The Deindustrialization of DC

Between January and May this year, more than 260,000 U.S. federal government workers have either been laid off, taken early retirement, or accepted buyouts. Thousands more are losing jobs as the Trump administration slashes research grants and funding for social services and non-profits. While the cuts affect people across the country and the world, they hit especially hard in Washington, D.C., where the federal government has always been the largest employer. As the Axios news service put it, the Trump administration is “downsiz[ing] the capital city’s big factory.”

Welcome to white collar deindustrialization. It’s not, as they say, your father’s deindustrialization. This crisis raises two challenging questions.

First, there’s the question of rhetoric. Should we describe these massive job cuts as deindustrialization? While deindustrialization refers to the contraction of an industry, it has also been applied to blue-collar workers losing jobs when the owning class exercises its economic power. Plants closed because corporations sought higher profits by reducing labor costs and escaping environmental and labor regulations. Government policies often aided these capital moves, and neither strong unions nor community organizing campaigns were able to block them.

Much of that applies to the Trump job cuts. Elon Musk, the “brains” behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), certainly has economic power. He also has a personal stake in privatizing government operations. For example, some have suggested that he wants his networking company Starlink to take over the beleaguered air traffic control system. The stated goal of job cuts is reducing federal spending, which Republicans have long pitched as a matter of fiscal responsibility – though the savings are more than off-set by tax cuts. And both tax cuts and reducing regulatory efforts – and jobs — across government agencies will primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans. The costs of all of this will be borne by the working class.

That includes most of the displaced federal workers. About 70% of them have at least a bachelor’s degree, and the nature of their jobs – working in offices with a fair amount of day-to-day control over their work – would define them as middle- or professional-class. Yet even the most professional federal employees don’t control the “means of production.” They are as subject to the whims of DOGE and Cabinet members as steelworkers were to corporate bosses forty years ago.

Calling the decimation of the federal workforce deindustrialization makes the conflict between workers’ limited power and the economic interests of those who are making the decisions painfully clear.

The second question is more local: what does all of this mean for Washington, D.C.? That’s a personal but also ironic question for me. For the last 14 years, I’ve spent the academic year in D.C. and the summer in Youngstown, moving back and forth between one of the most highly-educated, prosperous, thriving cities in the U.S. and one of the places hit hardest by – and still struggling with the effects of — deindustrialization. Median income in DC is over $108,000; in Youngstown, it’s about $32,000. In D.C., dozens of new housing and mixed-use complexes have been built since 2010, transforming the local landscape amid an influx of highly-educated, mostly white professionals. Gentrification brought prosperity for some and housing shortages for many others. The majority Black “Chocolate City” of the late twentieth century has become what sociologist Derek Hyra calls “Cappuccino City,” with the mix of races and all the bougie trappings implied by that name. Meanwhile, in Youngstown, some abandoned homes in my mixed-race-and-class neighborhood have been renovated, while others have become “sober houses” or groups homes – or just sit empty. The promised boom of fracking turned into a bust, and the poverty rate is more than three times the national average. Repeated efforts to attract new development and revitalize the city’s economy have failed to return to the city to anything like it’s mid-century prosperity. Even successful efforts have had limited impact.

Thirty years ago, standing in an abandoned steel mill and talking with a CBS News reporter, photojournalist Michael Williamson linked Youngstown’s story with the downsizing of white-collar jobs in the 90s: “Now the rest of the country knows what only Youngstown knew then.” What Youngstown knew has been on my mind as I worry about D.C. today. Unemployment is up, of course, which reflects not only job lost in the DOGE purge but also restaurants and other businesses that have closed as the local economy enters a recession. Job postings are down 17% since January in the city, 10% in the greater metro area, while the number of displaced workers looking for new jobs is going up. The city’s finance director predicts that the economy will contract by 1.9% in the next year, and retail sales are down. Residential building permits have fallen by about a third, and the number of homes for sale is rising dramatically.

And those are just the concrete economic effects of the deindustrialization of D.C. Research on the effects of deindustrialization in other American cities identify some significant social costs: mental and physical health problems; increases in addiction, suicide, and domestic violence; and the loss of social networks as people leave in search of new jobs. As the Washington Post reported last month, interviews with displaced workers show that many are struggling with anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts emerging already among displaced workers in DC,.

Another common effect of deindustrialization is also playing out in D.C. today: the undermining of labor unions. Public-sector workers have had the highest union density rates of any American industry. More than 32% of all public workers, including more than 25% of federal workers, belong to unions. Between the DOGE cuts and Trump’s executive order ending bargaining rights for federal workers, the American Federation of Government Employees is facing some significant battles.

That said, more than many former industrial towns, D.C.’s economy has become relatively diverse over the last few decades, with significant sectors in education, medicine, technology, and various business services. Some of that supports federal government programs, but D.C.’s five universities, a dozen large cultural institutions, and a number of major research centers all rely to some extent on federal funding. On the other hand, D.C. is well ahead of the game in tourism, which has been a significant element of economic recovery strategies in deindustrialized regions. It’s hard to imagine middle schools across the U.S. ending the tradition of school trips to visit the nation’s capital.

It may be too early predict how deindustrialization will play out in D.C., much less what it will take for this city to recover from a decline that is just starting to take shape. Perhaps my two hometowns will prove as different as their median incomes. But in 2025, as Trump continues his attacks on the federal government he is supposed to protect and defend, deindustrialization has spread from the Rust Belt to the Beltway, and Youngstown’s story has become a cautionary tale yet again.