WaPo: The full force of Trump’s federal job cuts is about to hit the D.C. region
The D.C. region is bracing for new economic pain next week as paychecks stop coming for thousands of federal workers who took the government’s offer of deferred resignation — and the threat of a shutdown could make it worse.
Since January, the region’s unemployment rate has already increased more than eight times as quickly as that of the country as a whole, according to analysis by the Brookings Institution published last week. The region has also shed federal jobs at a higher rate, and both the share of residents with low credit scores and the number of homes for sale have grown more quickly than the rest of the country. Meanwhile, private-sector job growth has plateaued.
That’s all before the full effects of President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce hit. When the fiscal year ends Tuesday night, government workers who have been on paid leave for months will be officially out of their jobs. A prolonged shutdown, which could also begin next week, could delay pay for remaining federal workers, too — and contractors, who don’t usually get back pay from shutdowns, would suffer as well. The White House budget office told agencies that if the government shuts down they should prepare for mass firings, dealing another blow to the civil service.
“We see a lot of strong early warning signs,” said Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at Brookings Metro.
From the loss of federal jobs to changes to federal contracts and federal real estate, the region has shouldered one blow after another.
For many government employees, the economic danger is already here. In interviews, seven federal workers of varying ages, backgrounds and life stages — all of whom live in or around Washington and took the resignation offer — described a despair-inducing job search saga.
Brian Naranjo, a 55-year-old former State Department employee, said he has unsuccessfully thrown his résumé at more than 50 positions since resigning in May. He expected a rough job market, he said, but nothing this bad.
“It’s terrible. You have far more people going for those very specialized jobs than would normally be out there,” Naranjo said. “And a lot of the usual places people turn to in Washington are just not hiring.”
Some workers have canceled donations to charity or date nights. For others, the changes have been more sweeping: waving goodbye to career paths they had dedicated decades to and weighing whether to move out of the region altogether.
“I’m more and more apprehensive as October approaches,” said Jennifer Malenab, who resigned from the Department of Homeland Security after more than 20 years and is struggling to find a new job. She lives with her husband and four children in northern Calvert County, Maryland. “This is not where you want to be at 42, with a family.”
Upending the workforce and a regional economy
Some federal workers opted into the deferred-resignation offer because they were nearing retirement. Some had ethical qualms about staying. Others thought they would soon be fired anyway. After all, Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, his leading cost-cutter through the U.S. DOGE Service, had vowed to slash jobs as part of the biggest reorganization of the federal bureaucracy in decades.
Musk promoted the offer soon after it first hit employees’ inboxes in January, arguing it was crucial to reorganize a workforce he has long characterized as lazy and disloyal. The email — titled “Fork in the Road” — instructed workers to reply “resign” if they wanted to accept. Most civil servants were eligible.
The offer was briefly stalled by a lawsuit but then resumed.
Still, the federal government has spent more this year on federal salaries than last year to this point. As of this past summer, more than 154,000 federal workers nationwide had volunteered to leave government but were still getting paid, The Washington Post reported in July. The Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s HR arm, has not shared how many of those workers will be off the payroll next week. But an agency spokeswoman estimated about 275,000 workers will have voluntarily left government through buyouts and retirements by then.
The cuts hit the D.C. metropolitan area hard.
In the region — which, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines it, stretches far beyond the District into Virginia, Maryland and a patch of West Virginia — about 1 in 10 jobs are with the federal government. Many more residents work for companies and nonprofit groups reliant on federal spending.
While job growth is sluggish nationwide, it is stronger in other metro areas than in the D.C. region.
“Private-sector growth is not compensating for the shock that’s happening to the regional labor market,” said Loh, from Brookings. It’s a similar story for residents’ credit — getting worse across the country but “getting worse here faster,” she said.
“DOGE has been a disaster for Washington, D.C.,” said Ankit Jain, one of the District’s two shadow senators, who advocate statehood.
To stay or to go?
Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Virginia) said he hears daily from current and former federal workers and contractors in his Northern Virginia district about the cuts. A handful, he said, have felt no choice but to leave the area.
“That’s a gut punch,” Walkinshaw said, both on a personal level and as a public official who cares about the economic future of his community.
“Our biggest strength is our workforce — a highly educated, highly skilled, motivated, mission-focused workforce,” he said. “Any time one of those folks leaves to go somewhere else, that is a loss for our region.”
Naranjo, the former State Department worker, said he has friends in their 40s and 50s — all former federal employees — who are considering leaving D.C. to move back in with their parents.
In Owings, Maryland, Malenab, 42, took the deferred-resignation offer because she worried that DHS would abolish her job anyway and because she was asked to divert funds from counterterrorism to immigration enforcement, which she believed was illegal. Her office has been stripped of funding, and all her former colleagues have been fired or reassigned or have otherwise departed.
She has applied to upward of 350 positions since she went on paid leave in June. She has been invited to six interviews, she said, but none have so far led to offers. During two calls, she said, she was described as “overqualified.”
She has tried for chief of staff positions, HR jobs and lower-level administrative officer slots with state and county governments. She and her husband canceled day care, so she balances caring for her 20-month-old with the daily scouring of LinkedIn. They also canceled all planned family vacations and told their oldest daughter they can no longer promise to pay for college.
If Malenab can’t find work well into next year, she may have to move away, she said.
A former Peace Corps staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of harassment and negative consequences in her job search, said she has stopped eating out and limited her trips to the local laundromat. Instead, she sometimes hand-washes her clothes with old bars of soap she saved from her time overseas. She thinks she can stretch her savings through January, but after that may have to leave her D.C. apartment and move in with her aunt. But like some other former federal workers, she’s not sure what she’ll do about health insurance once her government coverage runs out.
‘What are we now?’
The loss of federal jobs isn’t the only problem the D.C. region faces now. By several key indicators — marketing forecasts, street-level foot traffic, hotel occupancy — Washington’s tourism economy is sliding, too.
Beyond federal employment, “we relied on tourism. But foreign tourists aren’t coming. And we relied a whole lot on universities bringing talent who would then stay here and be part of our talent pool. And that is kind of gone, too,” said Yesim Sayin, executive director of the D.C. Policy Center, a local think tank. “So what are we now? We just don’t know.”
On Wednesday, elected officials and regional leaders from the public and private sectors will unveil an online “one-stop shop” resource to help residents navigate the job search and better understand available support services across the region, said Clark Mercer, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.
“A lot of other states have been aggressively marketed in this region to try to attract folks to leave. We need to speak with one voice to remind these folks just how valued they are — but also point them in the direction of a really comprehensive resource,” he said.
Local nonprofits were already contending with the cancellation of government-funded grants when the administration threatened to shut down the annual charity drive that federal workers can donate to. Although the fundraising campaign will continue this year, nonprofit groups are bracing for fewer donations because of job losses — and greater need, including from former federal workers.
“This region stands to take a hard hit from those who are no longer employed but can’t find new employment and now find themselves in need,” said Rosie Allen-Herring, president and chief executive of United Way of the National Capital Area. “It’s a full-circle moment to be a donor and now find yourself in need, but it is very real for this area.”
One of the programs United Way supports, a financial empowerment center on Prince George’s Community College campus, has come in handy for Helen Robinson, a former Food and Drug Administration program analyst who lost her job after two decades during the agency’s mass dismissals in the spring. She needed advice for how to make ends meet now that she’s making significantly less working part-time.
“It’s a terrible blow,” said Robinson, 62.
Worried about greater demand and costs, including higher food prices, DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit group that distributes food to the needy, began its preparations for Thanksgiving a month earlier, said chief development officer Alexander Moore.
Not only are people losing their careers and their paychecks, but they also are losing a sense of self, too, former federal workers and contractors say.
In Fairfax County, Amanda Rose Parker, 39, is staring down a radically different life than the one she thought she was living. She worked for the federal government for 14 years, most recently with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after earning a master’s in public policy from American University. She chose to resign because she found her agency’s changed mission unpalatable and the rigid return-to-office schedule unworkable.
Now she has applied to more than three dozen jobs without results. She’s pursuing a teaching certification and, in the interim, pondering working part-time at a preschool, or maybe driving a bus, to help pay the bills. She is also taking over the majority of child care and household chores such as buying the groceries and cooking, once duties split evenly with her husband.
It’s not that she dislikes cooking or that she would find driving a bus demeaning, she said.
“But it’s all so demotivating because I had a career, I was speaking at conferences, I was doing important work,” she said. “Now I don’t have a career anymore. This is not the person I was.”