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Civil Service Commissioner Timothy Hogues and Gov. Kathy Hochul host a roundtable with workers impacted by federal layoffs, at the Office of the Governor of the State of New York, March 3, 2025.
After setting aside congestion pricing and Mayor Eric Adams’s endless scandals for at least a New York minute, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has found her new calling: She’s taking up the righteous cause of employing federal workers left unemployed by the Trump administration’s purges. Her message? “New York Wants You!”
“Elon Musk and his clueless cadre of career killers know nothing about how government works, who it serves, and the tireless federal employees who keep it running,” Hochul declared at a Monday press conference flanked by federal employees who had been unceremoniously dismissed by the Musk operation.
In a bid to soothe the sting of unemployment, Hochul has teed up 7,000 vacancies in state government. New York needs educators, engineers, and health care workers. Attorneys, engineers, nurses, and IT specialists are also in high demand. Career services are on offer and dismissed New York residents can apply for unemployment insurance. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor super commuters and casual travelers can expect to see similar appeals on digital billboards in New York’s Moynihan Station and Washington’s Union Station, two of the busiest stops on the national rail network.
Nationwide, 75,000 U.S. government workers have taken the Trump-Musk buyouts, and tens of thousands more may ultimately find themselves on the street once the havoc affecting a national civilian workforce of nearly 2.5 million people threads its way through federal agencies. Although U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the Trump administration to reverse its probationary employee firings, there is no indication that people who have been discharged have been offered their jobs back.
Though job offers from a few governors won’t begin to dent the ranks of the unemployed, they do make plain the pressures that states and cities must confront in the coming months: surges of avoidable joblessness that will cause further economic and political instability in a country that can’t afford the chaos of a dysfunctional federal government.
State jobs can offer good benefits like health care and, in some places, pensions. That’s certainly something when a worker suddenly has nothing. However, pay scales and the quality of those benefits—which are important metrics in high-cost-of-living states and metro areas—can vary widely by region and the political leanings of state lawmakers and governors. Moreover, public service–focused employees in niche areas (think cybersecurity or marine ecology) may not find comparable work in such sectors.
With nearly 690,000 federal employees, the Washington metro area is one of the country’s hardest-hit areas. In 2023, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) pledged to fill thousands of vacant state jobs and has continued to pursue new workers despite a $3 billion budget shortfall. Now, with some of Maryland’s 10,000 probationary federal employees facing unemployment, Moore aims to recruit 1,600 of them for teaching and other state positions. He’s also ordered state agencies to expedite Maryland’s long and complex hiring process and have people hired in 45 days or less. Some 450 laid-off feds have already filed for unemployment insurance in Maryland.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has established a recruitment program touting the state’s 250,000 public- and private-sector job vacancies to help Virginians and others affected by what he euphemistically called “the federal workforce changes.” Last week, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) called on the Trump administration to “not use a chainsaw but to figure out which jobs we need and which jobs we don’t, and that can be done in an orderly way and in a humane way.” About 7,450 Washingtonians have applied for unemployment insurance, and the city plans to hold a job fair and provide other services for former federal workers.
In Hawaii, Gov. Josh Green (D) has moved to recruit federal workers by executive order with expedited hiring designed to steer people into positions within two weeks. The state had roughly 4,100 civil service vacancies at the end of 2024. Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) has also encouraged resident federal workers affected by the cuts to look at state jobs. Despite the appeal of the tropics or the tundra, both states have difficulties attracting federal workers due to the high cost of basics (food, housing, and gas).
This new job market isn’t limited to states. Cities like Atlanta and Honolulu also are eager to snap up well-trained federal workers—who, in turn, are similarly eager to be snapped up. Howard County, Maryland, which is north of Washington, held a career fair for federal workers, contractors, and residents for the first time at the end of February: 600 people attended. Meanwhile, even though the Oklahoma City area has an Air Force base and an FAA training station that may lose people, Mayor David Holt (R) believes they’d be able to find jobs locally. He’s one of the few sanguine local leaders out there. That’s not the case in Kansas City, where officials fear that the metro area won’t be able to provide employment for the college graduates who get laid off.
The fast-moving instability, the public’s growing unease, and the crowds of town hall–attending voters seem to have focused the minds of some congressional Republicans to meet with Musk this week. He told them that individual agencies, like the Department of Veterans Affairs, were ultimately going to have employee discharges, and suggested that Republican members of Congress reach out to him directly about their particular problems. But most of them seem so encouraged by his quick work that they’re considering voting to make the cuts permanent at some point in the future (not, however, as a component of the current budget process).
Conversations like these have done little to quell the sense of dread that most Americans have about gutting the federal workforce that provides the services they depend on. A late-February PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that 60 percent of Americans believe that federal workers are “essential.”
