ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, facing budget problems and President Donald Trump’s dramatic efforts to downsize a federal workforce crucial to Maryland’s economy, said the state must become less reliant on federal jobs and better develop other economic strengths, during a speech to state lawmakers Wednesday.

Moore, a Democrat mentioned as a rising star in the party and a potential future presidential candidate, described both the state’s $3 billion budget deficit and the new administration’s first actions as “two storms” that have made landfall.

“We are being tested by an historic fiscal challenge — the likes that we haven’t seen since the Great Recession — and if that wasn’t enough, we are now being tested by a new administration in Washington that sows uncertainty and confusion, and chaos,” Moore said.

The Republican president’s first weeks back in office have jolted heavily Democratic Maryland by decreeing a federal hiring freeze and proposing a widespread buyout plan that encourages federal workers to quit. There also were confusing executive orders, including one that abruptly froze and then unfroze federal grant funds, as well as other broad changes to the federal government sending shockwaves into a state that neighbors the nation’s capital.

“These ideological moves will have the distinct impact on hurting our middle class, which is already feeling the pinch of inflation,” Moore said. “And in a larger sense, and heartbreakingly, these actions mark a shift in a longstanding relationship and longstanding norms between Washington and Maryland — norms that have been preserved by leaders of both political parties and of all backgrounds.”

Moore, who was mentioned as a possible replacement for then-President Joe Biden last year when he withdrew his reelection bid, said he still hopes to work with the new administration and Republican-led Congress to “deepen the partnership between Maryland and Washington, D.C., that has benefited our people all across the country for generations and across political ideologies.”

“But if the policy decisions of these past few weeks are any preview, I fear that our most charitable expectations will be met with harsh realities — that at a time when our nation needs clarity, we confront chaos,” the governor said.

“At a time when our nation needs vision, we confront hysteria,” Moore added.

Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia have about 20% of the nation’s federal workers. Federal employees represent about 5.7% of Maryland’s total employment, compared to 1.9% nationally, according to a 2024 report by Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman’s office.

The federal government also supports an ecosystem of private sector suppliers, contractors, and subcontractors in Maryland. Federal procurement provided a $42 billion investment in Maryland businesses in 2022, which represented 10% of the state’s GDP, the report says.

The governor said he has identified “three lighthouse industries of the future” that he wants to focus on in Maryland, including life sciences, information technology and aerospace and defense.

The governor said the state must close its budget gap in a way that grows the middle class, “supercharges and diversifies our economy” and “breaks our distinct reliance on Washington.”

Maryland Republicans said the state is underachieving, but not for the reasons mentioned by the governor.

“Maryland families are struggling with their finances, energy costs, higher prices and more because of the expensive policies and overregulation passed by a Democratic Supermajority — not because of his predecessor or new leadership in Washington,” said state Sen. Steve Hershey, the Maryland Senate minority leader.

Moore has proposed a budget for the next fiscal year that includes higher income tax rates for taxpayers who make $500,000 or more, as well as about $2 billion in spending reductions throughout state government to address a $3 billion deficit. The proposal would create a new 6.25% tax rate for people who make more than $500,000 and a 6.5% rate for taxpayers who make more than $1 million.

For incomes over $350,000, an additional 1% tax would be levied on profits from the sale of stocks and other assets. The governor says 82% of Marylanders will either see a tax cut or no change. He’s also proposing a reduction to the state’s corporate tax rate.

Brian Witte, The Associated Press

For the federal government’s largest group of employees — nurses caring for military veterans through the Department of Veterans Affairs — the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer and its looming Thursday deadline come amid longstanding staffing shortages, deemed severe at more than half of all facilities.

Unions are discouraging nurses from accepting the offer, and leaders say an exodus would directly and immediately affect the care of its 9.1 million enrolled veterans.

“We’re already facing a staffing crisis in our hospitals,” said Irma Westmoreland, a registered nurse who heads the Veterans Affairs unit for National Nurses United. “We cannot afford to lose any more staff.”

Nurses for the VA — the federal government’s largest employer — comprise the biggest single group of federal workers, numbering more than 100,000 and accounting for 5% of all full-time permanent employees, according to an Associated Press analysis of personnel data.

Union official Mary-Jean Burke said she’s taken calls from nurses and other VA workers from across the country. At first, she said, some thought the buyout plan sounded attractive, but second thoughts have set in.

“Originally, I think people were like, ‘I’m out of here,’” said Burke, a physical therapist and American Federation of Government Employees leader. As more information came from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, it started sounding “a little bit too good to be true and people were hesitant.”

VA nurses are somewhat older than the rest of the workforce, with 16.2% of nurses 55 and older, compared with 14.6% for the rest of the federal workforce, AP’s analysis shows.

Burke said some workers who are retirement eligible have been “on the fence” about the offer, which promises pay through Sept. 30, though there have been broad concerns about the program’s legality.

Nurses were confused at first, and now they’re angry, Westmoreland said.

Official communication on the offer has implied the nurses are not productive, she said, and that’s insulted those she’s talked to. A follow-up question-and-answer email from the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to find a job in the private sector.

“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” the email said.

Burke said she’s been asked by workers about the flurry of other executive orders, too.

“I can tell you here in Indiana and other places, people are really frightened about the chaos, the chaos they kind of feel around them,” Burke said.

The department’s leadership also has expressed concern about the potential impact on nursing in the VA, she said. More than 80% of facilities are experiencing a severe nursing shortage, according to a 2024 report from the VA Office of Inspector General.

“They’re scared, too,” she said. “They know that they have to follow the president’s orders, per se, but then you hear the caveat, like, ‘Hey, if five nurses take the buyout, we don’t have an OR anymore.’ That’s in the dialogue of conversation.”

The VA did not respond to an email seeking comment.

In an email sent Wednesday by the Office of Personnel Management, officials ramped up pressure on federal workers to accept the financial incentives to resign.

“Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward,” the email said.

Burke said she is worried about the federal workforce more broadly.

“I know it’s going to look different,” she said. “A lot of people are stressed out because they kind of feel like the predictability of their mission is a little bit different.”

___

Associated Press journalists Mary Katherine Wildeman in Hartford, Connecticut, and Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report. Johnson reported from Washington state. Witte reported from Annapolis, Maryland.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Carla K. Johnson And Brian Witte, The Associated Press

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Registered Republican voters have — by the narrowest of margins — overtaken Democrats in the pivotal battleground state of Nevada for the first time in nearly 20 years.

As of January, there were 187 more active voters registered as Republicans than Democrats, according to a monthly report released Tuesday by the Nevada Secretary of State’s office. The last time Republicans had an edge over Democrats in voter registration was in 2007. Both parties, meanwhile, remain outnumbered by nonpartisan voters, who now make up 33% of Nevada’s 2.1 million active registered voters.

The shift helps cement its status as a purple state and could make it more difficult for Democrats to defend two U.S. Senate seats and win back the presidency. That hurdle comes as the party faces a growing challenge to regain power in Washington.

Since the pandemic, Democrats have watched with alarm as their advantage in the state has eroded. Registered Democrats in January 2020 made up 38% of the state’s electorate, leading GOP voters by more than 83,000. Republicans since then had been slowly closing that gap.

Now, the latest Nevada report shows, each party accounts for just under 30% of the state’s registered voters — 618,539 are Republican, while 618,352 are Democrats.

Not every state registers voters by party, and it can be difficult to compare trends in those that do because of differences in voter registration procedures and state political histories. Still, there’s evidence of Republican registration gains in other swing states, too.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats hold their narrowest voter registration edge in at least a half-century. What was an advantage of 1.2 million voters in 2008, the year Barack Obama won the presidency, is now a gap of fewer than 200,000, according to state statistics. And in Arizona, where Democrats had been closing a registration gap with Republicans for the past decade, that trend reversed after 2022 and the party again lost ground.

Dan Lee, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said the shift in Nevada serves as a reminder that it is a swing state, even if it voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 2008 until President Donald Trump flipped it in November.

“It’s not turning into a deep-blue state,” he said.

Trump carried Nevada narrowly in the 2024 presidential election. Data from AP VoteCast showed that self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaners outnumbered Democrats voting in that election, though self-identified party can differ from party registration.

The Nevada GOP credits its recent gains to voter outreach in 2024, including conservative organization Turning Point’s get-out-the-vote efforts. Alexander Watson, executive director of the state party, says that they plan to build on these efforts in 2026 and beyond by “promoting policies that resonate with Nevadans.”

Hilary Barrett, the Nevada Democratic Party’s executive director, says they are “laser-focused” on broadening support with nonpartisan voters, as well as inviting moderate Republicans into their party. AP VoteCast found that a majority of self-identified moderates voting in the state, including nearly 2 in 10 self-identified moderate Republicans, supported Kamala Harris in 2024.

Experts say the reasons for the shift in Nevada’s voter registration are varied and cautioned against placing too much weight on the numbers because they can be easy to misinterpret.

Chuck Muth, a longtime conservative campaign consultant in Nevada, pointed to routine voter roll maintenance and changes to the way the state registers its voters.

After the November election, for example, Clark County, a Democratic stronghold that is home to Las Vegas, removed nearly 130,000 inactive voters. More voters registered as Democrats than as Republicans tend to be inactive in Nevada, according to historical statewide voter data.

The Nevada Secretary of State’s office says there is usually a drop-off in active voter registrations across parties in the months following an election because the National Voter Registration Act prohibits county election officials from removing inactive voters in the 90 days leading up to an election.

Adding to those changes is that Nevada in 2021 began automatically registering people to vote when they apply for a driver’s license or ID card from the DMV. Under that system, people are registered as nonpartisan if they don’t pick a party on their application. Within two years of this new system, nonpartisans became the largest voting bloc in the state, and it continues to grow.

“The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how a person is registered so much as whether or not you turn your voters out,” Muth said.

___

Associated Press journalists Emily Swanson in Washington, D.C.; Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; and Jonathan J. Cooper and Gabriel Sandoval in Phoenix contributed.

Rio Yamat, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Pam Bondi was sworn in Wednesday as attorney general, taking charge of the Justice Department as it braces for upheaval with President Donald Trump aiming to exert his will over an agency that has long provoked his ire.

The ceremony took place in the Oval Office and it was the first time that the Republican president had participated in a second-term swearing-in of a Cabinet member. It was further evidence of Trump’s intense personal interest in the operations of the department that investigated him during his first term and then brought two since-abandoned indictments after he left office in 2021.

Bondi is expected to radically reshape the department, which in recent days has seen the firing of career prosecutors and FBI officials as well as the undoing of the massive prosecution into the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot with Trump’s sweeping day one pardons.

The former Florida attorney general enters as the department is embroiled in a dispute with the FBI over an effort to identify thousands of agents involved the sprawling Jan. 6 investigation.

FBI agents this week sued over the Justice Department’s demand to turn over the names, which agents believe may be a precursor to mass firings. And on Wednesday, the acting deputy attorney general in a memo sent to the workforce accused the acting FBI director of “insubordination.”

Bondi is likely to be one of the most closely scrutinized members of Trump’s Cabinet, given her close relationship Trump, who during his 2024 campaign suggested that he try to exact revenge on his perceived enemies.

Bondi has said that politics will play no role in her decision-making, but she also refused at her confirmation hearing last month to rule potential investigations into Trump’s adversaries. She also has repeated Trump’s claims that the prosecutions against him amounted to political persecution, telling senators that the Justice Department “had been weaponized for years and years and years, and it’s got to stop.”

Before Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath of office, Trump praised Bondi’s record as a prosecutor and said she will “end the weaponization of federal law enforcement.”

Bondi, who was Florida’s first female attorney general before becoming a lobbyist, told the president that she would not let him down.

“I will make you proud and I will make this country proud,” she said. “I will restore integrity to the Justice Department and I will fight violent crime throughout this country and throughout this world, and make America safe again,” Bondi said.

The Senate confirmed Bondi in a 54-46 vote Tuesday that was almost entirely along party lines. The lone Democrat to join Republicans was Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman.

Republicans have highlighted Bondi’s record in Florida in taking on human traffickers and opioids. GOP lawmakers she will bring much-needed change to a department they believe unfairly pursued Trump through investigations and mistreated his supporters charged in the Jan. 6 riot.

As attorney general Bondi will oversee the FBI, which is in turmoil over the scrutiny of agents involved in Trump-related investigations. On Tuesday, FBI employees filed two lawsuits to halt the collection and potential dissemination of names of investigators after the acting deputy attorney general demanded the names on Friday to determine whether additional personnel decisions were merited.

Bove later said in a memo to the workforce Wednesday that FBI agents “who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner” are not at risk of being fired. The only employees who should be concerned, Bove wrote, “are those who aced with corrupt or partisan intent.”

Alanna Durkin Richer And Eric Tucker, The Associated Press

For the federal government’s largest group of employees — nurses caring for military veterans through the Department of Veterans Affairs — the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer and its looming Thursday deadline come amid longstanding staffing shortages, deemed severe at more than half of all facilities.

Unions are discouraging nurses from accepting the offer, and leaders say an exodus would directly and immediately affect the care of its 9.1 million enrolled veterans.

“We’re already facing a staffing crisis in our hospitals,” said Irma Westmoreland, a registered nurse who heads the Veterans Affairs unit for National Nurses United. “We cannot afford to lose any more staff.”

Nurses for the VA — the federal government’s largest employer — comprise the biggest single group of federal workers, numbering more than 100,000 and accounting for 5% of all full-time permanent employees, according to an Associated Press analysis of personnel data.

Union official Mary-Jean Burke said she’s taken calls from nurses and other VA workers from across the country. At first, she said, some thought the buyout plan sounded attractive, but second thoughts have set in.

“Originally, I think people were like, ‘I’m out of here,’” said Burke, a physical therapist and American Federation of Government Employees leader. As more information came from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, it started sounding “a little bit too good to be true and people were hesitant.”

VA nurses are somewhat older than the rest of the workforce, with 16.2% of nurses 55 and older, compared with 14.6% for the rest of the federal workforce, AP’s analysis shows.

Burke said some workers who are retirement eligible have been “on the fence” about the offer, which promises pay through Sept. 30, though there have been broad concerns about the program’s legality.

Nurses were confused at first, and now they’re angry, Westmoreland said.

Official communication on the offer has implied the nurses are not productive, she said, and that’s insulted those she’s talked to. A follow-up question-and-answer email from the Office of Personnel Management encouraged federal employees to find a job in the private sector.

“The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector,” the email said.

Burke she’s been asked by workers about the flurry of other executive orders, too.

“I can tell you here in Indiana and other places, people are really frightened about the chaos, the chaos they kind of feel around them,” Burke said.

The department’s leadership also has expressed concern about the potential impact on nursing in the VA, she said. More than 80% of facilities are experiencing a severe nursing shortage, according to a 2024 report from the VA Office of Inspector General.

“They’re scared, too,” she said. “They know that they have to follow the president’s orders, per se, but then you hear the caveat, like, ‘Hey, if five nurses take the buyout, we don’t have an OR anymore.’ That’s in the dialogue of conversation.”

The VA did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Burke said she is worried about the federal workforce more broadly.

“I know it’s going to look different,” she said. “A lot of people are stressed out because they kind of feel like the predictability of their mission is a little bit different.”

___

Associated Press data journalist Mary Katherine Wildeman in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report. Johnson reported from Washington state. Witte reported from Annapolis, Maryland.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Carla K. Johnson And Brian Witte, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A D.C. Superior Court Judge has awarded an historic Black church control over the Proud Boys trademark after the group defaulted on a $2.8 million judgment.

The Monday ruling grants rights to the trademark of the far-right group’s name to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church as well as barring the Proud Boys members from selling any merchandise with the group’s name or symbols without the church’s consent. The ruling also allows the church to try to seize any money made from selling the group’s merchandise.

The church filed the lawsuit to try to recoup damages from vandalism made by group members after a December 2020 pro-Donald Trump rally. Black Lives Matter banners were torn down and burned at two churches, including Metropolitan African Methodist. There were also violent clashes between opposing protesters and arrests were made that night.

Enrique Tarrio, then the leader of the Proud Boys, confessed to participating in the burnings and was later sentenced to more than five months in jail on those and other charges. Tarrio was later sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for orchestrating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump granted pardons, commutations or vowed to dismiss cases against the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol— including Tarrio.

In a lengthy statement posted to X, Tarrio wrote, “The presiding judge has denied due process to myself and the other defendants, preventing us from presenting a proper defense.” Tarrio also suggested in separate posts that the Proud Boys rename themselves, “African Methodist Episcopal Boys” and asked for suggestions on a new name.

Case records show the lawsuit was served to Tarrio at the federal prison where he was housed when it was filed, as well as to at least one other address associated with him and another member. The church lawsuit called the actions on Dec. 12, 2020 “acts of terror” and said they were meant to intimidate the members of the church.

A default judgement was awarded to the church in June 2023. After no payments were been made and no responses were filed by the Proud Boys or their representatives, lawyers for the church filed a motion in December seeking rights to the trademark.

An attorney representing the church in the civil action did not respond to a request for comment. Nayib Hassan, Tarrio’s attorney, declined to comment.

Associated Press, The Associated Press