Tracking player injuries and roster moves by Orioles management — and there have been several this spring as the team struggles in last place in the American League East — is not easy. But it’s a cup of coffee compared to understanding the scope of the Trump administration’s attack on the federal government and thousands of workers in Maryland.
Note: National news media use the term “sweeping overhaul” to describe what Elon Musk tried to bring to the federal government in the fast-and-furious first weeks of the second Trump presidency. I prefer to call it an “attack” because there appeared to be no formal, data-driven plan, only anti-government zealotry, random and draconian cuts, and unfounded claims of waste and corruption.
As of March, there were about 160,000 civilian employees of the federal government in Maryland, ranking us fourth among all states in that category, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are more than 200,000 contractors in the state doing business with the feds, according to data cited by Maryland Matters.
So chances are good you know someone who either has a federal job or a job funded with federal dollars. They live in Baltimore and every Maryland county. The Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services in Woodlawn employ thousands of them.
But there was a DOGE, right? Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to federal agencies during the winter; thousands of federal workers, longtime and probationary, received notices of buyouts, layoff and cutoffs.
As spring winds toward summer, a question looms: Of the thousands of Marylanders who started the year with federal jobs or jobs supported by grants, how many are left?
We won’t have a specific number for a while yet.
The Maryland Department of Labor reported a loss of 2,700 federal jobs across the state in March and another 2,600 lost in April. But, until related litigation is settled and the next federal budget clears the Senate, we won’t have a measure of the full impact of Trump’s efforts to defund and declaw the so-called “deep state.”
“I’ve been trying to track the exact same question in terms of specific numbers,” says Chris Van Hollen, the state’s senior senator and a leading Democratic critic of Trump, Musk and the DOGE cuts. “What I can say is, thousands of patriotic federal employees in Maryland have been harmed. Many of them were illegally fired.”
And federal courts have concurred. District judges have blocked many of Trump’s executive orders and thousands of workers have been reinstated as a result.
Last week, a federal judge in California blocked Trump’s Feb. 11 order shutting down offices and laying off thousands of people, ruling that “agencies may not conduct large-scale reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a President may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress.”
Also last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked Trump’s order calling for the closure of the Department of Education.
So, if these and other injunctions survive challenges, presumably thousands of employees will keep their jobs, assuming they still want them. Courts are playing a huge role in blunting Trump’s attack.
“And,” says Van Hollen, “because the Trump administration fired people without knowing the important work they did, they had to reinstate them, just to maintain certain essential services.”
The long-term effect of the cuts and the general chaos caused by Musk and DOGE remains to be seen.
Of immediate major concern is the Trump assault on the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, the world’s leading biomedical research agency. Van Hollen last week met with a group of cancer researchers from Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Georgetown University and The George Washington University. All look to NIH for the funds for their work.
Since January, 1,300 NIH employees have been fired and more than $2 billion in research grants canceled, according to CBS News. Looking ahead, the NIH faces a proposed $18 billion cut in funding in the budget that the Republican-led House of Representatives sent last week to the Senate.
What the cancer researchers told Van Hollen was deeply disturbing.
“There are people who are literally, right now, patients in the middle of cancer studies and clinical trials,” the senator says. “They’re getting medicines that are being tested. But they [cancer researchers] had to stop giving them these medicines. And what these researchers pointed out is that, 40 years ago, when you did these clinical trials, the medicines that were being tested were maybe 40% effective. But, these days, because of advances in technology, a lot of these medicines delivered in clinical trials are providing immediate benefits to thousands of people and keeping them alive. And now when you [eliminate] these medicines, you’re giving them a death sentence.”
The cuts to NIH and the proposed reduction in funding for the agency will likely cause a brain drain — the loss of talent from the nation’s biomedical establishment and its university feeders.
Among those who met with Van Hollen was a woman who had recently been recruited to a leadership position in the National Cancer Institute, at NIH.
“She was recruited because she’s like a superstar in cancer research,” Van Hollen says. “But, because she was a probationary employee, they fired this incredibly talented person . . . These are the people that we count on for the discoveries of the future, and [the Trump administration] is just slamming the door shut on young researchers.”
