Maryland State GOP House members call Democrats ‘reactionary' in response to DOGE cuts. Dems ask why they're not standing up for federal workers.
BALTIMORE — Against the backdrop of a raging national fight as President Donald Trump overhauls the U.S. government, tensions bubbled up at the Maryland State House Wednesday over fired federal workers.
House Republicans accused Democrats of trying to battle the federal government while debating a bill that would provide the attorney general an additional $1.5 million to sue Trump's administration on behalf of the fired federal workers.
'We cannot overcome the federal government,' said House Minority Leader Jason Buckel, an Allegany County Republican. 'You are not going to stop the federal government through the operations of a state of six million people.'
House Majority Whip Jazz Lewis, a Prince George's County Democrat, said the legislation is not about dictating or responding to what happens in Washington, D.C. Its ultimate purpose, he said, is to stand up to protect federal workers. Lewis criticized Republicans in the chamber for not publicly doing the same.
'I have not heard you all stand up once to talk about how you are going to stand up for the workers in your districts — particularly the federal ones,' he said.
Because of its proximity to Washington, Maryland is uniquely impacted by mass layoffs at federal agencies being implemented by Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. In 2023, nearly 160,000 state residents worked for the federal government.
Buckel said that if lawmakers want to engage in 'lengthy, partisan' debates about national politics, then 'we'll be here every day.'
'Pack a lunch, pack a dinner, pack a midnight snack,' he said. 'I appreciate my friend, but when he says, 'We're here, we're going to protect our people,' why are our people only federal government workers?'
The Protect Our Federal Workers Act, sponsored by Lewis, would create the Federal Government Employee Assistance Loan Fund to provide money to Maryland residents who worked for the federal government but were terminated by the Trump administration during the ongoing waves of mass firings.
The legislation would allow money in Maryland's Catastrophic Event Account and Federal Government Shutdown Employee Assistance Loan Fund to provide six months of no-interest loans to federal employees who live in Maryland and aren't being paid due to a full or partial government shutdown. It would also help those who left their jobs because of the voluntary incentive payment program or were let go due to closures, relocations or mass layoffs at federal government agencies.
The bill was amended in the House Appropriations Committee to allow Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, to sue the Trump administration on behalf of terminated federal employees. An additional $1.5 million would also be allocated in the state budget to the attorney general's office to carry out lawsuits against the federal government.
Buckel unsuccessfully attempted to strip the $1.5 million from the bill and remove the attorney general's ability to sue the Trump administration on behalf of employees, whom he called 'private individuals who lost their job because of a policy decision or a budgetary decision.'
The attorney general litigates cases on behalf of the state of Maryland.
'The state doesn't have the right to enforce the employment and labor laws of the federal government on behalf of private individuals,' Buckel said. 'I'm going to bet you money … that if we do this and the attorney general brings suit, some court somewhere will say, 'Nope, you can't do that.''
Lewis said that the intent of the amended bill is to fight to protect all constituents, regardless of whether they work in the private or public sector. He said that the amendment would 'neuter' the bill, which empowers the attorney general to take on these cases because a significant portion of Maryland's economy is wrapped up in the federal workforce.
'We are fighting on our front foot,' he said. 'What this amendment does is it says Maryland is going to fight with our arms behind our back.'
Del. Chris Adams, a Republican representing the Lower Eastern Shore, disagreed with Lewis and called the bill 'reactionary.'
Maryland's current budget deficit is $3 billion, which Lewis said could be exacerbated by the layoffs.
Buckel said the state has become 'a ward of the federal government.'
'We are their orphan child,' he said. 'Our budgets are completely reliant — or largely reliant — upon their largesse.'
Roughly one-third of Maryland's budget is federal funding, and a significant portion of that goes to Medicaid.
Buckel also said that the federal government is a big economic driver for jurisdictions across the state because it is a 'major employer' in areas where the private sector is 'hollow.'
'Without those federal jobs, Maryland doesn't look so good,' Buckel said. 'We all want Maryland to be the best. If we had the same level of federal jobs that someone has in, say, Ohio or Oklahoma or Oregon, we would not look very good under almost any set of metrics.'
In defense of the legislation, House Appropriations Committee Chair Ben Barnes, a Democrat representing Anne Arundel and Prince George's counties, said Democrats believe Trump is taking illegal action that directly impacts Marylanders through these mass firings.
'When the federal government takes adverse actions that is illegal, that adversely affects Marylanders, you're damn right we're going to fight,' Barnes said. 'We might not beat the federal government, but we're going to fight them. And our constituents who are hurting, who are losing their jobs — not just the federal workers, but the workers who are going to have the ancillary effects of that as it flows through the budget — should know today the Maryland legislature is going to stand here and fight for you.'
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Although there's little evidence of self-reflection or self-critique, we simply don't know whether his statements are improvised or calculated, even when they seem spontaneous. Furthermore, there's no way to know whether he truly believes some of the over-the-top comments he makes, for instance on his own capabilities. When he tells us that he is 'a very stable genius', does he truly believe it? It would be easier to prove or disprove whether such statements are factually correct than whether he actually believes them himself. Evolutionary psychology shows that truly believing such statements even when they are not factually correct (what psychologists refer to as self-deception) is rather common in humans because it helps us display convincing signs of confidence and be regarded as competent. In other words, the best way to fool others is to fool yourself first. 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Unflattering attacks are common in politics — but a court just ruled that one campaign went too far. Cook County Commissioner Toni Preckwinkle's 4th Ward Democratic Organization and Lamont Robinson's aldermanic campaign have been ordered to pay $1.475 million in punitive damages over a series of attack ads sent during Robinson's 2023 race against Ebony Lucas for the City Council. (In a statement, the 4th Ward Democratic Organization and the Lamont Robinson for Alderman Corp called the verdict an 'unprecedented misapplication of the law' and said they are confident it will be reversed on appeal.) Among other smears, the mailers labeled Lucas a 'bad landlord' who 'can't manage her own business' — a collection of accusations a jury deemed defamatory. The mailers also claimed Lucas 'doesn't care about doing the right thing,' a particularly broad and insulting claim. Preckwinkle previously defended the mailers, saying, 'They were carefully footnoted, so lots of luck to her.' In campaign mailers, the bold print does the damage — not the fine print. Any political operative knows that. Voters see the headlines, not the citations. We empathize with Lucas and all candidates who face baseless, harmful personal attacks as a consequence of running for office. As Lucas told the Tribune, she is a wife and mom of three. Her kids saw these mailers. Their friends and neighbors and teachers saw these mailers. Perhaps this can be a turning point, because our political culture certainly needs one. Political ads that spread hateful, demeaning rhetoric attack people's humanity and do nothing but fuel people's worst impulses when it comes to how they view anyone with whom they disagree. You can have a different point of view from someone on public policy and still treat them with respect. It's unfortunate we even need to point that out. Partisanship has become so toxic that people are cutting off family members, shunning neighbors, and labeling political opponents as either stupid or evil. We've seen that ugliness on the national level — and it's infecting local elections, too. We all felt it leading up to November 2024's presidential election. During that cycle, mailers for the Chicago school board races went negative, with candidates not backed by the Chicago Teachers Union hit with ads calling them 'right wing' and 'MAGA,' inaccurately tying many candidates to political beliefs and causes they in no way espouse. Board member Ellen Rosenfeld was one of the candidates who dealt with those ads. She's a Democrat and her husband is the 47th Ward Democratic committeeman. But this animosity and culture of distrust and disrespect lingered into 2025. We wrote about this phenomenon during endorsement season for local elections, as exemplified in a bitter mayoral race in Orland Park between two former neighbors. Because of the personal nature of local politics, it usually breeds a healthy dose of decorum and respect. Not so in this race, during which former Mayor Keith Pekau was attacked with ads calling him and his wife racist. 'Dirty politics makes bad policy,' Lucas wrote in a Facebook post after the ruling. 'When voters are inundated with false information about candidates, we lose out on electing the best and most qualified.' We agree. In addition to spreading falsehoods and increasing vitriol, hateful campaigning is one of the reasons people check out of politics altogether, a problem that weakens our political system. We hope the Lucas decision has a chilling effect on the kind of nasty, ad hominem attack ads that all too often end up in our mailboxes and on our TVs, finding their way into our kids' hands and ruining our enthusiasm for our representative democracy. Voters deserve campaigns that respect truth and dignity, not ones that poison the well of public trust. Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@
