In Washington state, the fallout from the Trump administration’s widespread cuts to the federal workforce are reverberating. Officials still don’t have a clear picture of the scale of the layoffs — and many former federal workers are struggling to land on their feet.
“It’s a giant mess,” said Rebecca Howard, a former research biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was fired in February, rehired under a court order in March, then fired again in April.
Like many former federal workers, Howard is still looking for a new job. She said funding cuts have made it difficult to find research work.
“It’s definitely been a struggle because my career kind of evaporated with this,” Howard said.
Howard’s worried not just about her livelihood, but also her research and the future of marine biology. She doesn’t want to leave the country, but she’s considered it. As legal challenges over the mass firings continue to play out in the courts, Howard and thousands of other government workers are in a state of extended limbo.
“It seems exceptionally cruel for reasons that I don’t think any of us really understand,” Howard said.
‘We just don’t have the data.’
This spring, Washington’s Employment Security Department held a series of webinars to connect former federal workers with health care, job training and unemployment benefits.
About 60 people attended the first one, held in March. While state officials shared a slideshow on how to apply for benefits, recently fired federal workers typed questions into the chat. Confusion followed. Some former federal workers said they were locked out of their work computers while being fired and lost access to documents needed to apply for unemployment benefits. Others weren’t sure what to do if they were called back to work.
“A lot of you don’t know what your future holds,” Kristan Lortz, the King County layoff support program manager, told the webinar attendees. “I hope that you can walk away from this presentation knowing that there are people that can support you and really help you through this time of transition. Really, the goal is to help you find employment.”
Normally, state officials would reach out directly to workers who’ve lost their jobs and connect them with resources. But because officials still don’t know exactly how many federal workers were laid off, the state has had to pivot.
“In this particular instance, the state was concerned with an unknown number of federal employees who may be impacted, no good way to find out who they are and where they are,” said Donna Mack, rapid response manager with the Employment Security Department. “We just don’t have the data.”
Months after Trump took office and began slashing the federal workforce under guidance from billionaire Elon Musk, it’s still unclear how many federal employees have actually lost their jobs.
“We’re looking at the news reports and we’re following it all as closely as we can,” Mack said. “There’s a lot that we don’t know right now.”
There’s no centralized database of federal workers, and most agencies have not released clear numbers. Local elected officials like Washington Senator Patty Murray say they’ve been asking for information, but the administration hasn’t been forthcoming with it.
Through consulting a combination of court documents, press statements and sources, The New York Times has estimated that 58,566 federal employees were cut from their positions nationwide, with an additional 76,290 who accepted offers to resign and continue receiving pay and benefits through September. The paper said the figure is likely an undercount.
Before Trump’s election, Washington state had a federal civilian workforce of about 58,000.
As of May 22, more than 1,300 former federal employees had filed for unemployment benefits in Washington — a 62% increase over the same time period last year.
But unemployment filings don’t capture the full scale of the layoffs. The figure doesn’t include people who haven’t yet filed for benefits or those who accepted the deferred resignation offer.
The figure also doesn’t include people like Mark Batzell, a former fisheries management specialist with NOAA in Seattle.
“I was let go, but I pretty quickly found another job, so I never really filed for unemployment,” Batzell said.
Batzell had spent over 20 years conducting salmon monitoring for the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. He was hired by NOAA in 2024, and was laid off in February as part of a wave of cuts targeted at workers in their probationary period with less than one year on the job.
After being laid off, Batzell was able to find a temporary job doing similar fishery work with the state’s Fish and Wildlife department. But the state is facing budget problems, and Batzell isn’t sure how long his new position will last. Still, he considers himself lucky: Many of his former colleagues are still looking for work.
‘An overall slowdown’
In April, the state continued its online outreach with a virtual job fair connecting former federal workers with employers in city, state and county governments. Dennis Jaska, a former fisheries observer at NOAA, is one of the fired federal workers who attended.
“It was good to see who was hiring in the area, but as you can well imagine, I’ve already applied to a lot of those different agencies,” Jaska said.
Jaska said the state has been helpful in connecting him with benefits and job search tools, but there isn’t much that matches his unique qualifications. He helped analyze fishing vessel data for compliance with federal regulations. Before joining NOAA last year, he worked for them as a contractor.
“I’m in a way overqualified, but also underqualified,” Jaska said.
Local government work would seem a natural fit for former federal employees. A bill in the state legislature that would have prioritized them for state jobs failed to advance this year. And even if it had succeeded, openings are slim: Washington is under a hiring freeze because of budget constraints.
At the state Department of Ecology, hiring managers have seen an uptick in applications from former federal workers, said spokesperson Andrew Wineke. Ecology values the skills and technical knowledge former federal workers bring to the table, Wineke said, but given the hiring freeze, the agency is recruiting for only a limited number of positions.
A spokesperson for the state Department of Natural Resources said they’re aware of at least one former federal worker the agency hired this year, but they’re unlikely to have any more openings due to budgetary limits.
Washington’s Employment Security Department doesn’t have any more webinars for former federal workers planned. Officials are now pivoting to a new series of webinars — this time aimed at laid-off state employees.
“There’s just been so many people looking for jobs,” Jaska said. “I think it’s just really hard.”
Washington’s broader labor market appears to be experiencing a slowdown, with three consecutive months of job losses for the first time since the pandemic, said Anneliese Vance-Sherman, a chief labor economist with the Employment Security Department. The data isn’t cause for major concern, she said, but it’s still not an ideal situation for job seekers.
“Every indicator I’m looking at is just pointing to an overall slowdown, and that’s a scary spot to be,” Vance-Sherman said. “It’s not as scary as everything being downward-pointing arrows, but it’s definitely a very frustrating situation for anybody who’s looking for work right now.”
There’s a lot of variety in the types of federal jobs people do, and Vance-Sherman said former federal workers’ ability to transfer to the private sector depends a lot on the work they were previously doing. In theory, there are enough jobs in Washington to absorb the federal layoffs, but they aren’t necessarily jobs that match each worker’s unique skill set, she said.
“When we’re talking about the labor market, it’s not just about the total number of jobs,” Vance-Sherman said. “It’s about whether there’s a job that’s going to fit what I’m looking for as a job seeker.”
The federal layoffs represent a relatively small portion of Washington’s labor force, and aren’t likely to throw the job market into a tailspin, Vance-Sherman said. But the broader impact of federal funding cuts is much harder to measure — and could have a ripple effect on city, state, nonprofit and private-sector employers.
“It’s that indirect and induced employment piece that could make this balloon,” Vance-Sherman said.
Broad ripple effect
When Andrew Shutes-David applied for unemployment benefits this spring, he didn’t check the box identifying himself as a federal employee. But he’s still among the workers affected by federal cuts.
Shutes-David had worked with the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound Healthcare System for more than two decades, helping write grants and review regulatory guidelines for research into health issues like PTSD and dementia. He was technically employed by a private contractor, but the government still paid part of his salary. He worked on a two-year contract that was renewed every year without issue.
In December, Shutes-David received a letter telling him his contract would be renewed once again. Then, one day after Trump’s inauguration, he received another letter informing him that the offer was being rescinded because of a “freeze on the hiring of federal civilian employees as directed by President Trump.”
Despite his decades of experience with the agency, Shutes-David was still considered a new hire because of his contract renewal. He was shocked.
“It felt very stable,” Shutes-David said. “I knew that I was valued by my colleagues and co-workers, and it seemed like such important work that we were doing. I wouldn’t have imagined someone thinking that we should put this work in jeopardy.”
Shutes-David spent the next few months in limbo as his supervisors at the VA tried to cut through the red tape and find a way to bring him back.
“For my family, the ambiguity of not knowing what was going on was really tough,” he said.
In May, the VA changed their policies regarding the hiring freeze. After jumping through more hoops and changing the way his job was classified, Shutes-David was able to secure another contract. He said he’s glad to be back doing the work he cares about, but is unsure how long it will last. At the VA, rumors of future cuts are swirling.
“It’s stressful for me, and then also it just seems stupid, like no other word for it,” Shutes-David said.
Vital services
Since February, protestors have been gathering weekly outside the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building in downtown Seattle to show their support for government workers.
At a recent rally, people chanted “Fork in the road, knife in the back, federal workers will fight back!” and waved signs in solidarity with government workers.
“Public work is the public good,” said Patrick McKee, who has been helping to organize the protests. “What they do matters.”
Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck was in the crowd playing flute with a protest marching band. During a brief interview between songs, she said she’s interested in finding ways for Seattle to incorporate the “immense talent in our federal workforce locally.” But she acknowledged the city is having budget issues of its own, and that it’s unclear how many new people the city will be able to hire this year.
A handful of active federal workers attended the rally. They said there’s an atmosphere of fear, and that many current employees are worried about getting “RIF’d” — slang for receiving a “reduction in force” notice informing them that their position is being eliminated.
The uncertainty has made federal work and “providing really vital services to the public really difficult,” said an Environmental Protection Agency employee named Steph. Due to fear of retaliation, she asked that her full name not be used.
Steph said it feels like the administration is using intimidation and fear tactics to force federal workers to leave voluntarily.
“Announcing these intentions to cut and making the workplace not a good place to be working has pushed a lot of people to take these resignation offers,” Steph said. “It’s been really harming morale.”
Ambrose Dieringer is one of thousands of federal employees still in a state of limbo. He’s an oversight analyst who has worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Seattle for more than a decade.
The Bureau is responsible for overseeing a variety of financial institutions, including several of Musk’s companies. It was marked as a top target of DOGE shortly after Trump’s inauguration, and has been targeted with a 90% reduction in staff.
Dieringer was placed on administrative leave in February as the Bureau tried to find a legal way to fire him and his colleagues. He received a layoff notice in April, but it was rescinded several hours later because of a court order. He’s now back at the job, under “ready to work status” — still getting paid, but unable to do the work he was hired to do. He’s allowed to check email, organize files and do other housekeeping tasks. Anything else has to be authorized by a department director, and that hasn’t happened, he said.
“We have an important mission here. We are not being allowed to carry out this mission,” Dieringer said. ”The bread and butter of the Bureau’s work, writing laws, punishing bad actors, going into financial institutions, kicking the tires, making sure they’re treating Americans fairly — none of that work, to the best of my knowledge, is being accomplished right now.”
Dieringer and many other current and former federal workers say they’re still upset by the callous nature of Musk and the Trump administration’s attacks on their work. Despite the initiative’s stated goal, they all say government agencies have, ironically, only become less efficient.
Jaska, the former NOAA fisheries worker, said he’s still upset at how arbitrary and reckless the cuts felt.
“All this from someone who reportedly was walking around high on ketamine,” Jaska said, referring to a recent New York Times report about Musk’s heavy use of the anesthetic.
Dieringer said the attacks on the federal workforce have been personally stressful, but he’s most concerned about the work that isn’t happening as a result.
“It’s sad that we’re losing our jobs and we can’t pay our bills,” Dieringer said. “But the important thing is the veterans that are being harmed, hard-working people that are getting ripped off by mega-companies … that’s the story.”
