal job cuts.