By 2025, hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been laid off or resigned. Many found new purpose, and fewer bureaucracies worked in state and local governments.
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In March 2025, Meghan Burns was busy working for the Department of Education when her computer restarted just after 5 p.m., and she learned her job as a civil rights lawyer had been terminated.
In the blink of an eye, she and her colleagues in seven of the department’s 10 civil rights offices were shut out and no longer federal employees.
But Burns’ only career was in the civil service. She wasn’t ready for it to end.
“When I graduated from law school, I specifically moved to Washington, D.C., because I wanted to work in public service and in civil rights. That’s all I’ve done,” she said.
More than 317,000 employees will no longer work for the federal government in 2025 as part of President Donald Trump’s drastic downsizing of the government, according to the Office of Personnel Management. According to the agency, the majority of employees chose voluntary buyouts or early retirement. Tens of thousands of employees were laid off.
Layoffs and intentional attrition have led to a nationwide scramble for skilled federal employees to take jobs in the private and nonprofit sectors.
But some former federal employees, like Burns, have found they can continue their service by working at another level of government.
“The federal government’s loss is definitely a gain,” said Burns, now deputy director of the Maryland Department of Health’s Office of Equal Opportunity Programs.
After federal job cuts were announced, states including California, Hawaii, Maryland, New Mexico, New York and Virginia encouraged federal employees to apply for local jobs, and several states offered to streamline the process and ease the transition.
“This is a huge opportunity for communities to get long-term, high-quality talent that they wouldn’t have access to in other scenarios,” said Caitlin Lewis, co-founder of Work for America, which helps people find public sector jobs.
I find it rewarding to work for my hometown
After 25 years as a diplomat around the world, 51-year-old Mark Shaw was ready to return home to Kansas City, Missouri.
He entered the civil service immediately after graduating from graduate school. Shaw oversaw arms control and compliance efforts, monitored compliance with the Biological and Chemical Weapons Convention, and served as Director of the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Division in Afghanistan. He was serving as deputy assistant secretary of state at the U.S. Department of State when he retired in April after working under six presidents.
“The question is… what do you do with this career? Who wants you?” he said.
He applied to nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits, and universities, telling them, “I’ll mop floors. I’ll do anything to get back home.”
It was his mother who encouraged him to consider working in city government, but he wasn’t sure how well suited his skills were.
But Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas knew how useful these skills, developed while working for the federal government, would be to the city. He jumped at the chance to hire a federal employee like Shaw.
“They understand how to navigate the bureaucracy. They understand the core mission of what we’re trying to do. They just have extraordinary expertise,” Lucas told USA TODAY. “Having that level of experience and being able to make it available on a mass scale is something local governments typically don’t have the ability to do.”
Lucas said he took office in 2019 hoping to lure federal employees to work for the city, but found most employees were unwilling to move away from the stability and security traditionally associated with federal employees.
He said Kansas City is currently competing with other cities for former federal employees with decades of experience who the city considers job security.
“For the rest of the country, this is a benefit and I think it’s a strong opportunity to really attract talent that in the past few years has been focused solely on Washington, but now is necessarily looking for opportunities across the country,” he said.
Shaw, who currently serves as Kansas City’s interim city auditor, said he likes the lack of the level of bureaucracy that he had working at the State Department. Instead, he and his team report to City Council, giving them more flexibility to act quickly when they identify problems. He said the position allows him to immerse himself in the community and see the direct impact of his work.
And that gives mothers more time to pamper their grandchildren, he said.
“I’m really satisfied,” Shaw said.
“I never imagined there would be such a need.”
Most of the country’s more than 3 million federal employees are nonpartisan civil servants and remain in their roles no matter which party is in power.
When Trump was elected president in late 2024, Lewis expected to focus on helping about 4,000 political appointees who would soon be out of work find jobs in the public sector.
But she said: “We could never have imagined in January and February last year, when so many civil servants were laid off, that there would be this much demand.”
Work for America’s hastily launched Civic Match program organized job fairs, resume reviews, and mental health seminars for newly laid-off federal employees. We also sought to help both applicants and employers understand how national or international work experience translates to local and state needs.
Local governments have many vacancies in key positions such as human resources, finance, procurement and operations, as well as mid-level staff who can eventually become leaders, she said.
It’s unclear how many former federal employees have found new public sector jobs, but more than 250 state and local governments use Civic Match, and 187 people have used Civic Match to secure state and local government positions since January 2025.
He felt “called” to work for the federal government
Austin Holland, 39, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, went to law school primarily because he wanted to work for the federal government. He began working in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of General Counsel during President Trump’s first term.
He resigned in May 2025 after the government stopped allowing employees to work from home from time to time. He said commuting from Lancaster every day was not sustainable and traveling with two young children was too much work.
“I really love what I do and really felt called to what I do,” he said. Holland considered work in nonprofits, cities and states before landing as assistant general counsel at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.
Although he worked in administrative law and wrote regulations at HUD, he was also exposed to a wide range of policy issues, two things that he said helped him at the state level and allowed him to work on a more diverse set of programs.
“Even in a large state like Pennsylvania, state-level agencies are still much smaller than federal agencies,” he said.
Now, Holland said, he can see for himself how he helps people.
“I’m getting pretty close to the direct impact of my work,” he says. “That’s amazing.”
Sarah D. Wyer is USA TODAY’s senior national political correspondent. Contact her at swire@usatoday.com.
