By MEHEDI MAROF
Capital News Service
When David Harbourt signed onto a recent video call, he was alone in a motel room in central Kansas. But in any given week, he could be somewhere else.
A year after losing his federal job, Harbourt now spends about half of every month on the road, moving from contract to contract while his wife and two children remain home in New Market, Maryland, east of Frederick.
“This is the only way I can generate income to provide for my family now,” said Harbourt, 43.
For Harbourt and thousands of other displaced federal workers in Maryland and the greater capital region, the layoffs that followed Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025 did not end with a termination notice. The cuts set off months of financial strain, career upheaval and emotional fallout that are still rippling through a state unusually dependent on federal employment.
In Maryland alone, about 29,700 federal jobs disappeared between January 2025 and March 2026 amid a sweeping federal workforce downsizing driven by the Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire Elon Musk. Nationwide, federal civilian employment fell by about 335,000 jobs during that period, including about 81,500 across Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The losses hit especially hard in Maryland, where federal jobs have long done more than provide paychecks. They have helped anchor household finances, sustain local businesses and support state revenue in a region where public-sector work is deeply woven into everyday economic life.
Benjamin Orr, president and CEO of the Maryland Center on Economic Policy, said the damage has extended beyond workers who lost their jobs.
“The federal government is a much less reliable source of economic engine for our state than it used to be because of the chaos introduced by the Trump administration,” Orr said.
‘Gratifying and fulfilling’
A year ago, Harbourt’s life looked very different.
His days were anchored at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine in Laurel, where he served as the sole safety and occupational health manager for a 27-acre federal campus with laboratories and pastureland.
He said his job was to ensure the site’s safety through routine hazards and emergencies: wild animal intrusions, flooding, snow removal and even storm damage when a tornado tore through the pastureland.
It was the kind of work that, to Harbourt, did not feel optional.
“Maybe it was my inherent naive mindset,” he said, “because I just never thought that they would lay off safety personnel because so many aspects of our job are essential to the operation of any facility.”
He said he liked the work. He thought it offered stability, not just for him, but for his family. He was home for dinner every night. “Never missed it,” he said.
Harbourt, who holds a doctorate in toxicology, had spent nearly two decades in federal service: nine years with the Army, three at the National Institutes of Health and four at the FDA. Public service, he said, had been “gratifying and fulfilling.”
Then, at about 5:20 a.m. on April 1, 2025, his wife shook him awake and told him to check his email.
The message said his position had been eliminated. In the reduction-in-force paperwork was a line he said he still cannot forget: His job was deemed “duplicative and unnecessary.”
“Those are the exact words I’ll never forget,” Harbourt said. “In 17 years working in this field… even my harshest detractors had never said [that].”
Later that morning, he said, the entire branch, 107 employees, was laid off at once.
A region reshaped
Before the 2025 layoffs, the federal government directed about $150 billion a year into Maryland through contracts, grants, salaries and direct payments to individuals and businesses, according to a report by the Maryland comptroller’s office and the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Roughly 230,000 Maryland residents worked for the federal government and earned a combined $26.9 billion annually. Federal employment made up about 6% of all jobs in the state but about 10% of total wages.
“That gap … shows that federal jobs in Maryland are relatively high-paying and high-skill, so their economic impact is larger than their share of employment,” said Liu Yang, an associate professor of finance who led the Smith School analysis in collaboration with the comptroller’s office.
“Because these jobs pay more, each loss carries a larger economic impact,” Yang said. “It reduces household income, local spending, and tax revenue more than a typical job loss.”
Orr said the cuts also reduce take-home pay, shrink consumer spending at local businesses and leave the state with less revenue for services such as education, health care and transportation.
In 2025, Maryland lost roughly 15% of its federal workforce, Yang said, an unusually large decline by historical standards.
In October alone, the state lost about 9,700 federal jobs, the steepest monthly drop in decades. Maryland’s unemployment rate rose from 3.6% in February 2025 to 4.3% in February 2026.
Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said the October drop was tied in part to the end of the Office of Personnel Management’s “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation program, which urged federal workers to resign voluntarily in exchange for paid leave through Sept. 30.
Workers who accepted were still counted through September, he said, before officially rolling off payroll in October.
“The [layoff] numbers are incredibly concerning for a number of reasons,” Comptroller Brooke Lierman said in a statement. “One, because they represent not a thoughtful approach to making government more efficient, but a whack-a-mole attack on important federal services.”
Daraius Irani, chief economist at Towson University’s Regional Economic Studies Institute, said Maryland private sector has not been growing fast enough in some areas to easily absorb displaced federal workers into jobs that match their skills.
“Those job cuts probably hit us harder than, say, job cuts in Nevada or in California or Indiana, where there wasn’t that much of a dependency on the federal government,” he added.
‘Terrifying’
Harbourt’s family felt the pain of the layoff quickly.
“Every second of every day after that, I thought about almost nothing else,” he said. “I can’t tell you how terrifying it is as a parent with two kids… faced with the thought that you can’t provide for your family.”
His wife’s job as a pharmacist at a Maryland pharmaceutical company gave the family some stability, he said. Even so, the uncertainty changed how they lived.
“There was a long stretch of many months… I didn’t want to spend one more penny than I absolutely had to,” he said.
Harbourt, an avid Virginia Tech fan who attended college there and grew up in southwest Virginia, said he missed football games last fall for the first time since he was 5. His family canceled an annual trip to see his mom’s family and other relatives in Rhode Island — a routine he said went back decades.
To get by, Harbourt now juggles between contract jobs in several states, doing work similar to what he once did at the FDA. But the nature of the work, and of his life, has changed. Instead of overseeing a full safety program, he is usually brought in for narrower assignments.
Although he now makes more on an hourly basis than he did before, the work is far less stable.
“There is always the concern when the next paycheck might come,” he said.
Shuffling cards
Joe Murphy of Dumfries, Virginia, was also laid off in the same wave of cuts. He is now preparing for a career he never expected to pursue.
“I felt that my next job would be retiree,” Murphy said.
Instead, at 57, he is learning how to shuffle cards.
Murphy is retraining to become a casino poker dealer because he no longer expects to find work “as fulfilling as the one that I had,” he said, “rewards me in terms of satisfaction, not just financial.”
He spent nearly a decade at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education as a management and program analyst, helping oversee grants for students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.
Murphy was laid off March 11, 2025, during a reduction-in-force that cut the Education Department’s workforce from 4,133 employees to 2,183, according to agency figures. Additional rounds of layoffs followed later in the year.
He said he was in a routine staff meeting when an email came in announcing that the building would be closed the next day.
“It made no sense whatsoever,” he said.
Employees were told to hand off their work, but Murphy said they received no clear direction from senior leadership about where those responsibilities should go.
For Murphy, the loss was not only professional.
“It absolutely put me through mental and emotional trauma,” he said. “It’s been a really awful year to deal with what they put us through.”
Financially, he said, the consequences unfolded gradually. His salary stopped when administrative leave ended, and he has not yet found another job.
“I don’t ask people to feel sorry for me,” he said.
‘Woke up every hour’
Denise M. Joseph of Waldorf, Maryland, experienced the same unraveling more slowly.
Joseph, 55, had worked at the Education Department since 2015, most recently in the Office of Postsecondary Education, where she supported training, onboarding, workforce planning and other internal operations.
She said she was first placed on administrative leave on Jan. 29, 2025, after an evening email informed her that she could no longer work.
Then came the March 11 mass layoffs.
“My whole team… supervisor, everyone, gone,” she said.
Joseph said she believed deeply in the department’s mission. She supported grant competitions and other initiatives and took pride in helping resources reach schools and programs that needed them.
“It is really fulfilling to know that I had a part to do with that,” she said.
What made the loss harder to absorb, she said, was the sense that years of expertise had been tossed aside without explanation.
“We have all the expertise, and we’re passionate about the work that we do,” Joseph said. “So why would somebody do this?”
She said the stress left her unable to sleep. “I woke up every hour … just tossing and turning.”
Months of legal and administrative limbo followed before she was ultimately let go on Aug. 1.
Since then, she has started teaching once a week in an after-school program and taken on contract peer-review work tied to education grants. Her family has stayed afloat because her husband still works and they had savings.
“I worked really hard… to save my money,” she said.
Joseph said she is one of 142 former career federal employees from six agencies who joined a lawsuit filed in February in federal court in Maryland. Backed by Lawyers for Good Government and other legal groups, the suit alleges the layoffs were politically motivated and carried out without the due process normally required in a reduction-in-force.
She said she hopes to get back her old job via the lawsuit.
“I would go back because I love what I do,” she said.
Beyond the layoffs
Harbourt has pushed back in other ways. He attended several protest rallies, he said, including a former federal employees rally against Labor Department cuts in Washington, where he also spoke out against the administration’s reduction-in-force policies.
He also pointed to an executive order President Trump signed last March that stripped collective-bargaining rights from roughly a million federal employees on “national security” grounds.
In practice, the order lets agencies end bargaining obligations with unions across large parts of the federal government.
The AFGE, the largest federal union with nearly a million members, blasted the move as “disgraceful” and “retaliatory,” and said it would “relentlessly” fight in court to “protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks.”
They and other unions sued the Trump administration a year ago arguing the order was “unlawful and unconstitutional.”
A federal judge later temporarily blocked the order, but in late February, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted that injunction, finding the order was legitimately grounded in national security concerns.
AFGE President Everett Kelley said in a statement that the decision was not the final word and the union could seek further review.
“Our union is not defined by a single ruling,” he said. “The fight is far from over.”
For Harbourt, what lingers most, though, is not a legal argument. It is the life he lost.
Before the layoffs, he said, his work gave him stability, purpose and time at home with his family. Now, he said, everything feels more uncertain.
“If you take away certainty in people’s income, they’re going to pull back,” Harbourt said. “And that’s just a reality now.”
