Across the D.C. area, fired federal workers are looking at what their futures hold. One question that’s come up: Can they find similar salaries and benefits in the private sector?

During Thursday’s presentation by Maryland’s Board of Revenue Estimates, Robert Rehrman, director of the Bureau of Revenue Estimates, noted the comparatively high salaries that many of the state’s 161,000 federal workers earn.

“In recent years, the federal government has been employing a lot of folks,” Rehrman said. And in many cases, he continued, “Federal wages and employment has outpaced our private sector.”

“There are six counties where the average wage is $124,000 or higher,” Rehrman said. The highest earners, he said, are in Montgomery County, where the incomes are roughly $146,000.

“This is being driven by HHS, specifically, the FDA and the NIH,” he said. Many of those positions belong to employees who are in the medical and STEM fields with advanced degrees, he explained.

There are also seven counties where the government wages are double or greater than those in existing private sector jobs, Rehrman said.

Among the questions being asked, according to Rehrman, is, “How quickly can these individuals be reemployed, and can they gain wages similar to what they had as a federal employee?”

While trying to determine just how many people could be losing their jobs, Rehrman said they’ve analyzed announcements from each federal agency targeted for job reductions.

“Of the more than 100,000 job reductions that we think are in process, we think a little more than 11,000 will occur in Maryland,” he said.

Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman asked, “Will these federal workers stay in Maryland and find new jobs in the private sector? Can the private sector absorb them?”

On Thursday, Republican Senate Minority Leader Stephen Hershey issued a statement calling for “economic diversification.”

“No matter who has been in the White House, economists have warned for at least 20 years that our economy is too dependent on federal jobs,” Hershey wrote.

Hershey added that Maryland’s continued reliance on federal jobs makes “budget planning challenging when federal spending fluctuates.”

In an interview with WTOP, Senate Majority Whip Justin Ready, a Republican whose district includes Carroll County and part of Frederick County, said, “We have a lot of improving to do, and raising taxes on job creators and the so-called high earners, many of whom are job creators and investors themselves, is not the way to go.”

Ready was referring to bills in the General Assembly that would boost taxes and fees and Gov. Wes Moore’s plan to create two new tax brackets that target high earners — those earning $500,000 at 6.25% and those earning over $1 million at 6.5%.

Democratic lawmakers also proposed a business-to-business tax that’s intended to generate $1 billion, another measure designed to help shore up the state’s finances.

Ready said there’s a real urgency to improve the business climate in the state, and said the fiscal woes of the state “are entirely a self-inflicted problem.” He called for “common sense spending reforms and changes.”

“We’ve got to make our state more friendly and attractive to job creators of all kinds,” Ready said.

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