Let’s skip the talking points and get to the math.
By the end of 2025, Maryland had lost nearly 25,000 federal jobs. That’s your neighbor who used to work at NIH. The scientist down the street whose lab equipment orders got frozen because the people who processed procurement were laid off. The contractor who built a 20-year career supporting FDA drug safety reviews, handed a pink slip with a week’s notice.
And Maryland didn’t just feel this — we led the nation. By August, the state had already lost more federal jobs than any other state in the country (Maryland Matters). We were first in line for the damage, and we’re still counting.
The numbers Maryland hasn’t added up — until now
Here’s the thing about DOGE’s impact on Maryland: no one has put it all in one place. The Comptroller’s office has pieces. Maryland Matters has covered the month-by-month job reports. Local TV has done the sympathy stories. But nobody’s built the full picture.
So let me try.
About 229,000 Marylanders work for the federal government (Axios) and that’s not counting contractors. That’s direct federal employees — people whose paychecks come from Uncle Sam and whose mortgages, grocery runs, and school tuitions flow right back into Maryland communities.
The average federal wage in Maryland is $126,468 — nearly double the private sector average of just over $73,000 (Route Fifty). When you lose a federal job in Maryland, you’re not replacing it at CVS or McDonald’s. You’re looking at a median income cut of more than $50,000 a year, if you can find comparable work at all.
Comptroller Brooke Lierman estimated that the federal government brings around $150 billion into Maryland annually — $27 billion in wages, $9 billion in retirement payouts, $46 billion in contracts, $31 billion in grants, and $38 billion in direct payments (Route Fifty).
That’s not background noise. That is the Maryland economy.
And what happens when you pull that lever? Lierman said six months of DOGE cuts have already had the same impact as two full years of sequestration cuts from a decade ago (Route Fifty).
That’s the benchmark. Two years of pain, compressed into six months.
This is hitting your district
If you live in MD-06 — Clarksburg, Germantown, Gaithersburg, Frederick, Hagerstown — you’re feeling this. Your district sits next to three of the most DOGE-hammered institutions in the entire country.
Before 2025, there were 40,749 HHS jobs located in Maryland, with an average annual salary of $145,441 — totaling $5.9 billion in wages (Maryland Comptroller). Three of those flagship institutions are right in our backyard: NIH in Bethesda, FDA in White Oak, and CMS in Woodlawn.
HHS announced it would cut 24% of its overall workforce. Under the announced percentages — FDA at 18%, NIH at 6%, CMS at 1% — the projected Maryland job losses from those three agencies alone total around 2,919 people (Maryland Comptroller) And that’s before you factor in the rest of HHS. Under a full 24% cut applied equally, the number jumps to over 8,400 Maryland residents losing work worth more than $1.2 billion in annual wages.
Scientists at NIH — whose main campus is in Bethesda — reported being unable to buy lab supplies, first because of a freeze on federal credit card spending, then because the procurement staff were laid off (Route Fifty).
The people doing the work of curing diseases can’t order test tubes.
DOGE officials made multiple visits to the FDA’s Maryland headquarters. FDA managers said internally they were out of the loop on the scale and targets of the cuts, and hundreds of retirement applications were being processed at the same time — a brain drain accelerating faster than any buyout plan could manage (CBS News).
The ripple hits harder than the layoff itself
Federal job losses are the headline. The ripple is the story.
In just one week in early 2025, Montgomery County reported 808 jobs lost from four companies — all contractors who worked with USAID (WJLA). Those aren’t federal employees. Those are private sector workers at Maryland firms whose contracts disappeared overnight.
Contracting slowdowns alone could undercut 10% of Maryland’s private-sector GDP. The state already faced a $3 billion budget shortfall, and a steep decline in personal income tax collections — driven by federal job cuts — slashed income tax revenue projections by $350 million across fiscal 2025 and 2026 (Conduit Street).
Moody’s didn’t mince words. They flagged Maryland as the state at the greatest economic risk from federal cuts. With 28,730 federal job losses projected, and two-thirds of Marylanders living in counties at the maximum local income tax rate, counties can’t absorb these costs without cutting services or raising property taxes (Conduit Street).
That means your roads. Your schools. Your local fire department’s budget. This isn’t abstract federal policy. This is the cost of your next property tax bill.
What’s actually being “saved”
DOGE claims it’s saving taxpayers money. Let’s look at that.
The department’s own website credited its workforce cuts with saving the average taxpayer about $1,273 in 2025. What it doesn’t credit to the average Maryland taxpayer: the $350 million income tax revenue shortfall that Maryland now has to close. The projected shrinkage in the state’s taxable wage base. The downstream hit to property values as federal workers sell homes or stop buying them. The cost to Montgomery County of standing up a new Federal Workforce Career Center — a whole new government program to help workers displaced by a different government program.
You don’t “save” money by moving the cost somewhere else. You just move it — and usually make it bigger in the process.
What comes next
Maryland is a resilient state. We have world-class research institutions, a highly educated workforce, and a geographic position that will always make us strategically important. We’re not going anywhere.
But resilience doesn’t mean ignoring the damage while it’s happening. And right now, the people of MD-06 need a representative who understands what’s actually happening to them, not one who’s pretending the numbers don’t exist.
I worked inside these federal systems. Not as a spectator — as someone who helped build and modernize them. I’ve worked with CMS on the systems that process Medicare and Medicaid for millions of Americans. I’ve worked with FDA on the infrastructure that keeps medical device safety reviews moving. I’ve worked with the Health Insurance Marketplace, with the VA, with agencies across HHS. I know what it looks like when these institutions are running well — and I know exactly what’s being lost right now when experienced people walk out the door carrying decades of institutional knowledge that no org chart captures and no rehiring sprint recovers.
When DOGE fires the person who knows why a particular CMS rule is written the way it is, that knowledge doesn’t retire with them. It just disappears. And six months later, when a beneficiary gets a denial that shouldn’t have happened, or a clinical trial stalls because the right FDA reviewer isn’t there anymore, nobody connects it back to the pink slip that got handed out on a Saturday in February.
We need to be honest about what’s happening. We need to fight like hell to protect what’s left. And we need to build the kind of congressional representation that treats federal workers not as a line item to be managed, but as exactly what they are: Maryland neighbors doing vital work.
I can make those connections.
That’s exactly what MD-06 needs in Congress right now.
Sources: Maryland Department of Labor, Maryland Comptroller’s Office, Maryland Matters, Axios DC, CBS Baltimore, Route Fifty, Center for American Progress, Moody’s/Conduit Street, Challenger Gray & Christmas
This article was originally published on Ethan Wechtaluk’s Substack. Republished on TANTV News with permission.
