Hundreds of careers across the Triangle were abruptly derailed a year ago as the federal government made sweeping cuts—offering buyouts to civil servants, eliminating grants, and dismantling organizations like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
In the congressional district hardest hit by federal grant cuts, there’s no clear way to measure the impact or where all those workers ended up. But the sense of loss is real.
John Nicholson, 48, spoke to the INDY during a break from his job at Weaver Street Market in Carrboro, where he has worked since last June. In some ways he sees it as a continuation of his 20-year career in international development, working to build a more resilient community, just on a hyperlocal scale rather than global.
“That’s one of the things that I actually really liked about it,” he said. “Here it was very hands-on … of course, the jobs are vastly different, but I like that too.”
Across the Triangle, the federal workforce dropped by about 12% between January 2025 and January 2026, according to an INDY analysis of federal job data. Hundreds more lost jobs in the private sector as federal contracts and grant dollars abruptly ended. A recent report by Axios showed that the Durham-Chapel Hill area lost about 3,800 jobs while Raleigh-Cary grew by around 13,000 jobs—a discrepancy likely due to federal cuts.
“We are the brains of this country, and we are being attacked by this dumb administration,” Durham Mayor Leo Williams told INDY. “And we are seeing it at the dinner table, we are seeing it in the confidence of some of our most competent people, we’re seeing it just trickle down and ripple through our local economy.”
Net job numbers give a glimpse of the impact, but the scale and nature of the cuts mean it is impossible to know exactly how many people were impacted. Lawmakers, government agencies, experts, and local chambers—no one has a hard number.
But the cost is undeniable. The INDY analyzed public data and spoke to former federal workers, union leaders, advocates, and elected officials to see where the Triangle’s federal workers went after the cuts. Some asked not to be named, as they are still actively looking for jobs.
Nicholson spent about two decades at John Snow, Inc. (JSI), a Boston-based consulting firm, where every one of his projects was government funded. On his last project, he served as the knowledge management and communications director for a program helping countries digitize, share, and track health data.
Nicholson knew his job might be in danger after the 2024 election. He took his family to Disney World that Christmas while he still could. On February 14, 2025, he lost his job.
He’s now doing some consulting again—as much as 30 hours a week—for a project out of the Netherlands, working on policy measures to improve diet and health. That’s on top of a full-time job at Weaver Street, which provides insurance and gives him a chance to salvage local food for Food Not Bombs, another organization he became involved with after losing his job.
“It was important to me, especially, to demonstrate for my kids that, you know, when you get knocked down, you pick yourself back up,” he said. “ And it doesn’t mean that you necessarily start where you left off.”
The Scale of the Cuts
At the end of January 2025, there were 8,805 federal workers in Durham, Wake, and Orange counties. About half of them worked for the Veterans Health Administration. By the end of January 2026, that number had dropped 12%, to 7,752.
The relatively stable VA workforce, however, masks even steeper declines in other areas. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, lost 26% of its local employees, dropping from 1,403 to 1,042. The agency’s Research Triangle Park campus included a number of staff of the now-shuttered Office of Research and Development. In Durham, the immigrant rights organization Siembra NC has asked local officials to study the full impact of the cuts on the city.
“It actually takes me back to the pandemic when there were folks who had never been unemployed and they would reach out to our office for assistance,” said state Sen. Natalie Murdock, who represents parts of Chatham and Durham counties.
In March Murdock visited Capitol Hill with the organization OXFAM, advocating to keep funding for international aid in the budget—she was invited, she said, because North Carolina has been so deeply impacted by federal aid cuts.
A representative of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 3347, which represents EPA employees, said that union membership has dropped from about 1,000 people to 700. The union said most of those people took buyouts rather than being laid off.
Heather Hughes, president of AFGE Local 3509, which represents Social Security Administration employees in North Carolina and surrounding states, said a number of people took the offer of the deferred resignation program last April, which offered the option of receiving pay for several months before departing the civil service. More followed in December. A freeze on hiring has meant those who remain are stretched even thinner.
“People didn’t [stop] having babies and needing Social Security numbers and needing replacement cards, so the work increases, the staffing decreases,” Hughes said.
Then there’s the unknown number of workers who lost their jobs when federal contracts or grants ended abruptly. Some, like Nicholson, worked for organizations based out of state, making it nearly impossible to track.
One of his colleagues who was also laid off, Kate Sheahan, 48, said that of the 20 to 30 JSI employees who worked in the Triangle, only three kept their jobs. Sheahan said her family income dropped by two-thirds after the layoff; she’s only recently picked up part-time work that matches her professional background.
“I knew in sixth grade that I wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer and that I wanted my career to be in public health,” said Sheahan, who has a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “And so I knew that my identity was going to go through the ringer, and that my mental health and everything was going to be a mess.”
Within a day of the layoff she reached out to a triathlon coach, determined to find some positive outlet for her passion. She completed the Wilmington Ironman last October.
“It literally, honestly saved me,” she said. “And then in the background, I applied for a lot of jobs. I started waiting tables just to make money. … I’m still waiting tables at Venable in Carrboro.”
As of last September, cuts at Research Triangle Institute International had impacted over 400 people in North Carolina. FHI 360 in Durham filed notice of 144 layoffs, while the American Institutes of Research filed notice of 19 layoffs as a result of grants and contracts being cut.
UNC-Chapel Hill lost 97 federally funded projects, totalling $39.5 million. Despite efforts to move workers into different roles, 140 people were laid off as a result, a university spokesperson said. Duke University, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University did not respond to requests for comment regarding the job impact.
Not every local federal agency has seen a mass exodus.
There’s about the same number of TSA workers at Raleigh-Durham International Airport as a year ago, said Mac Johnson, president of AFGE Local 449, which represents TSA staff. This is despite the “emotional roller coaster” of repeated government shutdowns, he said.
U.S. Rep. Valerie Foushee, a Democrat who represents the 4th Congressional District, said she has seen the damage of the cuts.
“People either don’t have their calls answered, don’t have their questions answered, don’t have their needs met, even services that are due them, because the people who perform the services aren’t available,” she said.
Where Did They Go?
Finding where people are now is even harder than tallying the total number of lost jobs. Unemployment rates and the total labor force have remained fairly steady, according to state data and information from the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce.
In the place of hard data, everyone has anecdotes: the friends and former colleagues doing administrative work for an actuary, waiting tables, starting a travel agency, chasing the vanishingly few international development jobs available alongside other overqualified candidates.
“I think it’s pretty hard for people who haven’t experienced it to imagine everything changing on a dime, and not only losing your job … but then all of your job prospects elsewhere disappearing as well,” said Brianna Clarke-Schwelm, executive director of North Carolina Global Health Alliance.
Through public layoff notices and her own personal network, Clarke-Schwelm has confirmed 625 North Carolinians who lost jobs due to USAID cuts. She declined to name any specific companies, but many of them were likely at places like Research Triangle Institute International. Still, she said that is an undercount due to the number of people who were working remotely.
“All of those people were people who had committed their lives to service, had committed their lives to making the world a safer place, a healthier place,” she said.
Some have been able to pivot very successfully, finding research work or jobs with local governments. Some left the state or even the country. Others managed to keep a job but are now underemployed.
Emily Kochetkova, 44, still works for Inclusive Development Partners, a small women-owned business with expertise in inclusion, particularly of people with disabilities, in development work. USAID funded about 90% of the company’s projects. The company initially laid everyone off, then hired a few back as contractors to finish the non-USAID projects.
Kochetkova still has the same title—senior technical adviser and program manager—but she’s a part-time contractor now instead of a full-time employee. She freelanced before, but it’s harder now.
“The consulting field and opportunities are just so much more competitive because everybody’s trying to do it now,” she said. “People that lost their jobs, who want to stay in this work, who are passionate and skilled, they’re all applying for the same small batch of independent consultancies.”
Some just decided it was time to retire.
Nina Frankel, 67, was also employed remotely for JSI, one of several organizations she worked for over her 30-year career in international development. In that time she worked on reproductive health, contraception, HIV, immunization, refugee health—“whatever came my way.” But when she lost her job last February, she decided she was done.
“It was my life, and I was just gonna do it until I couldn’t do it anymore, because I loved it so much,” she said. But “the idea of starting looking for a job, and looking for a job in a sector that no longer existed, you know, it was kind of daunting and I was of age, I could retire.”
Pushing Back
In the wake of the cuts, workers have found ways to support each other. Frankel and Kochetkova both found others experiencing the same thing. “It’s been a really neat, supportive community,” Kochetkova said.
And some have pushed to be reinstated. Dr. Tom Luben, 52, is unusual among the people let go from the EPA locally because he did not take the deferred resignation offer. After 18 years with the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, he signed a protest letter in late June after hearing the division might be shuttered, which it later was.
Within days of signing the letter, Luben was placed on a two-week administrative leave, which then stretched into months of limbo before he was officially fired last October.
“I just couldn’t believe that because I signed this letter at home on my couch, on my phone, well within my First Amendment rights, that I was being fired,” he said.
He has appealed through the federal Merit Systems Protection Board and his case is ongoing. In an unattributed response to the INDY, the EPA press office said it does not comment on ongoing litigation.
Last December, Luben started a remote position as a senior research scientist at the University of Michigan, a job that lets him stay in Durham, where he and his wife have lived since 2005. But he still wants to return to the EPA.
“My best-case scenario is that I would be reinstated,” he said. “I would like to say, ‘into my old job at EPA,’ but that no longer exists.”
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