Former federal workers are taking up local government jobs

Some federal workers aren’t leaving public service altogether. They’re landing jobs in local government.

A job-seeking platform managed by national nonprofit Work for America is helping some workers find those new roles. The service is relatively new but predates President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce in 2025.

Some 350 workers with federal job experience in Pennsylvania and 169 in New Jersey have used the platform, called Civic Match, since it was founded in November 2024.

Nearly 900 state and local government roles in Pennsylvania have been posted on the platform since its start and 42 in New Jersey.

And, according to new data, 187 former federal workers across the U.S. have used the site and landed jobs in state or local government.

While that’s a small fraction of the total federal workers who have left their jobs in the last year amid the Trump administration’s shakeup of the workforce, the new data sheds light on where workers are landing after leaving government positions.

The federal government cut 271,000 jobs from January through November last year. That included workers who were laid off, left of their own accord, or took a government incentive to resign.

In October, just after Trump’s deferred resignation program took effect, Pennsylvania and New Jersey lost roughly 6,000 federal jobs.

There really isn’t a centralized place where someone looking for a state or other local government job can go, said Caitlin Lewis, executive director at Work For America. The platform is currently open only to job seekers who have federal work experience or who lost their jobs because of federal funding cuts, but Lewis hopes to open it up to others in the future.

Austin Holland was working in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last year, when federal workers were instructed to begin working in the office full-time. He had been working remotely from Lancaster much of the time and commuting to Washington, D.C., a few days per pay period. Relocating to D.C. full-time wasn’t feasible for him.

“I really enjoyed my federal job, and I had imagined that it was kind of something I was going to do for my entire career,” he said. “I was struggling with losing that and trying to figure out ‘Where is my career going from here?’”

Holland estimates that he joined the Civic Match platform in early 2025. Through a virtual job fair, he made a connection that ultimately led to a job at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. He took a pay cut but was able to stay in Lancaster — and in public service.

Before leaving his job at the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Kreider uploaded his resume to Civic Match and attended some of the platform’s webinars.

“It was refreshing and validating to have such high-quality hiring officials participating,” Kreider said. “I think it helped remind those of us who maybe were a little bit disillusioned — or were feeling traumatized by what we had just been through — that there were places where we could continue to serve where we wouldn’t be subject to what we were going through at the federal level.”

Kreider, who lives in Chester County, also used LinkedIn to look for jobs and searched government websites. He ultimately landed a communications director job with Chester County, which he found directly on the county’s job listing board.

He’s been in the new job for roughly two months and says some days are “completely overwhelming.”

“County governments do a lot of work with not as many resources as federal agencies tend to have,” he said. “I’m working as a communication director for an organization three times the size of the one I came from, but I’m making significantly less money and sort of being responsible for communications related to far more things.”

He’s taken a pay cut but said he loves the new job.

“It’s been, for me, an affirmation of how many good people there are who just want to help,” Kreider said. “I’m surrounded by people who come into work every day to serve their neighbors and their communities.”

On a recent Thursday afternoon in February, Civic Match had seven jobs posted in Philadelphia. Available positions with the city included a chief epidemiologist, a director of tax policy, and a director of adult education.

The majority of the 187 platform users who have found jobs — 63% — are workers with at least eight years of public sector experience, according to new data from Work for America. Roughly 40% found jobs in human resources or other operations-related roles.

One-third of those hired have relocated for their new jobs out of state, with 22% reporting a move of over 100 miles from their previous position.

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Their federal experience came from a range of departments, including the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, as well as USAID, the General Services Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The aim of Work for America is to curb staffing shortages in local governments and help speed up their hiring process, Lewis said.

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“Unlike the private sector, government does not really think about its employer brand and marketing itself as a potential employer,” she said. “Individual local governments don’t have the same amount of resourcing to actually think about expressing an employee value proposition and really marketing to folks who could be great fits for roles that they have open.”