People who lose their federal government jobs are being recruited to fill positions with Pennsylvania and Allegheny County government.
It remains unclear how many of the more than 16,000 federal employees who live in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area will be affected by the cuts, but on Wednesday Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order to streamline the state’s hiring process so displaced federal workers can be hired to fill what Shapiro termed critical vacancies in state government.
Civil engineers, nurses, prison workers and accountants were among the fields listed in a statement released by Shapiro.
A website was also launched to entice federal workers to continue their public service by taking a job with the commonwealth.
The state’s move comes in advance of the planned launch this week of a similar program in Allegheny County.
Some former federal workers have already interviewed for county jobs, according to spokesperson Abigail Gardner.
“We want to play matchmaker for some high-level positions,” Gardner said.
There are hundreds of job openings in the county and this will help the county to fill some of them, she said.
Specifics about the cuts remain vague, although the Trump administration is touting billionaire Elon Musk’s effort as the face of the burgeoning Department of Government Efficiency to cut government waste.
Aside from jobs, government buildings, including those in Pittsburgh, could also be sold.
The federal government is Allegheny County’s fourth largest employer and Westmoreland County’s 11th largest, according to state data.
VA Pittsburgh quiet about cuts
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is among the largest federal government employers in Pennsylvania, according to Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that helps federal workers.
Last month, more than 2,400 VA employees were fired, the Trump administration announced.
Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, is trying to find out how many of these employees worked with the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System.
Deluzio sent a letter seeking those details Feb. 25 that asked for a response by Feb. 28.
As of Wednesday, VA Pittsburgh Director Donald Koenig hasn’t responded to Deluzio’s query.
“It is unacceptable for the VA to ignore Congressman’s Deluzio’s demands for answers about fired VA workers (many are veterans themselves),” said Zoe Bluffstone, Deluzio’s communications director. “And now there are reports that the Trump Administration plans to fire 80,000 VA workers and dismantle the VA. This is a betrayal of veterans, and Congressman Deluzio is going to give them hell to defend his fellow veterans and Western PA values.”
VA Pittsburgh spokeswoman Shelley Nulph did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, said government efficiency is merely the excuse for the cuts.
“This is about weakening public services, attacking unions, and undermining protections for working people. These cuts aren’t happening in some far-off Washington office,” Lee said. “We have over 8,300 federal workers in PA-12, doing everything from delivering our mail to caring for our veterans to making sure seniors get their Social Security checks.”
The cuts will mean longer wait times for those in need of government services and fewer health care resources, Lee said.
“This is not ‘efficiency’—it’s reckless, dangerous, and it’s playing with people’s lives. We need to invest in our public workforce, not cut it down to the bone,” she said.
Overall, tens of thousands of Pennsylvania residents could lose their jobs, Stier said.
“There’s not a lot of transparency here,” Stier said.
Some people may view federal employees as bureaucrats they finally speak with after minutes listening to the prompts of a computerized system.
“There is no face of the federal worker,” Stier said.
But they’re people like the nurse who cares for VA patients and the inspector who ensures food is safe or the analyst who works to keep people safe from cyberattacks, Stier said.
Al Gore led last effort to cut red tape
By headcount, government hasn’t grown topsy-turvy, Stier said.
“I think it’s the same size as it was in 1969,” he said in a recent interview with TribLive.
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It’s actually slightly smaller, according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
There were 2.3 million executive branch employees in 1969 and there were about 2.2 million in 2024, OPM data show.
“There is a need to modernize our government,” Stier said.
He was among the people behind the largest effort to tame the bureaucracy that was taken by then-President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The “Reinventing Government” initiative was under the control of his vice president, Al Gore.
The project was nearly the opposite of the chaotic Musk effort, say those who ran it or watched it unfold. It was authorized by bipartisan congressional legislation, worked slowly over several years to identify inefficiencies and involved federal workers in re-envisioning their jobs.
“There was a tremendous effort put into understanding what should happen and what should change,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, which seeks to improve the federal workforce. “What is happening now is actually taking us backwards.”
Gore appeared on the David Letterman late night television show and smashed a government ash tray with a hammer to symbolize his crusade to eliminate waste. The government ended up giving out “hammer awards” to employees who came up with ways to cut red tape and improve service, recalled Don Kettl, an emeritus professor of public policy at the University of Maryland.
“Liberating employees and seeing employees as a better part of the system was a big piece of it,” Kettl recalled. “One important difference is the Trump administration sees federal employees as the bad guys, and the Clinton administration saw federal employees as good guys.”
The Clinton administration also worked with Congress to authorize $25,000 buyouts for federal workers and ended up eliminating what Kamarck said were more than 400,000 federal positions between 1993 and 2000 through a combination of voluntary departures, attrition and a relatively small number of layoffs.
Kettl said the job cuts didn’t save money because the government had to turn around and hire contractors to perform the tasks of workers who left — something he worries will happen again if Musk and Trump continue to slash the federal workforce.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.