By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews
Firings and layoffs of federal workers by the Trump administration are likely to have marked effects on the economies of Oregon’s north coast counties, particularly in Lincoln County.
That’s the assessment of Shaun Barrick, a state workforce economist who, in addition to Lincoln, monitors economic trends in Clatsop, Columbia and Tillamook counties.
While the percentage of federal workers compared to total employment doesn’t exceed 2 percent in any of those counties, those jobs nonetheless far exceed average local wages, he said.
Lincoln County’s 313 federal workers, for instance, earn an average of 79 percent more than their non-federal counterparts, according to state data. The percentages in Clatsop (55 percent), Tillamook (44 percent) and Columbia (17 percent) combine to give federal employment an outsize effect on the coast’s economic picture.
“It’s definitely substantial,” Barrick told YachatsNews. “If you take all the high earners out, that has a big impact on a region. All the services and products those employees are buying would certainly have an effect.”
The actual number of federal layoffs both on the coast and across Oregon and the rest of the nation is far from clear at this point. But the firings and resignations of thousands of federal workers, along with lawsuits seeking the block some terminations, are taking place on a near-daily basis.
Lincoln County
About 2 percent of Lincoln County’s total workforce is comprised of federal workers, according to Oregon Employment Department figures. That is quite a bit higher than surrounding counties, due mainly to Newport being the West Coast headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific fleet, where layoff notices went out last week.
Technically, NOAA is classified under the federal Department of Commerce, which is why the agency is not a line item in the overall list of federal government employment in Oregon, Barrick said.
Of Lincoln County’s reported 313 federal employees, 111 work for the Department of Agriculture, with the Department of Commerce a close second at 110. The remainder of the federal workforce in the county looks like this: The U.S. Postal Service (62), the Department of the Interior (19), the Environmental Protection Agency (9), and the General Services Administration (1).
A total of 172 workers, or about 1.25 percent of Clatsop County’s total workforce, is employed by the federal government. The breakdown, by agency, is the Postal Service (59), the Department of Defense (50), the Interior Department (16), Homeland Security (15), Department of Veterans Affairs (10), the Social Security Administration and Commerce Department (both 9), and the Coast Guard Exchange System (5).
Tillamook County’s 113 federal employees are spread among the Postal Service (53), Agriculture (36) and Interior (24).
Columbia County’s 78 federal workers are employed by the Postal Service (74) and Agriculture Department (4).
Across the state
While the total of 28,570 federal jobs at the beginning of 2024 accounted for about 1.5 percent of all employment, according to a state report, the share was considerably higher in many rural areas of Oregon.
In the first quarter of 2024, for instance, the top 10 counties by share of all jobs in federal government were rural areas, the report found. The highest percentages were in Sherman (14 percent), Grant (9 percent) and Lake (7 percent) counties.
As on the Oregon coast, federal government jobs also tend to pay relatively high wages. Annual average wages on federal government payrolls in Oregon in 2023 paid $92,700. That was fully 36 percent higher than the average annual wage of $68,300 for all jobs in the state.
“A larger share of federal government jobs tend to require education beyond high school, which tends to be correlated with higher wages,” the report said. “In addition, some sectors that generally have lower average wages, such as leisure and hospitality and retail trade, also generally have little to no government employment. Both of these factors are among the contributors to higher average wage in federal government jobs.”
The exact timing of any further job losses, along with even when they will start showing up in unemployment reports, remains unclear
“The January employment estimates are unlikely to show any of the job changes due to executive orders or other workforce reductions, due to timing of the personnel changes in late January or February,” the report said. “Monthly employment and unemployment estimates for Oregon in February are due out on March 26.”
Sheer numbers aside, however, Barrick noted that any real and lasting impacts of federal job losses on the Oregon coast and elsewhere remain difficult to assess.
“There is so much uncertainty right now,” he said. “Will the NOAA layoffs stick? Who knows? It’s tough to pin down exactly what to expect. We just don’t know.”
- Dana Tims is an Oregon freelance writer who contributes regularly to YachatsNews and can be reached at DanaTims24@gmail.com
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To read the Oregon Employment Department’s report on federal jobs in Oregon, go here
With such low percentages of federal workers in Lincoln and surrounding counties the impact on local economies will be minimal. For example, here in Lincoln county federal employees make up 2% of jobs. If 10% are laid off that would equate to 1 in every 500 jobs lost here. According to this article these federal employees are highly educated (which explains their high salaries) which hopefully will ease their transition into the private sector. I was part of mass layoffs in the oil and gas industry years ago and it is survivable.
The jobs they will ease into are not going to be local. They are taking their taxes and their spending somewhere else.
You are forgetting the knock-on effects of unemployment. Unemployment affects not just the person but the household they live in. The household dramatically cuts spending–no eating out at local restaurants, fewer haircuts, no spending on home and auto repairs, no spending on new furniture or toys, etc. If federal employee wages tend to be higher (because of the higher education requirements) their lack of spending has a disproportionate effect on the local economy.
Assuming the family doesn’t leave Lincoln County, what jobs are there here that pay the same wages? Let’s say the worker is willing to take a lower paying job, maybe even reduce their wages by half. This still reduces the amount of money being spent at local businesses. As a person who has dealt with trying to find an above median-wage job here in Lincoln County after being laid off, it took 7 years for me to find a similarly paying job. In the 10 years since being laid off, my spending habits never returned to their prior rate and that is absolutely catastrophic in an economy that depends on consumer spending. In other words, the repercussions of a layoff can extend for years, not just months within a local economy.
Another thing to consider: I was very lucky that a local employer was willing to hire me for literally half my prior salary. Even landing a much lower wage job is not a guarantee–who is going to hire a person who is overqualified, if there is the high probability that the person will leave as soon as a better job shows up?
The federal government went through a massive re-structuring in the 90s that led to many kinds of jobs being outsourced to the private sector and that process ramped up in the 2000’s. Contracted services these days can include everything from administrative assistants to PhD scientists as well as the more well-known janitorial services. There isn’t a good accounting of how many personnel are associated with contracted services, so that is an extra wild card. (I’m interested in people analytics and at one branch office on the east coast I calculated that about a third of the workforce at a particular federal branch office was hired via temporary staffing agencies.)
And finally, on a personal note, my father was also part of the mass layoffs in the oil and gas industry and it was definitely *not* survivable for him. He died because he couldn’t find a job and lost hope of ever being employed again. (So between you and my father that’s a mortality rate of 50%, although it should be noted that two observations won’t really let us conclude much of anything.)
I don’t think that most people object to the idea behind DOGE – reduce waste, fraud and abuse in government – however its their approach that is the cause of concern. It reminds of another ultimately ineffective approach to solving a problem – the old medical practice of bloodletting. In both cases a group of people (doctors/DOGE) was trying to solve a complex problem (disease/government spending) that they didn’t completely understand. The approach was to pick what they thought was the source of the problem (blood/federal employees) and trying to fix it by picking an arbitrary, poorly researched, approach (bloodletting/firing federal employees) without knowing if it would truly fix the problem and then not taking the time to measure its effectiveness. Of course in the case of bloodletting, when the patient didn’t improve, the solution was to apply more bloodletting until the patient (rarely) recovered or (more likely) died. Lets hope DOGE figures out a better approach before their “patient” dies.
There is an old saying, “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.” A perfect example is the Trump-Musk wrecking machine. These two people have in about 6 weeks done more than all of our enemies in the last 250 years. I don’t think anybody would argue with the notion that there need to be some cuts. However, the way Trump and Musk are going about it is insane. And If anybody thinks that the disruption due to the pandemic was bad, just hold on. “Baby you just ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.