WASHINGTON — Democrats representing Maryland in Congress are doubling down on their efforts to protect federal workers in the state, saying Thursday that they will try to pass legislation and also rely on the courts to stop President Donald Trump’s quick moves to reclassify tens of thousands of merit-based employees as political appointees.

The legislation — aimed at combating an executive order that critics say will politicize previously nonpartisan jobs — faces an uphill battle in the Republican-controlled U.S. House and Senate.

But with more than 142,000 federal employees in Maryland making up a larger share of the workforce compared with other states, the state’s representatives said they’re looking for all avenues to push back.

“We’ll continue to push for that,” said U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who sponsored an identical bill that failed in the session of Congress that ended in December. “But in the immediate, the first line of defense right now is to go to court and prevent them, the administration, from abusing its power to gut the merit-based civil service.”

In a week when Trump took the oath of office and quickly launched a wide range of executive actions, his targeting of the federal workforce — through the reclassification order, hiring freeze and a return to in-person work mandate — is a top concern for Maryland Democrats.

All seven of the state’s nine Democratic members who spoke at a news conference Thursday said they were deeply concerned about the workforce issues.

U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, who represents the Eastern Shore and is the delegation’s only Republican, also appeared to signal “Team Maryland’s” bipartisan push for some state-specific priorities, like protecting the Chesapeake Bay and maintaining the H-2B visas for temporary workers coming from abroad. But Harris also said his party is likely not going to oppose Trump very often.

“The majority is probably not going to break with the president on a lot of issues,” Harris said. “There are a lot of issues that I think we’ll see eye-to-eye on. Look, there’s some we’re not going to see eye-to-eye on. That’s obvious and it’s true. But more times than not we work as Team Maryland on issues that are important to Maryland.”

Harris did not comment on the federal workforce issues but has previously acknowledged that cuts could have an outsized impact on Maryland.

Democrats’ largest area of concern is what was previously known as Schedule F, an order that seeks to reclassify merit-based jobs as positions that eliminate civil service protections. Van Hollen said about 80,000 workers nationwide could be impacted by this order.

“When you start replacing people who were selected based on knowledge and experience and qualifications with people who are hired as political hacks, the whole country should worry,” Van Hollen said. “Because the quality of services will go down, and the quality of the important work that the federal government does will go down, and that will hurt every American.”

U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth pointed to employees in her district at the Annapolis-based Chesapeake Bay Program Office.

“I’m gravely concerned that the executive order might lead to a silencing of our scientists at a moment in time when we’re seeing the impacts of a change in climate, sea level rise, things that are actually threatening the lives and livelihoods of our constituents,” she said.

U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who represents Baltimore, said federal workers at Baltimore County-based agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare are “living a life of uncertainty, not knowing what’s going to happen.”

He said his legislation, called the Saving the Civil Service Act, would require Congress to approve reclassifying the types of employees targeted by the executive order. With just four Republicans among its 99 cosponsors in the last session, Mfume said he hopes to “expand the bipartisan nature of it” this session by talking about the impact on employees’ families if there’s “an arbitrary situation” where civil servants can be fired.

In the meantime, lawsuits may be a quicker option to stop the order, Van Hollen said. At least one was filed this week by the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 150,000 employees in 37 federal agencies.

The other executive orders focused on workers are also already having an effect, lawmakers said.

Van Hollen said in an interview that his office has heard from constituents who’ve already been caught up in a nearly government-wide hiring freeze because they’d been accepted for positions but had not yet signed formal offer letters. While not specifying which types of jobs those calls have been related to, he said the longer the freeze is in place, the worse it could get for people, for instance, trying to get ahold of someone about their Social Security benefits or for food inspectors to do their jobs.

“As time goes on, the hiring freeze has a more and more harmful impact on the public, he said.

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