The president-elect’s pledges to slash the workforce could crater the local economy. But administrations have made these promises before.

Whether President-elect Donald Trump orders hundreds of thousands of federal workers back to their Washington, DC, offices or purges them from their jobs, local officials are bracing for seismic impact on the local economy.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised a sweeping reorganization of the government that includes relocating as many as 100,000 jobs and eliminating tens of thousands more. He also pledged that the federal government would “take over” the nation’s capital city.

Leaders are wary because the links between the federal government and the local economy so strong. The metro area of 6.3 million people is home to some 314,000 federal workers as well as a vast ecosystem of industries that serve government agencies and workers.

“Threats to the federal workforce have serious implications for how our economy functions moving forward,” says Erica Williams, executive director of the nonprofit DC Fiscal Policy Institute. “There’s no mistake that the federal government is a huge sector of the DC economy.”

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, who cut a figure as a resistance leader during Trump’s first administration, has asked for a meeting with the incoming president. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

Local fears are centered around the work of Trump’s proposed Department of Government Efficiency, a new agency to be led by billionaire Elon Musk and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which aims to cut some $2 trillion in government spending. In a YouTube conversation with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Ramaswamy said that the Trump administration could order federal workers to return to the office five days a week.

To Ramaswamy, this strategy would help reduce the workforce by compelling employees to resign. But Mayor Bowser has asked the Biden administration to bring employees back to the office — or relinquish office real estate — in a bid to revive the city’s downtown.

A full return to office for federal employees could shore up the local economy, since post-pandemic office vacancy rates remain high and economic activity in downtown DC has plateaued at 68% of pre-pandemic levels, per a 2023 report from the Downtown DC Business Improvement District.

The city has long prided itself in being somewhat recession-proof; its status as the seat of federal government has helped it to weather many storms. Yet this time the federal government itself might be the storm. The rhetoric from the president-elect and his allies about the DC metro area has taken on a punishing tone. In the Project 2025 document — written for the incoming administration, though Trump has disavowed it — the Heritage Foundation compares the city to the capital of North Korea:

Nighttime satellite images of the Korean peninsula famously show the free-market South lit up, with homes, businesses, and cities electrified from coast to coast. By contrast, Communist North Korea is almost completely dark, except for the small dot of the capital city, Pyongyang, where a psychotic dictator and his cronies live. The same phenomenon is on display in the infuriating fact that four of the six richest counties in the United States are suburbs of Washington, D.C. — a city infamous for its lack of native productive industries.

“We are not some desolate wasteland,” Williams says, referring to DC. “We are an engine of a regional economy.”

Residents of the District certainly feel the brunt of shifts within the federal workforce. Federal workers don’t have a strong return-to-office policy, despite promises by the Biden administration to adopt one. Losses continue to mount around the downtown office corridor, thanks to lower property values, decreased sales and higher vacancy rates. Tax revenue from downtown have already fallen by $243 million since 2019, according to the Downtown DC Business Improvement District, and absent any intervention, stand to fall another $190 million, to $2.16 billion, by 2033.

And while both federal workers and local officials are on edge waiting to see whether Trump’s promises materialize, some observers note that we’ve been here before.

The first Trump administration did move several agencies out of Washington: The Empowering Rural America Program and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, for example, moved to Kansas City, Missouri, in 2019. The moves did work to shrink federal agencies, at least in the short term: When the Trump administration moved US Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, the same year, just 41 employees agreed to move, while 287 retired or left the agency — an 87% attrition rate — according to The Hill. (BLM has since moved back to Washington under President Joe Biden.)

Yet over the course of the Trump administration, the swamp actually grew. The number of federal employees in the DC-Maryland-Virginia-West Virginia metro statistical area ticked up a notch, from 371,000 staffers in January 2017 to 374,000 staffers in December 2020, per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

During this time, the Trump administration also tried to gut federal government union contracts and displace union members, according to Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 800,000 federal and DC government workers.

“We’ve seen how the previous administration tried to bust up our union. We’ll try to guard from that happening again,” Kelley says. He adds that the union is also seeking a meeting with the incoming administration. “We want to work with them.”

Economic and demographic changes in DC are bipartisan, says MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska, associate professor of history at American University and author of the forthcoming book, “Your Nation’s Capital: How Visitors Changed Washington, DC, and Vice Versa.” She notes that Project 2025 is simply the latest edition of the “Mandate for Leadership” transition document that the Heritage Foundation first prepared for President Ronald Reagan in 1980. His administration implemented a lot of suggestions from the 20-volume, 3,000-page document, but ultimately, Reagan didn’t shrink the government.

Rymsza-Pawlowska’s book examines the stereotype that DC is a transient city and finds that it’s more accurate to say people come there and then stay. Government growth drives local growth, and discourse aside, both parties grow the government. “This [growth] isn’t as dependent on different administrations as we like to think,” she says.

DC isn’t a monolith. Different populations in the metro area already experience Washington’s economy in different ways. Williams notes that the current unemployment rate for Black Washingtonians is about 10%; over the last couple decades, Black unemployment in DC has reached as high as 20% and never dipped below 8%, whereas for white workers, unemployment has never been higher than 4%.

“For some folks, the economy here has not really worked for them ever, no matter the administration,” Williams says. “For some folks, it always works well, no matter the administration.”

Written by: — With assistance from Hadriana Lowenkron @Bloomberg