Has the federal gov shed jobs? Is this a good thing?

Whether you want to admit it or not, the fact that the Federales spends more than it takes in is bad. Really bad. Like the main cause of inflation and higher interest rates. Ergo, higher mortgage rates than you'd like making buying a home even more ridiculous.

So reducing the number of federal employees is essential. Yes, there are going to be places where it hurts, but there's no avoiding this.

Is this sufficient? No, but it's a start that no other administration in decades has made a dent in. Of course the elephants in the room are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Defense. Voldemort hasn't meaningfully touched the first three (politically dangerous) and is ramping up the fourth.

Washington, DC, lost over 100,000 jobs last year, the most in the US

Sweeping federal job cuts and a shrinking hospitality sector have resulted in high unemployment in the nation’s capital.

Millie Giles, Chart R

April 24, 2026

For those living there, or those predisposed to political irony, it may not come as a surprise that the home of the US government has the highest unemployment rate of anywhere in the nation.

Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last Thursday revealed that the largest year-over-year decrease in nonfarm payroll employment of any US metropolitan area last year was in Washington, DC, where almost 104,000 jobs were lost over that period. In context, that’s about 3.5x the job decline observed for Boston, Massachusetts, the metro area that saw the next most jobs lost in 2025.

Generally, it follows that the largest nominal changes in employment are seen for the most populous metro areas, like Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, and Washington, DC. However, as the BLS outlined in a separate release on Tuesday, DC was also among the six metro areas that saw statistically significant declines last year, with employment down 3.1% to 3.26 million in January 2026.

Doge days

Earlier this month, The Guardian reported that DC had the highest unemployment rate in the country, and pointed to the drop in the federal workforce, since the government is the region’s largest employer.

Indeed, the BLS’s Employment Situation report for March detailed that ~355,000 jobs have been cut from the government since October 2024 (an 11.8% decrease), with the number of federal employees currently sitting at ~2.66 million, the lowest level since 1966.

Though initiatives like DOGE — the single greatest cause of job cuts in the US last year, according to Challenger data — have, as intended, caused a large number of civil servants to lose their jobs, a cocktail of other issues are also driving joblessness in DC.

Per Axios, the area’s hospitality industry has shrunk as restaurants and hotels suffered from declining tourism last summer, while nongovernment workers have faced private sector layoffs. Still, looking at the historical unemployment rate in DC compared with the rest of the US, there might be longer-term issues at play.

US DC unemployment rate

The latest preliminary data shows DC’s unemployment rate is hovering around the highest level since 2015, with February figures placing it at 6.5% — only slightly down from the 6.7% peak seen from November through January, and considerably greater than the national unemployment rate that month (4.4%).

However, since 2000, the unemployment rate in DC has pretty consistently outpaced that of the US overall, excluding the pandemic and the financial crisis. A competitive job market flooded with skilled workers offers one explanation; another is perhaps that DC’s fed-driven, urban economy sees the jobless rate outpace more suburban regions with steadier jobs under normal circumstances... and stays more resilient during economic downturns.