Virginia leaders brace for impact of federal cuts

“There’s so many down-river, trickle-down effects that are going to occur, and frankly, at the local level, we’re not going to be equipped to be able to handle all of that,” said Canek Aguirre, an Alexandria City Council Member

The stress of working as a federal employee in the second Trump administration has been immeasurable for John Z., who did not want to give his full name for fear of retribution. 

John Z. of Washington, DC has worked for the federal government for two decades and described what’s happening to the federal workforce as catastrophic. He wishes more people understood all the important work that’s being undermined with the cuts the Trump administration is attempting. 

“The cuts are everywhere, and it makes no sense to just cut these agencies without doing a complete analysis of what those causes and effects are going to do,” John Z. told The Dogwood in an interview on Tuesday in Arlington at a Tesla protest. 

He pushed back against the allegations that the federal workforce is corrupt, wasteful, and inefficient. The money that works its way through the federal government is tracked and used as Congress intended, John Z. said.

“The services they’re providing protect communities and they protect the world,” he said. 

The stress of federal workers like John Z. and hundreds of thousands of others like him who live in Virginia is also being felt by local leaders as they put together their budgets for the upcoming fiscal year. 

Canek Aguirre, an Alexandria City Council Member, told The Dogwood in an interview on Thursday that he is “extremely concerned” about the cuts happening at the federal level. He said local leaders are in talks with state leaders about the possible support that will be needed in the event of an economic downturn. 

“There’s so many down-river, trickle-down effects that are going to occur,” Aguirre said. “And frankly, at the local level, we’re not going to be equipped to be able to handle all of that.”

Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, has expressed sympathy for fired federal workers but also broad support for the Trump administration’s cuts.

In February, Youngkin launched a website to help connect laid off federal workers to job listings and his administration organized a virtual job fair last week. The website has garnered over 100,000 site visits from across Virginia, and the virtual job fair attracted more than 13,000 applications for more than 11,500 open positions, according to Youngkin spokesperson, Peter Finocchio. 

“Virginia has provided a national model for helping ensure anyone looking for their next opportunity can find it in Virginia, and we will continue to lead the way,” Finocchio said in a statement to The Dogwood on Thursday.

State Democrats disagree.

Virginia Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell told The Dogwood in a text on Tuesday that Youngkin is not doing enough to protect Virginia from the impact of the Trump administration cuts.

Surovell said Youngkin should be criticizing Trump for going after public servants; fighting to make sure no federal agencies are moved out of Virginia; and demanding that all federal funding streams to Virginia are maintained, especially for Medicaid. 

“Virginia has billions of dollars in federal grants that are at risk and there is no way that state can make up 800 million dollars a year of Medicaid cuts,” Surovell texted. 

Read more: US House Republicans want to cut Medicaid. Why that’s bad news for Virginia.

Surovell is a member of the recently formed Special Subcommittee on Federal Impacts to Resources in the state Senate that will have its first meeting on April 2. 

At the federal level, Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, has helped introduce legislation aimed at protecting recently fired federal workers. The legislation hopes to ensure that if and when federal employees get their jobs back, they will not need to restart their probationary periods for the same jobs they already had. 

Warner in a statement on Wednesday said that over the past 50 days more than 20,000 non-political civil servants had lost their jobs without cause and the aim of the legislation – dubbed the Protect Our Probationary Employees Act – is to make sure these civil servants can pick back up where they left off in their probationary periods. 

“Unsurprisingly, a number of these individuals are now being reinstated, either through legal proceedings or because the Trump-Musk administration has realized that these jobs were necessary, and these employees not easily replaced,” Warner said in Wednesday’s statement. 

A federal judge today (Thursday) ordered six federal agencies to rehire thousands of these probationary workers after finding that their firings by the Trump administration had “essentially been done unlawfully,” according to The New York Times. The judge, William J. Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, called the Trump administration’s mass firing of these workers a “gimmick” and a “sham.” 

“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” Alsup said.

This story was updated on Thursday after publication to include comments from Youngkin’s spokesperson.