More ex-federal workers in US face job hunt as grants & contracts vanish

The drastic, sudden pullback in federal dollars is collapsing opportunities for many who've spent years in public service

By Eileen Sullivan and Lydia DePillis

 

After Matt Minich was fired from his job with the Food and Drug Administration in February, he did what many scientists have done for years after leaving public service. He looked for a position with a university. 

Minich, 38, was one of thousands swept up in the mass layoffs of probationary workers at the beginning of President Trump’s second administration. The shock of those early moves heralded more upheaval to come as the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, raced through agency after agency, slashing staff, freezing spending and ripping up government contracts. 

 

In March, about 45 minutes after Minich accepted a job as a scientist in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, the program lost its federal grant funding. Minich, who had worked on reducing the negative health impacts of tobacco use, observed that he had the special honor of “being DOGE-ed twice.” 

“I’m doubly not needed by the federal government,” he said in an interview. He is still hunting for work. And like hundreds of thousands of other former civil servants forced into an increasingly crowded job market, he is finding that drastic cuts to grants and contracts in academia, consulting and direct services mean even fewer opportunities are available. 

Some states that were hiring, another avenue for former federal government employees, have pulled back. So, too, have the private contractors typically seen as a landing place. The situation is expected to worsen as more layoffs are announced, voluntary departures mount and workers who were placed on administrative leave see the clock run out. 

With Musk’s time in Washington now done, a fuller picture of just how completely he and Trump have upended the role of government is coming into view. Federal tax dollars underpin entire professions, directly and indirectly, and the cuts led by Musk’s operation have left some workers with nowhere to go. In Washington DC, and the surrounding area, the disruption has the hallmarks of the collapse of an industrial cluster, not unlike the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the upper Midwest during the 2000s. Except this time, it is moving at lightning speed. 

In January, just as Trump was taking office, the civilian federal work force across the country had reached a post-World War II peak of 2.3 million, not including the Postal Service. Few agencies have publicly stated how many people have been fired or voluntarily resigned, but a rough count shows that federal agencies have lost some 135,000 to firings and voluntary resignation, with another 150,000 in planned reductions. 

Contracted and grant-funded workers — which the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated to be as many as 4.6 million people — are harder to track in official data. 

The first contractor layoffs began in February with organisations that received funding from the US Agency for International Development, like Chemonics and FHI360. As more grants and contracts that were under review across government are terminated, job cuts have gained steam. 

Booz Allen Hamilton, the sprawling consulting firm based in Northern Virginia that gets 98 percent of its revenue from the federal government, announced that it was cutting 7 per cent of its 36,000-person staff. Even providers of Head Start, the low-income preschool program, have issued layoff notices because funding has been in doubt. 

While the national labor market remains stable, job loss is starting to become notable in the capital region. Unemployment rates in the District of Columbia and most of its surrounding counties have been on the rise since December. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance has been elevated in Virginia and DC over the past several months. Job postings in Washington have dropped across the board, according to the hiring platform Indeed, including in opportunities for administrative assistance, human resources and accounting. 

Local government agencies around Washington are hosting dozens of hiring events, and most of them are packed. Elaine Chalmers of Woodbridge, Va., was among 750 people who attended a recent resource fair in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington. The event offered free consultation for updating résumés, as well as professional headshots and workshops, including one on managing personal finances during a transition in employment.

 

It was the fourth one she attended in the month since she left the Agriculture Department, where she had worked for 20 years, most recently in the division that ensured equal access to grants for rural communities. She resigned to escape the stress and uncertainty created by new mandates, such as erasing words like “equity” and “diversity” from department communications.

“It just became almost a character question for myself,” said Chalmers, 53. “I couldn’t honorably stay.”