More than 100 federal map experts in Denver could lose their jobs next year as part of a push to give mapping projects to private companies.
“We’ve been getting a lot of pressure from the administration … to privatize things, to let the private sector do work that is not necessarily governmental,” said Max Ethridge, a manager in the U.S. Geological Survey’s Denver office. “We know they can do it because we already contract out a lot.”
That could mean letting go some 275 of the survey’s 400 professional mappers, about 100 of whom are in Denver, he said.
Next year, the Geological Survey will concentrate its remaining federal mappers, now sprinkled around the country in California, Missouri, Colorado and Virginia, in one location, Ethridge said.
