D.C. lost over 22,000 federal jobs in 2025 as the result of President Donald Trump’s plan to downsize the federal workforce, which was mainly executed through the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. It’s also a step the city had anticipated as it planned future budgets.
The city reported nearly 31,000 federal job separations in 2025, according to newly released data from the Office of Personnel Management. But with staffing increases reported at the Federal Air Traffic Organization, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State and Department of Justice, the net federal job loss in D.C. is about 22,356 jobs that carried $3.66 billion in annual pay.
“If you have people who are laid off and not working, then those people are going to be able to contribute less to the individual income tax, they will have less income,” said Fitzroy Lee, D.C.’s deputy chief financial officer and chief economist. “With less income, they will have less spending.”
D.C. had been bracing for the job loss, and Lee said the most recent budget plan assumed there will be 40,000 fewer federal jobs by 2029, and “it seems that we’re on track for that.”
The latest data, detailed in a blog post on the D.C. Office of Revenue Analysis’ website, found that most federal workforce reductions came from the Department of Justice, Department of State, U.S. Agency for International Development and Department of Transportation.
The bulk of lost jobs came through federal workers quitting, retiring or through reduction in force (RIF) programs. Over half the people separated from the federal government last year were younger than 50, which Lee described as surprising.
“Certainly in the deferred resignation program, what we see is the bulk of those were retirees,” Lee said. “But then looking at the people who were terminated, a lot of them were the younger people who, I’m assuming, were probationary. There are a lot of people who also quit. A portion of that were people who quit, and those tended to center around people between the 30 and 50 range.”
Over 85% of people who left federal jobs last year had earned a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the city’s blog post.
At the beginning of 2025, federal government jobs in D.C. accounted for one-fourth of all jobs in the city, Lee said. The job loss is highly consequential, he said, because “they were, relatively speaking, high-paying jobs.”
“In terms of our revenue projections, we saw that as impacting our individual income tax, lower individual income tax, as well as a lower sales tax,” he said.
Even before the Trump administration’s plans to downsize the government workforce, there had been a discouraging trend in federal employment.
“Right after the pandemic, there was a ramp up of federal hiring,” Lee said. “Two years after the pandemic, what we were seeing was that there was a downward trend.”
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