After the ‘fork’: Greater Washington leads the nation in regional job loss | Brookings

When the Trump administration first announced its “workforce optimization initiative” for the federal government in early 2025, Greater Washington’s economy entered into a state of limbo.

For the District of Columbia and its neighboring Maryland and Virginia suburbs—a region colloquially known as the “DMV”—the federal government has long been the lifeblood of the regional economy and labor market, conservatively accounting for 9.7% of its employment base (reflecting only direct federal government civilian jobs, and excluding private sector jobs funded through federal contracting). When the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced the beginning of its federal workforce purge, the question was not whether the DMV economy would suffer the consequences, but how much it would suffer, and for how long.

While some of the impacts of federal downsizing have been readily apparent in monthly data releases from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the design of DOGE’s strategy has previously made the scope of damage on the DMV region’s labor market difficult to quantify. While thousands of federal workers were terminated immediately, more than 150,000 others accepted offers for deferred resignation (also known as the “Fork in the Road”), which kept them on the federal payroll through the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2025. These workers, while functionally jobless, were thus excluded from official job and unemployment counts in the first three quarters of 2025.