If Trump cuts federal workforce, Warner predicts ‘disaster’ for Va.

U.S. Sen. Mark Warner said Thursday he hopes President-elect Donald Trump won’t pursue massive cuts and relocations in the federal workforce — because if he does, it would be a “disaster for Virginia’s economy,” particularly in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. “We would get hit worse than any other states,” Virginia’s senior senator said.

Warner, a moderate Democrat known for reaching across the aisle, said also that Trump’s proposed immigrant deportations and additional restrictions on immigration and guest workers would harm the state’s agriculture, seafood, hospitality and poultry businesses by depriving them of workers.

“There is no state in the nation that gets hurt worse than Virginia when we have government shutdowns … when we in Congress don’t do our job, because we have not only a massive federal workforce, but we have a huge contractor workforce as well,” Warner said during a press call Thursday. “When you think not just [about] the contractor workforce up in Northern Virginia, but all the folks … who are at our military installations as we go down through the peninsula into Hampton Roads, we would get hit worse than any other states. These kind of attacks that Mr. Trump has made on the federal workforce, I think is unwarranted.”

Trump has said he wants to rid the executive branch of “rogue bureaucrats,” whom he claims hampered his agenda during his first term as president. He also said he would bring in more political appointees to serve in agencies, instead of just the highest-level positions like secretaries and commissioners.

Warner added that if Trump “dramatically cut[s] back on our national security,” that would be particularly painful to Virginia’s government contracting and technology sectors, as well as to the military presence in Virginia.

“The president-elect has said he wants to have the world’s strongest national security defense,” Warner said. “We’ve got to protect our armed forces. Part of what we’ve got in Hampton Roads is a major Coast Guard facility, and that doesn’t get lumped in with national security. So, any time you talk about cutting non-defense spending, think about items that are not classic defense, but I would call the Coast Guard very important.”

The state has more than 140,000 civilian federal employees, and Trump’s platform calls for 100,000 federal jobs to be moved out of the Washington, D.C., metro region to other states. He also has vowed to revive Schedule F, which Trump instituted at the end of his first term in 2020, to strip civil service protections from potentially 50,000 career government workers, making them at-will workers and more vulnerable to firing.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who joined Trump twice on the campaign trail in Virginia, said in August that Virginia’s federal civil servants shouldn’t be afraid, because “there are fabulous opportunities for folks to find a new employer in Virginia should the one they work for move away.” But Democrats and others have said it’s not that simple to find a new job that matches up with workers’ abilities and training.

“My message to federal workers is I will be there to protect them, to protect their professionalism, to protect their careers,” Warner said. “The idea is, well, Donald Trump claims to be a good businessperson. If he is, he would recognize that by moving federal workers all over the country, you’d lose vast amounts of experience, vast amounts of folks who know their jobs and do their jobs for Democratic or Republican administrations.” He added that he and newly re-elected U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine are “already on a bill” to oppose Schedule F from being re-enacted, and U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat who represents part of Fairfax County, has sponsored a companion bill in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“If President-elect Trump comes in and takes an axe to cut back … without looking at the programs that he’s cutting,” Warner said, “no area in the country will get hit harder than Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.”

The wind energy sector — including Dominion Energy’s offshore wind farm and connected industry in Hampton Roads — could also see changes during a Trump presidency, as could the state’s nuclear industry, spanning from Newport News Shipbuilding’s construction of nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers for the Navy to nuclear fuel and reactor manufacturers BWX Technologies and Framatome in Lynchburg, Warner said.

As for immigration restrictions on guest worker visas and other temporary foreign worker programs — as well as the possibility of mass detentions and deportations of undocumented migrants residing in the United States — Warner said that family-owned seafood businesses on the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula in Virginia will be “dramatically hit. Without those workers, Virginia would lose thousands of Virginia-based jobs and many, many multigenerational businesses. Many of these businesses bring the same workers in every year. They go back [home], they come for the season.”

Immigrants also hold jobs at Virginia’s orchards, farms, poultry businesses and hotels, the senator said. “And then you’ve got landscape workers,” which is less of a seasonal job in the South, he noted. “I’d love to see some resolution so we can add more predictability.”