DC’s Federal Workers Search for Jobs as Trump Slashes Agencies

Hundreds of Marylanders packed into an arena in this suburban county just outside the nation’s capital with one goal: get hired.

Many of the attendees at a recent jobs fair in Upper Marlboro in Prince George’s County never needed to come to something like this before.

But now, the region is being slammed as President Donald Trump and his chief cost-cutter Elon Musk take aim at the federal workforce and Republicans block a funding fix for D.C. The twin moves have left agency workers scrambling for new jobs, created economic uncertainty in a region known for its stability and left lawmakers from the DC region facing angry and worried constituents.

“You’ve got this triple whammy, perfect storm kind of problem,” said Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.), whose office helped organize the job fair in his district to reach laid-off federal workers.

“You’ve got government employees being fired, federal contractors are being let go, and you’ve got the bad overall economy caused by the tariffs,” Ivey added, referring to Trump’s trade policy. “It’s an economic disaster that he’s creating for no apparent reason. ”

Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) speaks with job fair attendees at the Show Place Arena in Prince George’s County, Md., on April 17.

Photo by Maeve Sheehey

The cities and suburbs in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, often called the “DMV,” had been largely buffered from past economic downturns with the federal workforce traditionally less susceptible to mass layoffs than private sector employees. Indeed, the federal presence has particularly bolstered Prince George’s County, making it among the wealthiest majority-Black counties in the country.

But Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has culled thousands of federal workers around Washington. While government jobs ticked up slightly in March, that number was driven by state and local hirings: The federal government lost roughly 4,000 jobs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employees terminated after the Trump administration dismantled the agency collect their personal belongings at the USAID headquarters on February 27.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The cost-cutting spree has sent shockwaves through the mid-Atlantic region.

“Based on the number of phone calls and emails coming in, people are hurting worse than they’ve ever hurt in Northern Virginia,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). The workforce in Beyer’s district, which includes the Pentagon, is more than 10% federal employees.

D.C. Fix

The capital city faces another funding threat.

When the House passed a stopgap to keep the government open earlier this year, it funded the District at 2024 levels, effectively forcing a billion-dollar cut to the local budget.

Without a fix, Mayor Muriel Bowser has said the local government may need to lay off or furlough public school teachers and police officers — though she recently said she will employ a budget maneuver to limit the cuts.

The Senate passed its own fix to the problem. But House GOP hardliners are blocking that bill, citing objections to policies of the district that overwhelmingly opposed Trump.

“We should use this opportunity to make certain that D.C. isn’t wasting money on ideas like DEI or reparations,” said House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-Md.), who represents a district on the Eastern shore of Maryland.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has warned that city services will be hurt if Congress doesn’t pass a budget fix.

(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The 2008 and 2020 recessions hit the DMV, but not nearly as hard as other cities with larger private sector workforces. DOGE’s buzzsaw to the federal workforce is creating the opposite effect.

“The way that the federal government is largely being gutted right now, there really isn’t much precedent for that in this country,” said Adam Kamins, the senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics. The economic research firm was already predicting a market downturn in the Washington area before raising the odds of a national recession due to Trump’s tariffs.

Out of the 200,000 federal jobs forecast to be lost in 2025, Oxford Economics senior economist Barbara Denham said all but 70,000 are expected to find reemployment in state governments or the private sector. The area has also diversified in the recent decades, particularly as high tech, defense contractors and others have moved to the region.

Denham noted that the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government initiative, which aimed to make the government more efficient and increase its use of the internet, cut more than 400,000 federal jobs.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), an appropriator whose district includes parts of Prince George’s County and is home to more than 50,000 federal workers, expects a broader impact this time than in 1990s.

“My wife headed up Reinventing Government, which was to try to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse,” he said. Trump and Musk “are doing it with a chainsaw. They did it with a scalpel over six years.”

Too Early to Tell

It may be too early to gauge the full impact to the local economy. The Metro has been breaking ridership records as Trump ordered federal employees back to the office full-time. Office utilization in Downtown DC has risen from Covid pandemic lows, surpassing 50% in a week last month, according to the Business Improvement District.

Kamins said the cuts will initially be concentrated in the federal government, but that consumer industries like retail and leisure may begin to feel the hit this summer.

Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who’s running to succeed GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin in the competitive state, said the more than 140,000 federal employees in Virginia have been hit hard with job loss worries.

“It’s deep disappointment that they’ve devoted their lives to public service and there seems to be no recognition of what those services are in veteran-heavy communities as we have across Virginia,” Spanberger said in an interview.

A volunteer from Maryland Corps explains the service program to job fair attendees in Prince George’s County.

Photo by Maeve Sheehey

At the job fair in Maryland, participants said they were trying to make the best of a bad situation.

“We’re surprised that people have to come out to an event like this,” said Bill Tyler, the Prince George’s County director of Parks and Recreation. “But we’re happy to be here to offer an opportunity for people to find other employment.”