Trump's workforce purge batters DC's job market and leads to rise in
homes for sale, report finds
[September 25, 2025] By
FATIMA HUSSEIN
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Department of Government Efficiency's remaking of
the federal workforce has battered the Washington job market and put
more households in the metropolitan area in financial distress,
according to a report released Wednesday.
The number of homes for sale in the District of Columbia, Maryland and
Virginia region, also known as the DMV, is up by 64% since June 2024,
and the region’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation,
according to the DMV Monitor, a real-time data interactive created by
the Brookings Institution with the Metropolitan Washington Council of
Governments.
Washington has had the nation's highest seasonally adjusted unemployment
rate for four straight months. The unemployment rate was 5.3% in January
and ticked up to 6% in August, compared with the 4.3% national average,
according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
From the start of President Donald Trump's second term in January, DOGE,
led by his then-adviser Elon Musk, instigated purges of federal agencies
with the expressed mission of rooting out fraud, waste and abuse. DOGE
led to tens of thousands of job cuts, including layoffs and people who
accepted financial incentives to quit. Some people were rehired, a
reflection of the haphazard process. Although losses were felt around
the country, the Washington area was particularly hard hit.
Scott Kupor, director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, said
last month that there will be 300,000 fewer federal workers on the
payroll nationwide by the end of the year. The government has about 2.5
million workers, including military members.
Contractors have been affected, too. DOGE's website states that 13,231
federal government contracts have been terminated, totaling $59 billion
in savings. In fiscal year 2024, more than 100,000 companies received
contracts, totaling roughly $774 billion.
Besides the mass layoffs, the Republican president's other actions to
remake the image of the nation’s capital — including deploying National
Guard troops and federalizing the city’s local Metropolitan Police
Department — “could shape consumer spending and investment in the local
economy,” the report says.
The report also says private-sector job growth is stagnating, “with many
new jobs not aligned with the skills and experiences of most laid-off
federal workers.”
“As a result,” it says, “job postings were not as robust as they were in
peer regions, which is concerning when unemployment has soared,
especially in the suburbs.”
[to top of second column] |
Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., protests against DOGE, the Department of
Government Efficiency, as he and other House Democrats speak out
against the Republican budget plan, on the House steps at the
Capitol in Washington, Feb. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite,
File)
 Taylor Rogers, a White House
spokeswoman, said D.C. “has often had the highest unemployment rate
in the nation, even during Joe Biden’s federal hiring frenzy.”
D.C.'s unemployment rate hit 11.3% at the height of the COVID-19
pandemic and fell to 5.3% at the end of Biden's presidency. “This
longstanding problem is due to an overreliance on federal bloat and
sky-high crime, two problems that President Trump is quickly and
successfully fixing by cracking down on crime in the Nation’s
capital and implementing supply-side reforms that have already
created over half a million private-sector jobs for American-born
workers,” Rogers said.
The DMV region is home to the second highest share of college
graduates of any major U.S. metropolitan area, and one-fifth of
federal workers are concentrated in the area.
In July, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Trump's Republican
administration to downsize the federal workforce further, despite
warnings that critical government services would be lost. The ruling
does not apply to every agency, and other legal challenges to
federal worker firings continue.
Additionally, hundreds of federal employees who lost their jobs in
Musk’s cost-cutting blitz are being asked to return to work.
“The DMV region’s economy has grown even weaker than the nation in
many categories due to the Trump administration’s seismic actions to
shrink the federal government,” the report reads.
And given proposed additional cuts in the future, the DC Fiscal
Policy Institute predicts it's likely more Washington residents and
others from around the region who work in Washington will lose their
federal jobs over the coming months and years.
The latest Washington Office of Revenue Analysis figures show that
initial unemployment insurance claims have jumped by 33.7% compared
with this time last year.
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