Large scale layoffs and budget cuts can reverberate far beyond their origins, as the reduction in spending power makes its way from large employer to small-town businesses. Ask anyone who lives near a shuttered steel or auto plant—when those making decent money are no longer earning, those making less will make even less.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ushed in massive cuts in both federal jobs and services. Its impact on the national economy will take a while—perhaps years—to fully comprehend. One analysis speculates adding 500,000 new job seekers to the private sector, for instance, could push wage growth lower. And overall job losses could reach one million when private contractors are included in the calculation, since it’s estimated there are possibly two private government contractors for every federal employee.
Where DOGE can have a very large negative impact sooner, however, is on local economies and communities.
Over 80 percent of the federal workers live and work outside of the Washington, DC metro area. DOGE will be felt especially on states with higher shares—not numbers—of federal workers, including smaller-population states such as Alaska, Wyoming, West Virginia, and New Mexico. The Urban League says the most-affected areas (in terms of unemployment) of DOGE’s recommended 75 percent cut in the federal workforce “tend to be small and home to military installations or bases.”
Cuts to the national weather service has Alaska’s pilots of small planes—an important component of the transportation sector in that large but lightly populated state—worried they will lose data vital to keeping them and their passengers and cargoes up in the air and landing safely. Having fewer park service employees may also jeopardize the safety of tourists in Alaska’s national parks—particularly the expansive bear country. Roughly 3,400 federal workers with the U.S. Forestry Service have been canned across the country, including in Idaho, where 60 percent of the land is owned by the federal government. “This is affecting people in their day-to-day lives, and it’s affecting the public lands that define the Idaho experience,” Idaho Press reporter Royce McCandless told the Columbia Journalism Review.
Predictably, many states have begun their own version of DOGE—adopting the acronym or variations, if not always the exact name. There is Division of Government Efficiency (Oklahama), a Delivery of Government Efficiency commission (South Carolina) and committee (Texas), a couple of COGEs (Kansas has a committee, Missouri a commission), and a GOAT—Government Operations, Accountability and Transparency (Wisconsin). All of these promise to be, as Georgia’s declares, “in the spirit of DOGE,”—that is, not just making government run more efficiently, but cutting as much from government as they can get away with.
So what is happening in your state, your county, your city, your neighborhood as a result of DOGE cuts? We want to know.
Send us a note at info@inthepublicinterest.org. We’ll collect those stories over time so we can more fully understand what DOGE means to communities across the country.
Donald Cohen
Executive Director
IMAGE: Rocky Mountain National Park. Credit: Jeff Hagan