U.S. News Staff
Thousands of miles from Washington, D.C., Americans are feeling the effects of President Donald Trump’s second-term assault on the federal government.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico – about 1,650 miles from the nation’s capital – Kaiya Brown wept as she said goodbye to her professors, laid off in a wave of funding cuts.
In Jenks, Oklahoma – over 1,100 miles from Washington and the White House – Patricia Gross watched her small grant-writing business lose all of its contracts seemingly overnight.
And in Moscow, Idaho – 2,000 miles and nine states away from Capitol Hill – Ivy Dickinson learned she’d soon be furloughed from her dream job helping local farmers.
None of these women worked in the federal government. They weren’t bureaucrats or Beltway insiders. But Trump’s crusade to shrink the federal government – an effort outsourced to billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency – has impacted them all the same.
“There’s a lot of stories of waste and fraud and abuse,” says Dickinson, the Idaho worker now furloughed. “All I can speak to is my personal experience – and that is that we do our darndest to be good stewards of federal dollars.”
No one knows exactly how many people outside of Washington have been affected by Trump’s war on the federal government, but data offers some clues.
For starters, more than 80% of federal workers live outside the nation’s capital and the adjoining states of Maryland and Virginia – staffing military bases, managing national parks, conducting field investigations, running medical research labs and performing other jobs across the country.
But the reach of federal dollars extends far beyond government payrolls. The so-called federal industrial complex encompasses roughly 8 million people, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta – and nearly 6 million of them don’t collect a federal paycheck. They’re contractors, nonprofit workers and small-business owners who rely on federal grants and contracts to stay afloat.
“The phrase ‘Drain the swamp,’ is centered around Washington, D.C., right?” says Jonathan Schwabish, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “I do think that there’s this feeling that the federal government is in D.C., and that is the only area that’s going to be affected. But these impacts, they’re going to be everywhere.”
Here are the stories of 10 Americans who don’t live in Washington, D.C., but are paying the price of federal cutbacks:
Margaret Albaugh for USN&WR
When Ivy Dickinson took a new job supporting Idaho’s small farms in January, she was optimistic about her future role.
She had just joined the American Farmland Trust as Idaho’s urban conservationist, bringing two decades of local farm experience to the job. The nonprofit works to protect farmland and promote sound farming practices, and Dickinson focused on helping small farms and small producers.
“I was like, ‘This is a great fit. This is an awesome move,’” says Dickinson, who says she is passionate about the future of agriculture.
But soon after starting, Dickinson got the news she would be furloughed for at least 10 weeks.
“Farmland Trust does rely on federal grants and agreements, and the funding freeze has been having a pretty big impact on them,” she says.
Dickinson says she worries about the broader consequences the federal cuts will have on farmers and food production.
“People that farm, they are facing incredible challenges. Many times it’s very physically demanding work, and it can be thankless,” she says. “There’s variables all the time that are out of your control. You really just have to, on most days, make the best of the card you got. And I think those people need support, and they need people to rally around them because they’re doing a service for the greater good.”
-Laura Mannweiler
Adria Malcolm for USN&WR
Freshman year is a time of change for any college student.
But Kaiya Brown, a student at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, got more than she bargained for.
In February, her school – home to around 200 students – lost nearly a quarter of its workforce because of staffing cuts to the Bureau of Indian Education, which oversees and funds the institute. Maintenance workers, instructors, security officers and administrators were let go with no warning.
“I was super close to so many of the staff members that were actually laid off, so it was really hard for us,” says Brown, a member of the Navajo Nation. “We’re such a tightknit community and everyone knows one another.”
The impacts were immediate: Midterm exams were canceled. Students with laid off instructors lost access to their online gradebooks. With fewer custodians and security guards, power outages dragged on for hours, and campus safety became a concern.
In March, Brown joined other Native students and three Tribal Nations in suing the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education over the staffing cuts. Though most employees have since been rehired, Brown says the damage lingers.
“A lot of people from the outside looking inwards often comment, ‘You guys got your staff back. It’s probably good now,’” she says. “But it’s caused a ripple effect within our entire school in so many ways. It’s not just our academics that are being affected by this – it’s our mental health, our overall well-being and the spirit of the campus. There’s been so much uncertainty before the rehirings, and even now, we don’t even know what it’s gonna look like. There’s a lot of fear that they could be laid off again.”
-Devon Haynie
Lawren Simmons for USN&WR
Washington, D.C., is about 500 miles from Indianapolis – a distance Rhett Cecil was more than willing to travel in early May to meet with lawmakers.
His goal? To convince Indiana’s congressional delegation not to cut funding for Head Start, the federally funded program that provides early childhood education to vulnerable children.
As executive director of the Indiana Head Start Association, Cecil oversees about 40 programs serving more than 12,000 children statewide. The organization also offers job training for parents. Its impact, he says, has been “immeasurable.”
In April, Cecil learned the Trump administration was circulating a draft budget proposal to eliminate funding for the decades-old program, which has long enjoyed bipartisan support.
“I play offense, not defense,” says Cecil, who promptly booked a flight to the Capitol.
On one “very long day” in January, his team’s funding was blocked due to confusion in Washington. It was later restored. Then five of the 12 regional Head Start offices were shut down with no warning, leaving his staff without guidance on standards and grants.
For now, he says, his teams are managing. But he’s deeply concerned about what a loss of federal funding would mean. What happens to the 4,000 people employed by Head Start in Indiana? How would local economies respond? And what about the low-income children who’ve used the program as a launchpad to greater opportunity?
“I never thought I’d be in a position where I needed to tell people that supporting programs like Head Start is, at its core, an investment in human potential,” he says. “I don’t know that any Hoosier would want to say, ‘Yeah, that’s a good choice. Let’s not invest in that.’”
-Devon Haynie
Damola Akintunde for USN&WR
Jourdan Gore is an expert in process and change management. For four years, she advised the Department of Veterans Affairs on how to navigate large-scale transformation.
What she didn’t see coming was that on Feb. 25, she’d become part of one.
That day, her consulting position at Voyage Advisory was terminated without warning. Along with more than 1,400 VA employees, she found herself out of a job – a casualty of the department’s second round of mass layoffs that month.
Given her expertise, she figured she’d take the news in stride.
Reality was more complicated.
“The logical side of me is like, ‘This is what you show up to work and do every day. Are you really surprised?’” she says. “And the human part of me is like, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’”
Gore finds herself worrying about her coworkers who lost their jobs, but she’s even more concerned about the veterans who might see their services impacted by the layoffs.
“What I enjoyed the most is knowing that, behind the scenes, I was helping ensure that veterans received the benefits that they had been promised,” she says. “There are so many promises that we have made to them, and I was very proud to be a part of keeping those promises.”
-Devon Haynie
Harlan Bozeman for USN&WR
When federal funding freezes swept through Washington, Patricia Gross watched her business in northeastern Oklahoma vanish almost overnight.
Gross, who owns her own consulting business, writes grant applications for nonprofits and universities, helping them secure funding from government agencies like the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In January, Gross was fully booked through July, working on grant proposals related to global health, food security and international development.
But in February – soon after Trump took office – everything changed. A week before she planned to submit a grant proposal to the CDC, the university that hired her told her to stop working.
That call marked the beginning of a domino effect of canceled contracts for Gross due to federal funding freezes and cuts. She lost every contract and virtually her entire income.
“Small businesses are also affected by these cuts,” she says. “It’s not just federal workers. It’s not just cutting the fat, or however they want to call it. It’s here, in these red states.”
Gross’ 23-year-long career in international development and global health includes Peace Corps stints in Mali and Guyana and a U.S. Agency for International Development internship in Tanzania. She fears ending some of the grant programs will have far-reaching ramifications.
“I can’t separate out the emotional aspect of realizing that people are dying and that I feel like these were people’s lives that I was positively affecting,” she says. “Now I feel the burden of the consequences of these decisions.”
-Laura Mannweiler
Caleb Alvarado for USN&WR
When Martina Gollin-Graves first heard the news, she was both “devastated” and “utterly confused.”
It was March 27, and she’d just learned that her organization’s statewide call-in line, which had been providing free and confidential phone support to Wisconsinites experiencing emotional distress, had lost its federal contract.
The impact was swift: The line’s 20 staff members were furloughed, and thousands of people in Wisconsin were left without a source of support from certified specialists.
“People were very worried: ‘What am I going to do? Who am I going to call?’” she says. “That support is real-time – not the doctor, not the therapist.”
The line, known as a warmline, had been serving Wisconsin residents since mid-2023. It had been funded by the American Rescue Plan Act, which was enacted in 2021 to aid recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. And the funding was slated to continue through September.
Gollin-Graves, president and CEO of Mental Health America of Wisconsin, says fundraising is underway, and the organization is also “holding out” for funding earmarked in Gov. Tony Evers’ budget that could pass later this year. But she still finds the federal decision to cut funding – which she says has impacted lines at other affiliates across the country – for the warmline “ludicrous.”
“The understanding is that these dollars were cut because COVID is over,” Gollin-Graves says. “These dollars are also in place to help support the recovery after COVID, to support people as they are still rebuilding and finding their footing after such devastation to our country.
“These decisions impact real people.”
-Elliott Davis Jr.
Jamie Kelter Davis for USN&WR
In early April, Gabrielle Lyon, executive director of Illinois Humanities, found out that 32% of her budget was unexpectedly cut by the Trump administration.
The nonprofit receives support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency that supports museums, libraries, universities and community-based cultural work nationwide. When nearly 80% of staff at NEH were put on administrative leave and 1,400 grants were canceled, the ripple effects reached deep into local projects across Illinois.
Among the programs that NEH funds in Illinois, Lyon says, are the Museum on Main Street program, which brings exhibits to small towns of 6,000 or less; genealogy workshops that provide an avenue to collect local oral histories; and the Bronzeville Historical Society, which preserves the cultural and historical legacy of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood through archives, exhibitions and education.
“These are things that are hyper relevant, locally. People have emotional connections to them,” Lyon says. “Nobody else is going to fund those programs. It’s not any foundation’s job to do that.”
The budget cuts raised not only fiscal and strategic concerns, but also ethical ones. If funding is restored, would Illinois Humanities be expected to follow the administration’s anti-DEI policies?
“The impact is an erosion of our civic fabric,” she says. “People need more than just to make a living. We want to be able to have a good life, let our kids have a good life and share memories with them.”
-Laura Mannweiler
Maddie McGarvey for USN&WR
For more than 20 years, Sarah Whitton has studied the mental health of sexual and gender minority individuals – work she calls “the civil rights issue of our era.”
Whitton, a clinical psychologist at the University of Cincinnati, says she was leading the biggest longitudinal study of young sexual minority women – those identifying as lesbian, queer, bisexual or other non-heterosexual identities – in history.
In March, her study of this population, which faces disproportionate mental health issues and has higher rates of suicide, was awarded about $650,000 in new National Institutes of Health funding.
But just a week later, the funding was abruptly terminated, with officials citing DEI reasons. Instructed not to spend any additional money, Whitton had to rapidly shut down her research. Ten people, including Whitton, were working on the project; four lost their full-time jobs and the rest lost parts of their salary and benefits.
Now that her study is paused, Whitton says she would like to continue this work by finding other funding sources in the hopes that she can put her years of data collection to good use.
“This has really been my purpose, what my career and my work is about,” says Whitton, who notes that her comments reflect her own views, not those of her employer.
“It’s so unsettling in part because it’s so anti-science and it’s so undemocratic,” she says of the cuts, adding that American science has been able to flourish in part because it’s been free of presidential politics.
“That’s why we conduct the best science that there is in the world – or we used to,” she says. “This is just a very scary moment in our country.”
–Alan Kronenberg
Chona Kasinger for USN&WR
Kate Landis didn’t expect to find a second calling after ministry.
But at the University of Washington, where she connected communities with scholars to tackle urban challenges, she found work that felt almost as sacred.
For the past year and a half, she’s been program manager at Urban@UW, a research center that pairs academics with community leaders in Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.
One of her favorite projects involves a local refugee resettlement group that used North African water management techniques to conserve water on a large community-owned outdoor space. The center connected the group with professors and students who are now helping them secure tax breaks for their efforts.
“There’s a magical feeling when you talk to a community group and they tell you what they need, and you know that you can make that happen,” Landis says. “I mean, it feels really, really good.”
In late February, Landis learned her center’s work would be scaled back and that she’d be out of a job in September. The university, hit by federal funding cuts, was reprioritizing. And although the center relies on grants from foundations as well as the government, the funding landscape was looking increasingly dire.
Messaging from the White House, she says, has been frustrating.
“It doesn’t matter who you voted for, the changes in these programs are going to impact your community,” she says. “I think the story has become, ‘We have to save money so people pay less taxes.’ But I don’t think that’s true. I’m happy to pay taxes because it goes toward people in my community I care about.”
-Devon Haynie
Brianna Soukup for USN&WR
The Shaker Village at Sabbathday Lake in Maine is home to the world’s last active community of Shakers, a Christian sect known for their communal living, pacifism and craftsmanship.
Backed by a federal grant, the community has spent two years restoring its herb house, the sole surviving structure of its kind. In the 19th century, the Shakers were known as “America’s pharmacists” for their popular medicinal herb mixes. Now, they hope to transform the site into a year-round cultural center offering affordable education and job training for the wider community. The planned center would eventually employ traditional artists, neurodiverse people and local farmers and provide programming for nearly 100,000 K-12 students within an hour’s drive.
“This herb house is critical,” says Michael Graham, director of the United Society of Shakers. “It’s the only place where people can experience through in-person learning the richness of Shaker culture, their positive influence on the development of the United States and their lasting contributions to social justice – like equality of the genders and races.”
In April, after the Shaker community raised over $2.2 million of the $3 million required to release a full grant from NEH, the Trump administration abruptly cut funding for the project. As a result, the Shakers lost $200,000 – the final portion of a previous $750,000 grant – leaving the community scrambling to save not just a historic building, but a way of life.
“It was devastating,” Graham says. “It rattled our confidence, morale and momentum. We had people counting on us – students, artists, Indigenous partners, disabled workers … The weight I feel to complete this project cannot be fully described, but it’s all I think about day and night.”
Now the organization faces the challenge of closing the funding gap without federal support. “We’re going back to donors who’ve already given all they can,” Graham says. “People who skipped vacations to support us.”
He adds, “This isn’t about exorbitant costs. It’s carefully planned, federally approved work. It’s culture, community and continuity – and we’re fighting to save it.”
-Laura Mannweiler