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In 2008, as the Great Recession was beginning to take hold, my trips over Barack Obama’s presidential election took me one after another to American cities. I have visited places such as Kokomo, Indiana. It was labelled as one of the fastest-dead towns in America by the end of the year, as it had lost so many jobs in the Chrysler and Delphi plants.
After the trip, I returned to my home in Alexandria, Virginia, to the area in the Washington, DC area, and was impressed by how the national capital was removed from the pain felt in most parts of the country. Not only did it get insulated due to a high percentage of government employment, but it actually thrived as a result of the recession, as many of the federal economic stimulus packages remained Beltway contractors who managed spending.
When my growing family began searching for a big house in 2009, we left the corner of Alexandria. Prices in all other metropolitan areas in the country were still rising in northern Virginia suburbs.
The situation is currently reversing rapidly. Elon Musk’s relentless sickle, a major layoff, as a result of government efficiency, is in and around Washington. For the week ending February 22nd, the District of Columbia’s unemployment claims rose 25% from the previous week, four times the previous year. The district’s chief financial officer predicts that the city, whose federal government makes up about a quarter of all wages, could lose up to 40,000 jobs in the coming years.
The fallout is spreading to DMVs (DC, Maryland, Virginia). This is an area where almost a tenth of all jobs are in the federal government, let alone the tens of thousands of people working for contractors who rely on federal spending.
The losses are already showing up beyond the numbers: resumes from highly educated professionals who flooded LinkedIn, with quiet debates about this family pulling out their stakes and leaving town, as the laid back youth are asking others to take over their apartment lease.
It also shows in the very landscape of the city. The Trump administration has temporarily placed the headquarters of many government departments in a list of “non-core” properties that are scheduled to be offloaded as they are vacant or unused. This reminds us of the prospect that a massive, brutal revival building built in the 20th century could be vacant one day, as abandoned 19th-century factories loomed in many industrial and industrial cities in the country.
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All of this raises an immeasurable issue until recently. Has the capital of the country long been blessed to be a government company town, put over the years at risk of a fate similar to that of many other company towns? And if so, why would people beyond Metro Washington be more worried about it? When Detroit fell free, Obama stepped in to save the automotive industry and decided that America’s great cities needed help. But now, the administration itself is dealing a fateful blow to major cities.
With this shift, it is difficult to detect responsiveness on the part of Trump’s allies and supporters in recent undressed regions. By 2012, seven of the 10 wealthiest counties were in the Washington Capital Region when the country finally emerged from the recession. The number of high-net households in the region with investmentable assets of over $1 million has increased by 30% since 2008. Meanwhile, Midwest communities, including Vice President JD Vance’s hometown of Middletown, Ohio, were crushed by the Aston Martin Dealership of Opioids, aston Martin Dealerships at Aston Martin Dealerships at Aston Martin Dealerships. The district had been approaching a 400% increase since the early 1990s.
There’s also more recent fuel in Shaden Fluid than Washington’s pain. Federal workers were able to return to offices after the pandemic much later than workers in other industries, making it easier for the Trump administration to be consett and counterproductive. The sustainability of remote work within the federal government has given downtown Washington a desolate atmosphere as it helped countless high-speed lunch locales, retail stores and major cinemas. There is no small irony in the fact that Trump’s order to return to office brought more lives to downtown streets at a moment when the city was in great danger due to impending layoffs.
Doge Cuts doesn’t do much harm to the true economic elites of the region. There are still lobbyists closing their six-figure deal. Trump did little valuable to threaten that aspect of the so-called swamp. If anything, the Doge attack allowed many sectors, such as higher education, to spend more on lobbyists. There are still Beltway Bandit Consulting companies that absorb some of the previous work done by government workers and national security contractors alongside the soulless highway approach to Dulles Airport.
The actual goal of the cut is the more modest kind. Often, it could have been a career civil servant who made more money in the private sector, or a security guard or office cleaner who returned every night to a working-class neighborhood in Anacostia or Prince George County. This is these people, from housing finance analysts to food safety researchers and administrative assistants, who are currently desperately searching for other jobs or considering leaving the area forever.
The cuts fall particularly violently on black residents in areas that have long relied on federal employment as middle class ladders. (Black people make up a disproportionately large part of the national federal workforce.)
The Trump administration continues to cite untrue statistics to target federal workers
Looking at all this, I can’t help but keep in mind another company town, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, another company town. It once hosted three major divisions of General Electric, but in the mid-20th century, over 13,000 people were employed in a county of around 130,000, and was widely shared in the city along with great public schools and bustling Main Street.
But by the time I arrived at high school in the late 1980s, the company was expanding its operations with a quick clip under Jack Welch’s leadership. My classmates and I saw a family of engineers and managers move in and empty storefronts multiplied downtown. Ultimately, many of us decided to build our careers elsewhere. Pittsfield’s population has been declining in the quarter since 1970, with only 1,000 people employed in the company that took over one of the Rump GE units, General Dynamics.
Washington is unlikely to suffer fate, given the many barnacles that have obsessed themselves with the economy beyond bureaucracy. Even if several large stone buildings are vacant, like the ruins of the Roman Forum, tourists will come to thousands of places to admire the monument. But the experience of Pittsfield and so many big business towns is a reminder that the town’s biggest employers are a huge hit and the chaos of the chaos that comes when ladder rangs to upward mobility begin to crumble. The light-like echo of all other cities is why the beltway now absorbs that blow, so it provides sympathy, or at least recognition.
