In this three-part series, WTOP takes a look at how a new Trump administration could shake up the region.
The largest Maryland county, Montgomery County, also has the biggest federal government workforce in the state. With about 95,980 federal employees calling the county their home, local officials are looking into how President-elect Donald Trump’s second term could impact the economy.
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich told reporters Wednesday that while it’s no longer considered a “company town,” the county will be conducting an assessment to weigh the potential economic impacts of Trump’s plan to move government jobs out of the D.C. area.
Maryland has more than 350,000 households that directly benefit from federal wages or retirement income, according to a 2023 report prepared by the Office of the Comptroller. The report, prepared ahead of a possible federal government shutdown that was averted, found that some sort of federal income, totaling about $31 billion, touches one in nine households in the region.
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Montgomery County, home to a number of federal agencies — including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — used to be far more dependent on those agencies for its economic well-being, said Elrich.
“We’ve diversified somewhat,” Elrich said. “The good thing is we’ve tried to move more and more of our efforts in the nonfederal direction to base our economy more on the sciences.”
He listed a few major corporate headquarters in the county, including hotel chains, such as Choice and Marriott, and a large biotech presence.
But, said Elrich, it’s not certain that Trump would be “friendly to medical work and medical research, so we’ll see how that all plays out.”
In 2023, Trump announced what he called a “10-point plan” to move tens of thousands of government jobs outside of Washington.
“If he does anything serious like either shutting down those agencies or moving the agencies out of Washington, D.C. to basically a long distance from here, it will have an impact,” Elrich said.
As for how he would deal with that impact, he said he is considering tax increases.
“I mean, the option that we would want to do is probably raise taxes to make up for lost revenues,” said Elrich. “The way we’re structured right now, the bulk of those taxes would land on residents, and we would have to walk a very fine line.”
Elrich said changes promised by Trump could “seriously impact” the county’s budget.
The loss of employment could drive residents out of the county and also affect the housing market.
“We should be able to figure out which agencies are targeted. You can kind of guess … probably CDC and NIH, FDA. There’s a whole bunch of things that are going to be on the chopping block. So, but Department of Education, how can you forget that?” he said.
Maryland Matters contributed to this report.
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