At least 501 Virginians have made initial unemployment claims tied to federal employers, a Virginia Employment Commission spokesperson told VPM News on Thursday. The count comes as the federal government's plans to slash jobs remain hazy — and as economists and policymakers try to sift through data to plan for the possible economic fallout.
Last week there were a total of 168 confirmed initial Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees claims, and 136 were continued UFCE claims, said Kerri O’Brien in an email.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, under criticism from General Assembly leadership, has rolled out an online job portal in an attempt to create opportunities for tens of thousands of federal employees whose careers are on shaky ground. Paralleling that is President Donald Trump’s DOGE initiative, which aims to relocate or eliminate federal work without clear oversight and under the stewardship of entrepreneur Elon Musk.
“There understandably will be some job dislocation, and that's where we come in. We've worked so hard over the last three years to build this vibrant economy,” Youngkin told press last week after announcing an online portal to connect workers with new employment, VirginiaHasJobs.com. “We have got a pathway to a great career right here in the commonwealth, and we are ready to help you along that path.”
In addition to VirginiaHasJobs.com, which links to other online job postings, the initiative posted resources for federal employees, including specific ones for Virginians with disabilities and veterans — a large constituency both in the commonwealth and among federal workers.
Wednesday, Virginia’s workforce development agency held a virtual hiring event, with over 5,000 registered to attend — including more than 800 that had federal government experience.
Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis and a public policy professor at George Mason University, said data from online job postings aggregated by economic consultancies indicates Virginia’s job openings don’t line up with the skill set of Virginia’s federal workers.
“At best, it was maybe a 30% overlap,” he told VPM News in an interview Wednesday. Clower said the largest job description for federal employees were for general administrative positions, which covers a wide range of jobs.
“The job postings in the district for that particular occupation in January were like 32 job postings,” he said. “On the other hand, you get IT workers ... just looking at the numbers, theoretically, all of those folks ought to able to be go out and find jobs as soon as they can get through the hiring process.”
The lack of harmony between job openings and the relevant experience of newly unemployed workers issues underline the challenges facing Virginia as the federal government seeks to cut jobs and federal spending, and the limits that state workforce development and unemployment insurance can provide if such sweeping changes are indeed implemented.
Virginia House Speaker Don Scott (D–Portsmouth) criticized this approach in a press call after the event, saying Virginia’s maximum unemployment benefit of $378 a week is not enough.
“We're hoping that the governor will ask them to stop and stop telling people to prepare,” Scott said of Trump and Musk. “He'll just tell them to stop and stand up for Virginians.”
But one of the most significant challenges is a lack of information on the scope of what is already affected, and the new federal administration’s plans to affect it.
It’s still unclear how many Virginians have already been affected by federal job cuts: According to the Virginia Employment Commission, there were 450 initial unemployment claims tied to federal employers as of Feb. 22.
Data gathered by Virginia’s labor agencies may not convey an up-to-date scale of the problem. It has blind spots: Virginians working in Maryland- or DC-based jobs are counted by those jurisdictions; workers who are under administrative leave, those whose terminations are currently held up by the courts, and those who took buyouts may not be counted either.
The VEC is working toward putting together weekly data to reflect unemployment claims of federal employees, a spokesperson told VPM News in an email. The stakes are high: Around 300,000 Virginians work for federal agencies, and federal jobs also support other employment.
João Ferreira, an economist with the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center, said that the effects have layers: reductions in household spending, relocations to other states, real estate shocks and impacts on contracting, particularly in professional, scientific and technical services.
“This is a sector that has grown a lot in the DC area and also in Virginia… fueled by the contracts they had with the federal government,” he said. “If they start seeing that these contracts are starting to shrink, this might also have an additional layer of impact that can create more difficulties.”
Clower, the George Mason professor, estimates that for every federal job eliminated or relocated, the regional economy would lose 0.4 jobs.
But estimates also vary. According to the Weldon Cooper Center, a reduction of 39,000 jobs would mean a recession in Virginia.
The center calculated that a 10% reduction in federal civilian jobs, or 18,000 people, would mean a loss of 39,178 in total state employment — wiping out its previous projection of 30,000 new jobs in the commonwealth in 2025.
President Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to take 100,000 jobs out of the DMV area, which has approximately 400,000 jobs in the National Capital Region.
“What are spillovers through supply chains, through household spending and all that?” said Clower. “The approach that's being taken by the Trump administration is a long way from transparent. We don't know what their ultimate goal is.”
Even the exact number of federal workers in Virginia is elusive. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey said that in 2023, 315,000 federal workers resided in Virginia. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (an agency under the U.S. Department of Labor) said the number of jobs — specifically, places of employment physically located in Virginia — was 189,000 the same year. And the independent U.S. Office of Personnel Management said the number of jobs was 145,000 in 2024.
The census data is even more complicated by the fact that sometimes people report working for the federal government when they in reality may be working for contractors, said UVA’s Ferreira.
On top of that, he said figures on many employees of military and intelligence services are not made available for national security reasons.
Absent any sort of clear structure, representatives of local government associations have said Virginia’s policymakers are unable to plan for and accommodate the cuts, particularly at the local level. Many localities — including Richmond — are in the process of writing their fiscal 2026 budgets. (Virginia’s fiscal year runs from July 1–June 30; the federal government’s fiscal year runs from Oct. 1–Sept. 30.)
“We've got a moving target here in terms of what [information] the feds are going to provide,” Joe Flores, the Virginia Municipal League’s fiscal policy director, told a special commission of Virginia Delegates in late February. “What I heard from one locality is that the uncertainty is making it difficult for us to establish our budgets, and so we're even more cautious than in years past.”
Flores was speaking to the Emergency Committee on the Impacts of Federal Workforce and Funding Reductions.
The committee includes Dels. Joshua Cole (D–Fredericksburg), Mike Feggans (D–Virginia Beach) and Josh Thomas (D–Prince William), who are all expected to face competitive reelection campaigns this fall.
The House of Delegates also voted to allow for legislators to reconvene if eliminating federal jobs or spending undercuts Virginia’s budget, which received nearly $24 billion in federal funds, according to the House Appropriations Committee.
