The shrinking federal government — in D.C.
The campaign to shrink the federal government is working, in Washington, D.C., at least. We got new statistics this week on employment from the Labor Department. Turns out, in 2023, D.C. ranked dead last when it comes to growth in federal government jobs. For years, there have been more federal workers based outside the nation’s capital than in it. That trend picked up during the pandemic.
A couple of days ago, economist T.J. Lepoutre was in his downtown Washington office at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, crunching some numbers for me. I’d asked him to figure out what happened to the federal workforce in D.C. during the pandemic.
“So from February 2020 to January 2024, federal government employment in the District of Columbia, D.C. proper, fell by 2%,” he told me.
By comparison, over that same period, the number of federal employees nationwide actually grew — by more than 4%. Tens of thousands of people still work for federal agencies based in D.C. But they really aren’t in the office that much. There’s no across-the-board order for everyone to sling on their lanyards and trudge back to the office full time.
Some agencies require their staff to be there in person when they’re doing classified work; others just want employees at their desks a couple days a week. Lepoutre said his agency has been flexible.
“Most of the time I have been working from home since the pandemic,” he said.
He’s not the only one. The Government Accountability Office did a report on how many federal workers came into agency headquarters in D.C. during the first three months of 2023. It wasn’t pretty.
“Most of the agencies were using less than a quarter of their building’s space, and none were using more than 50%,” said David Marroni, the lead author. “So really, across the board, lots of empty offices.”
More than half of those agencies’ leases will expire over the next three years, Marroni said. But until then, they’re holding onto their empty offices — meaning the space can’t be turned into revenue-generating hotels or apartments.
Marroni was speaking to me from Atlanta, where the GAO has a field office. Now more than ever, you really don’t have to live near Washington to work for the federal government.
“A lot of people have moved out of the region because it’s high cost — expensive — realizing that they can work for the federal government and not necessarily be in the region,” explained Yesim Sayin, head of the D.C. Policy Center think tank.
The federal government has always been decentralized, Sayin added, with most federal workers outside D.C. The pandemic turbocharged that, which hurt the city’s bottom line.
Federal employees working remotely aren’t going out to lunch or shopping downtown during their lunch breaks. People who might have taken the train downtown for a meeting at a government agency are Zooming instead. And the city is losing sales tax revenue from all those missed meetings and lunches.
“That’s affecting city revenues, that’s affecting Metro,” Sayin said.
Sayin estimates that federal workers spend an average of $167 per week when they’re in D.C. And even if half of them were actually coming into the office, the city would still be out millions of dollars a year in sales taxes.
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