Anonymous wrote:Could it be that the job market report also does not include many soon-to-be former federal workers? Those who took the DRP are still technically employed through September 30. And many others are still on administrative leave due to RIF-related litigation.
True but people expecting layoffs don't take out mortages. Yet housing data for the DMV looks better than the rest of the country (look at Case Shiller Index for January-May).
I know a ton of federal workers and people whose jobs rely on federal funding. It feels like it has been a bloodbath because for the federal workers at least, they have been in their jobs for a long time and didn't have a reason (prior to this most recent election) to expect mass lay offs. So it is shocking that my friends at USAID and their contractors have been laid off and that my friends at State are expecting layoffs. It also sucks that other organizations that rely on federal funding have had layoffs as well, though for those individuals it is not the first time.
And many of my federal worker friends haven't been laid off and don't expect to be (based on factors specific to their jobs).
There might be a massive economic downturn in the DMV, I don't know. But I do think it's possible there won't be. I think right now the pain is isolated to a minority of federal workers (about 10% based on a higher end estimate of 280,000 layoffs
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/26/politics/federal-layoffs-trump-musk-dg ) who have been laid off in a very public, cruel and intentionally traumatizing way. There are still hundreds of thousands of federal jobs in the DMV.