California is being hit particularly hard by Department of Government Efficiency cuts.
It is home to more federal workers than any other state, many of them with the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose workforce is being slashed by thousands nationwide. Its national parks and reserves are facing staffing cuts, while its universities stand to lose millions in grants that support medical research.
Democratic lawmakers in Washington are incensed. But the effort is largely being cheered on by the state’s Republicans, even as some feel a sharp blowback in constituent town halls and make appeals to the Trump administration to undo some changes.
“Oh, there’s people concerned,” Rep. Doug LaMalfa told NOTUS. “Some just want to come in town halls and scream, others have more genuine concerns about ‘what’s this going to mean for particular staffing that is needed [for] people that have to get permits to do this or that.’ They’re concerned, ‘Will the people be there to do that?’ To carry out the other things that need to be done, forestry, agriculture.”
Rep. David Valadao, a swing-district Republican, said he has been working to raise any issues stemming from DOGE-related cuts with the Trump administration.
“When [the cuts] initially hit, obviously there’s an impact that caused a little bit of excitement,” Valadao said. “And then we started making phone calls and tried to resolve them as quickly as possible. Some [cuts], I assume, make sense when no one defends them, but for those of ‘em who speak up and make sure the administration knows we have a problem, we got to reverse, or at least try to.”
Some DOGE efforts are already being reversed. In Palo Alto, veterans managing a sprawling veteran health care facility were terminated and then rehired.
But more VA cuts are expected. A plurality of the federal workers in California are employed by the VA, per personnel data from last year.
The VA plans to ultimately terminate 15% of its workforce, according to Secretary Douglas Collins. That amounts to around 80,000 Veterans Affairs workers nationwide.
DOGE and the National Institutes of Health claimed credit for cutting billions in federal funding for university research overhead costs. Rep. Lateefah Simon, who represents Berkeley, said she recently visited the campus’ CRISPR DNA lab, which administrators warned could lose $37 million in federal support. The cuts would threaten research on sickle cell disease, ALS and dementia, she said.
“Sometimes it feels so high and mighty and academic,” Simon said. “My husband died of cancer. He was in the clinical trial. We got two more years of his life because of this trial. My daughter knows her father’s voice. Sick children and their grandparents are going to have lower life expectancies based on these decisions.”
Simon said she’d be supportive of DOGE were it a “surgical and thoughtful” endeavor set on cutting waste and not a “chain saw approach to the safety net of the poorest and sickest Americans.”
“We’re going to have a poorer California, sicker California, at least just California, and it’s real,” Simon said. “This is not politics, this is real. It’s worse than malfeasance, it’s an attack on all that good people have fought for.”
Trump’s freeze on certain federal grants also threatens funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Head Start and the National School Lunch Program, officials from California and other states told a federal judge. California Attorney General Rob Bonta was among the 23 attorneys general to secure a block last week against that funding freeze for the time being.
“DOGE, under Trump’s orders, froze grants to the county health department that addresses the high rates of mother and infant morbidity and mortality in the African American community,” Rep. Raul Ruiz told NOTUS ahead of the injunction. “Therefore, they will make those problems worse.”
Dozens of National Weather Service employees are being laid off across California. And while Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says Forest Service firefighters are not being laid off, some whose work aids fire prevention efforts are being cut.
“Given the fires that we’ve had in Los Angeles, their firing of wildland firefighters, their freezing of grants to do brush clearance and other fire mitigation efforts, they’re encouraging firefighters to quit,” Sen. Adam Schiff told NOTUS.
DOGE is canceling leases for federal offices across the state, including an office in Camarillo that oversees offshore drilling in the Pacific. The Indian Health Service, Forest Service, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, multiple Food and Drug Administration locations and dozens of other offices are also set to see locations shuttered. (The catalog of lease cancellations, however, appears to list some locations closed before Trump took office, along with a Social Security office in Carlsbad that doesn’t seem to exist.)
Last week, the General Service Administration listed 16 properties it intends to put up for sale across the state, including large government buildings across Los Angeles and Sacramento that are home to dozens of federal offices and a courthouse.
“The chaos in various industries, the fallout of all these firings and office closures, the loss of potentially an entire season on fire resilience projects that ought to be happening right now, but they’re not,” Huffman said. “I have seen a lot of devastation, and it seems like they’re just getting started.”
In total, DOGE has claimed credit for canceling over 60 contracts for work primarily undertaken in California, largely by in-state vendors. Of those contracts, over half did not yield any savings, per DOGE’s own estimates. Some canceled contracts, like one between NASA and the California Institute of Technology, appeared dormant and hadn’t paid out any funds in years.
Only five were for work in federal districts represented by Republican lawmakers.
Republicans have been broadly supportive of the efforts and dismissive of detractors. Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents more federal workers than any other California Republican in Congress, declined to take questions for this article but has defended spending cuts.
Rep. Kevin Kiley lauded the mission behind DOGE.
“The effort to modernize government and to eliminate waste, to root out fraud and to rightsize the federal government, I think it’s a positive thing,” Kiley said. “I think everyone realizes that. I think people know that the debt’s unsustainable. So I think that that’s something that has broad support.”
Staffing cuts at Yosemite National Park prompted employees to hang an American flag upside down from the El Capitan summit¬ in protest.
GOP Rep. Tom McClintock, who represents Yosemite, assailed protesting National Park Service workers for “ruining the view” and spreading stories of “visitors stuck in restrooms and fires raging out of control, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.”
The National Park Service cut hundreds of workers across the country, shedding workers at over a dozen California parks from Joshua Tree to Redwood National Park, according to data reviewed by NOTUS.
“The antics of some Yosemite employees dishonor the silent majority at the park who were genuinely devoted to public service,” McClintock said in a floor speech last week.
Democrats don’t intend on letting their Republican colleagues off easy. Rep. Robert Garcia is making a show of his disdain for DOGE as a member of the namesake Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency Subcommittee. And Rep. Ro Khanna is preparing to visit three areas of California represented by Republicans in Congress to speak out against layoffs and funding freezes.
“We’ve seen veterans be fired, and that’s been very, very disheartening and concerning,” Khanna said. “We’ve seen NIH cuts, and that is hurting our cancer research and labs at universities.”
Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and San José Spotlight.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.