Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON — (WMAL) President Donald Trump has given federal agencies until June to come up with ways to cut their workforces, and that’s bad news for Maryland.
“Maryland has a high concentration of federal workers and also, on top of that, people who work for federal contractors, so it would have a pretty hard hit on our economy,” said Joe Shapiro, spokesman for the Maryland Comptroller’s Office.
Shapiro said the state expects to lose 4,600 federal jobs, $25 million in revenue and $473 million in lost wages if the president shrinks the federal workforce as much as planned.
George Mason University professor of public policy Steven Fuller estimates Mr. Trump’s proposed budget could eliminate 24,000 federal jobs. It also cuts funding for federal contractors, which employ many people in the D.C. metro area.
Maryland relies on sales tax as a big source of revenue. If people lose their jobs or are worried about losing them, they won’t spend as much money, and sales tax revenues would decrease.
While state officials are hoping the cuts won’t be as big as proposed, Shapiro said they are planning for them and budgeting accordingly. Maryland has plenty of experience dealing with federal hiring freezes, job reductions and even government shutdowns.
“It’s something that’s not easy to get through, but with prudent fiscal management, we can get through it,” Shapiro said.
Fuller said the important thing to keep in mind is the cuts to the federal workforce are just being proposed.
“I think the reality is that they won’t be able to cut as much as they think without outsourcing, and the administration has already shown, it has been able to learn that it can’t do everything it thought it could do because the federal government is very complex,” Fuller said.
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