Experienced Marketers and Communicators Enter the Job Market Amid Federal Cuts
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Navigating Washington: Insights for Business

Marketing & Communications Briefs

Timely insights from the Marketing & Communications Center

Experienced Marketers and Communicators Enter the Job Market Amid Federal Cuts

April 18, 2025

How to Maximize this Unique Infusion of Talent

Aggressive government reduction efforts have already led to cuts of over 55,000 jobs, with an additional 75,000+ federal workers accepting buyout plans. Additionally, more than 140,000 cuts are expected to be made in the coming months, representing an approximately 6% reduction in the total federal workforce. 

Private-sector Marketers and Communicators stand to benefit: Based on September 2024 data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal workforce of some 2.3 million workers includes approximately 15,000 professionals with skills related to marketing and communications—or roughly 0.65% of the total federal workforce. These workers can be further classified into:

  • Professional communicators (approx. 7,600), 
  • Those with creative skills that could be applied to marketing (approx. 3,000), and
  • Those with marketing experience in non-creative roles (approx. 4,600). 

Assuming that communications and marketing jobs are evenly distributed across federal staff cuts, we can conclude over 900 experienced communications and marketing professionals will become unemployed in the months ahead—if they haven’t hit the job market already. 

Many of these recen

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Author

Jennifer Mathissen

Jennifer Mathissen

Former Senior Director, M&C

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