D.C. Is Becoming Another Hollowed-Out Company Town

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edgar guest Essay

By Alec MacGillis

Mr. MacGillis is a reporter for ProPublica and the author of “Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon.” This article is published in collaboration with ProPublica.

In 2008, as the Great Recession was starting to take hold, my travels reporting on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign took me to one American city after another that was reeling from major layoffs. I visited places such as Kokomo, Ind., which was losing so many jobs at its Chrysler and Delphi plants that by year’s end it was labeled one of America’s fastest-dying towns, and Lorain, Ohio, where Mr. Obama visited a National Gypsum plant that closed four months later.

After each trip, I would return to my home in Alexandria, Va., in the metro Washington, D.C., area, and be struck by how removed the nation’s capital seemed from the pain being felt in so much of the country. Not only was it insulated because of its high proportion of government employment, it actually prospered as a result of the recession, since so much of the federal economic stimulus ended up staying with the Beltway contractors who administered the spending.

When my growing family started looking for a larger home in 2009, we left our corner of Alexandria. As prices in every other metro area in the country were declining, they were still rising in the inner suburbs of Northern Virginia.

The situation now is sharply reversed. As a result of Elon Musk’s relentless scythe, the Department of Government Efficiency, the big layoffs are in and around Washington. In the week ending Feb. 22, unemployment claims in the District of Columbia rose 25 percent from the week prior and were four times as high as one year earlier — and that’s only the beginning. The district’s chief financial officer has predicted that the city, where the federal government accounts for roughly a quarter of all wages, could lose as many as 40,000 jobs over the next few years, more than a fifth of its total, which he estimates would cost the city more than $1 billion in revenue.

The fallout is spreading through the DMV — D.C., Maryland and Virginia — a region where nearly a tenth of all jobs are with the federal government, not to mention the tens of thousands of people working for contractors dependent on federal spending.

The losses are already manifest beyond the numbers: in the résumés from highly educated professionals flooding LinkedIn, in pleas from laid-off young people seeking others to take over their apartment leases, in hushed discussions about this or that family pulling up stakes and leaving town.

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