Codifying federal worker protections after the Trump administration’s major cuts to agency workforces will be key in rebuilding trust with federal employees, two House Democrats said Thursday night during MeriTalk’s Fix Fed Tech event.
Reps. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., and James Walkinshaw, D-Va., represent counties with high numbers of federal workers and contractors. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-led cuts to those employees have been devastating, they both said.
“Every day, every week, I hear from folks, federal workers who are fired, who have very specific expertise and knowledge, who haven’t been able to find another job, who are figuring out where in the country or where in the world they have to move,” Walkinshaw said, adding, “That’s not just a loss for them; that’s a loss for us as a region, long term.”
Walkinshaw, who represents the majority of Fairfax County, said that its unemployment rate is 28% higher this year than it was in 2024. Fairfax County is home to more federal workers than any other U.S. county.
“Now, increasingly, everybody knows somebody who has lost their job over the course of the last year due to the policies of this administration,” Walkinshaw said.
Subramanyam pointed to the politicization of the federal workforce as a cause of dwindling trust in the government by federal employees.
Those workers “took a lower pay to come to the federal government … because they trusted that it would be mission-oriented and wouldn’t matter with who the president was, and that they’d be doing great work and would have some stability in that job,” Subramanyam explained.
“And now we’ve blown up all of that … so the only way to fix that is to reverse that back, and so restore that trust, restore that certain sense of sort of job security,” Subramanyam added.
The representatives pointed to a need to codify federal worker protections, such as requiring that a president come to Congress before cutting an agency’s budget or workforce.
“I think we have to go systematically and make sure those protections are ironclad in the law,” Walkinshaw said. At the same time, Walkinshaw added, the government must have some freedom to reward high performers and remove low performers.
Ensuring that a presidential administration can’t refuse to spend money that Congress has appropriated will maintain Congress’s constitutional authority and also provide economic stability.
“Because if an administration, Democrat, Republican, can – on a whim – ignore funding that Congress appropriates; all of your businesses and all of your jobs as federal employees are at risk every single day,” Walkinshaw explained.
Looking forward, he said, “there’s really important conversation and work substantively that needs to start happening about that right now. So, when we have the opportunity to do all that, we’re prepared.”