The government jobs advertised in Maryland run the gamut.

Inspecting elevators for a salary between $60,987 and $79,364. Supervising case management specialists within the state Department of Juvenile Services for as low as $69,323 and as high as $112,044. Working in maintenance and sanitation at the Spring Grove Hospital Center for as little as $36,093 or providing clinical psychiatric care for as much as $463,485.

Filling state vacancies has been a priority for Gov. Wes Moore and other elected officials, though they are also facing a $3.3 billion state budget shortfall for which they have vowed to cut government spending.

When asked late last month how many former federal workers he thought state agencies could hire, Moore said he was not setting a quota and that it was up to each agency to determine what’s best for their operations.

Last week, at a job fair in Frederick County, he was working to fill open positions with fired and laid-off federal workers. Moore said the state was making progress in connecting federal workers with both public and private sector jobs.

“We want them to know that we are going to do anything and everything to make sure that our people are protected because right now they are under attack and they’re under attack by the federal government,” Moore said.

The roughly 430 jobs listed on a state government job board are among the potentially thousands of positions that officials hope could help federal workers — who have been cut en masse by President Donald Trump’s administration — get back on their feet.

Moore launched the effort for a streamlined federal-to-state pipeline for job seekers last month. To offset the harm of an estimated 29,000 federal workers in Maryland losing their jobs, the governor said he was hoping to expedite the hiring process for open state positions, host a series of job fairs and connect people to openings in the private sector.

More than 1,100 former federal workers had filed initial unemployment compensation claims as of March 20 — up from about 450 a month earlier — since Trump took office in January, according to the Maryland Department of Labor.

The state regularly offers resources such as job fairs, resume workshops and other professional development services to job seekers. Since its shift to focus some of those efforts on federal workers, the state has worked with local governments and organizations to hold or schedule about two dozen in-person or virtual job fairs from mid-March through April, according to the Department of Labor.

Dozens of public and private employers packed the Frederick Seventh-day Adventist Church last week as the governor joined hundreds of job-seekers moving from table to table, lining up for more information from recruiters at everything from the Frederick County sheriff’s office to the FBI.

Private employers like Northwestern Mutual, a western Maryland radio station and a local pool construction company joined as more than 900 potential employees registered to attend — far above the roughly 250 who registered for a job fair at the same location a year earlier, according to the state Department of Labor.

Moore’s administration has also highlighted those and other jobs in the private sector. An online jobs board run by the state that’s separate from the state government jobs site has about 130,000 openings — from healthcare workers to supervisors at local Sheetz stores.

“I have been so amazed at how the private sector has stepped up,” Moore said. “I was speaking with one tech CEO who said, ‘You know, I was speaking with a person who has a PhD, a [top secret] security clearance … and has been working at the NIH.’ They’re like, ‘I wanted to know their name because I’d love to hire them.’”

Similar public and private employers have been at other job fairs across the state, including in Baltimore and Anne Arundel County last week.

In Baltimore, more than 90 public sector employers showed up, including the city departments for transportation and human resources.

In Odenton, the Anne Arundel County fire and police departments, as well as the public school system, were among the recruiters.

While Moore used the moment also to recruit teachers across the state, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman said the county is short about 60 public school teachers.

“There are people who are considering a career change and becoming a teacher,” Pittman said. “I think [it] is great because we need more teachers.”

Aside from the job fairs across the state, state officials have set up a website, response.maryland.gov, for impacted federal workers to access resources like job help and unemployment insurance.

Filling state jobs

It makes sense for local jurisdictions and the state to do all they can to recruit laid-off federal workers, said Alessandro Rebucci, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.

Doing so could help minimize the layoffs’ impact on their own jurisdictions’ economies and keep the impact of additional federal or state cuts from becoming worse. And it could help public employers land specialized or hard-to-find talent, Rebucci said.

“If counties and states have open positions, particularly positions that are fairly high-skilled or technical, all of a sudden, they have a set of workers that probably fit the bill,” said Jeremy Schwartz, professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business.

The private sector is likely to recruit laid-off workers too, he said.

“That said, it’s going to be hard for the state economy to quickly absorb that many unemployed workers that quickly,” he said, and just a small share of laid-off workers are likely to find jobs through efforts such as job fairs.

Schwartz said Maryland may be in better shape to hire some of the workers than other states that rely on federal jobs but have weaker economies.

Though the state’s 3% unemployment rate was tied for the seventh-lowest rate in the nation in January, Maryland is also potentially one hardest hit by the federal workforce cuts because of its location and reliance on those jobs.

“The labor market is already fairly tight, which means a lot of firms are looking for employees, and there are fewer employees out there,” he said. “It’s a better situation for federal workers than in the middle of a full-blown recession.”

Reporters Natalie Jones and James Matheson contributed to this report. Have a news tip? Contact Sam Janesch at sjanesch@baltsun.com, 443-790-1734 and on X as @samjanesch.