The Washington state Employment Security Department has seen an average of 25 federal worker unemployment claims come in per day since Feb. 13, the department stated in a news release last week.
The Trump administration took control on Jan. 20 with plans to reduce the size of the federal government. The Employment Security Department stated that some claims came in prior to the recent mass layoffs. In total, 952 federal employees filed for unemployment for the entirety of the year to date as of Wednesday, March 5. Since Jan. 20, 703 claims have been filed by federal workers.
Regional labor economist for Southwest Coastal Washington Emily Robertson said that federal workers make up 2% of Clark County’s workforce with 3,900 employees when looking at the data from the second quarter of 2024. Cowlitz County had just around 220 federal employees, she added.
“So you can think of that as like the number of people who could possibly be affected,” Robertson said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have definite numbers in terms of how many layoffs and where they’re occurring, so we’ll probably have to wait for the next preliminary employment release to kind of get a good idea of what the overall labor market effects could be.”
At the end of 2024, Robertson said she believes the labor market ended in a good spot. Unemployment ended around 5% in Clark County and 5.5% in Cowlitz County, she said. The numbers were up a little from 2023, but Robertson added that 2023 was a hot labor market and 2024 has appeared to be a little bit of a cool down.
In Clark County, non-farm employment was up by about 2,800 workers over the course of the year, she said, adding that is roughly a 1.5% increase from December 2023 to December 2024.
“There were a couple of industries that were doing pretty well in there,” Robertson said. “So education and health services were up by about 1,300, leisure and hospitality up by about 800, and professional business services up by about 700. So, in terms of the overall job market, there were a lot of bright spots in terms of industry.”
Updated 2025 employment numbers will start to come in soon for the month of January, with February numbers available at the beginning of April and March numbers coming out on April 22. The latter will provide a county by county look where the effects of the mass layoffs might start to become apparent in countywide unemployment statistics.
Across the state of Washington, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was the federal agency with the highest number of claims at 190 with the U.S. Department of the Interior experiencing 116 unemployment claims. Across all federal workforces, Clark County experienced 54 federal employee unemployment claims, according to the Employment Security Department on March 5.
If the federal layoff trend continues, the Employment Security Department stated it will update the numbers on a regular basis.
