by James A. Bacon
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner warned Thursday that massive cuts and dislocations to the federal workforce under president-elect Donald Trump would be a “disaster for Virginia’s economy. … We would get hit worse than any other states.”
“When you think not just [about] the contractor workforce up in Northern Virginia, but all the folks … who are at our military installations as we go down through the peninsula into Hampton Roads, we would get hit worse than any other states,” Warner said, as reported by Virginia Business. “These kinds of attacks that Mr. Trump has made on the federal workforce, I think is unwarranted.”
Warner has good reason to be afraid. But what Virginians will mourn, much of the rest of the country will celebrate.
Trump has pledged an all-out war on what he calls the unelected “deep state.” He has said he will fire rogue administrators, slash federal payroll in the quest for efficiency, and relocate federal agencies and jobs to locales outside the Washington metropolitan area. He will have many people cheering him on, and I expect this is one campaign promise he will endeavor to make good on. We need to take it seriously.
Consider it a trial run for Boomergeddon. At some point in the next 10 to 15 years, there is a high likelihood that the federal government will face an investor revolt and find itself unable to continue financing $2-trillion-a-year budget deficits. There will be a reckoning. The federal government’s bloated payroll will be on the chopping block, and bond vigilantes will be far more merciless than Trump and his anointed cost cutter Elon Musk, if only because they don’t have to worry about the political blowback.
Whether Trump can accomplish his stated goals in the face of entrenched opposition from a recalcitrant federal bureaucracy, hostile regime media, and Democratic Party lawfare is another question entirely. But it’s a scenario that Virginians need to contemplate. As federal deficits and debt become increasingly unsustainable, the risk to the federal government workforce and military grows in tandem.
As I have argued previously, Virginia needs to conduct a stress-test analysis of what happens to the state’s economy, tax base, and budget when the inevitable fiscal reckoning occurs. The suggestion, to put it mildly, has yet to catch fire. Maybe now that Mark Warner is issuing warnings of what might happen under Trump, people will start asking the question what might happen under a bondholder’s revolt.
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