Democrats won Congress. Now Maryland leaders want to undo Trump damage to the state.

After a dramatic Democratic sweep of the U.S. House and Senate on Tuesday, Maryland leaders are plotting how to take advantage of their party’s new federal power and step into roles that could bolster the state’s influence nationwide.

Maryland has been especially hurt by Republican President Donald Trump’s second term. The state was one of the hardest hit by DOGE cuts, losing some 30,000 federal positions. The National Institutes of Health, a federal agency headquartered in Bethesda, has lost billions of dollars in funding. And top research institutions like The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have been shedding jobs after drastic federal grant cuts.

Top Maryland elected officials said in interviews late Tuesday and Wednesday that they want Democrats to use their newfound majority to stanch the bleeding — and begin to reverse it.

Marylanders are on deck to lead those federal efforts: U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin is poised to become chair of the influential House Judiciary Committee, while Sen. Chris Van Hollen, influential inside and outside the Senate, has sought to shape party strategy.

Raskin said he wants Democrats to “restore all the Medicaid cuts and the cuts against the Affordable Care Act credits” on their first day back in the chambers. The 120th Congress gets sworn in Jan. 3.

“We would also, I hope on Day 1, restore SNAP benefits,” Raskin said.

Congress, soon to be Democratic-led, controls the federal budget, so Raskin’s goals aren’t so far-fetched. And they could affect the lives of tens of thousands of Maryland residents.

Nearly 36,000 Marylanders who used SNAP — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — lost their benefits after Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed funding for the federal social safety net program, according to data from this summer.

Marylanders have also felt Trump’s cuts to federal subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. This year, insurance companies selling Obamacare plans requested an average increase in premiums of 13.7% for individuals and 13.1% for small businesses.

Those pricier rates will affect about 482,000 Marylanders, or close to 20% of the state’s commercial insurance market.

While campaigning for Democrats in other states, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks said voters frequently complained about the rising cost of healthcare.

“People are really going to start feeling the impacts of these cuts,” Alsobrooks said.

Maryland’s freshman senator — she wasn’t up for reelection this year — said Democrats have heard the voters and plan to deliver.

“None of us are interested in going back and protecting the status quo,” Alsobrooks said. “This is a new day, with new approaches, new solutions and a new urgency that Democrats must take on immediately.”

But Democrats have several hurdles ahead. For one, the party is prone to infighting between centrists and progressives, which could make developing a unified agenda challenging.

And there are two more years of the Trump administration. Democrats have less control over federal agencies. They cannot automatically reverse the cuts to the federal workforce, which have devastated the state’s economy.

Van Hollen, who spent much of the cycle campaigning for Democrats up and down the ballot, in Maryland and beyond, said they are focused on “stopping the bleeding” of federal jobs.

Through the “power of the purse,” Maryland’s senior senator said, Democrats can deny the Trump administration money to “hack away” at the federal workforce. Van Hollen added that the White House had replaced merit-based positions in the federal government with “political hacks and cronies” — something he said Democrats will work to reverse.

“Then we do need to begin the process of reforming and rebuilding, which will of course take a little longer,” he said.

Democrats also will use their budgetary authority to fight back against some of the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research funding that have hampered many Maryland universities.

“The Trump administration is attacking science, they’re attacking innovation, and yes, that hurts these important Maryland institutions, but it also hurts our country,” Van Hollen said.

Hopkins, which since 1979 has been the largest recipient of federal research funding in higher education, has faced hundreds of millions of dollars in lost scientific research grants and international aid support. The consequences for one of Maryland’s biggest employers have been extensive, with Hopkins cutting more than 2,000 jobs in 2025 and more than 100 in 2026.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore, has also suffered.

Last year, the public university’s president, Bruce Jarrell, announced layoffs, vacancy cuts and salary reductions for approximately 1,000 employees as the university navigated a “clear and present danger” from cuts to federal research funding.

Georges Benjamin, the CEO of the American Public Health Association and former Maryland health secretary, said a Democratic majority in Congress is much more likely to pass budgets that make “proper investments in innovation and science.”

The Trump administration created an environment of uncertainty for research institutions like Hopkins, he said, by delaying funding and breaking grant contracts.

Benjamin also predicted that Democrats will stabilize the NIH.

“When you have these funding disruptions, it totally undermines people’s careers,” Benjamin said. “A Democratic Congress will allow major academic centers in Maryland to hold onto faculty who might have been planning on leaving the country and will allow them to build a pipeline of young, energetic, smart scientists to do the work.”

Steuart Pittman, chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, said the state delegation is strong and that Gov. Wes Moore’s relationship with lawmakers will benefit the state.

Pittman’s priorities include keeping approval for the FBI headquarters relocation to Greenbelt and protecting federal funding for the Key Bridge rebuild.

“I’m confident that our governor and our delegation will fight for it,” he said.

Banner reporters Jeff Barker, Meredith Cohn and Pamela Wood contributed to this story.