The Private Sector Was Supposed to Save Everyone

When OPM sent its original guidance to workers eligible for the deferred resignation program, the agency encouraged them to "switch into higher productivity jobs in the private sector as soon as possible." This was the theory: the federal government was bloated, private employers were waiting, the transition would be relatively smooth. The region would diversify. The economy would adapt. The data says otherwise. Private sector employment in the DMV region dropped 0.28% year-over-year in 2025 — at a moment when private sector employment grew 0.3% across other major metro areas and 0.19% nationally [1]. The private sector didn't absorb the shock. It contracted in response to it. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's thought about how regional economies work. Federal employment in the DMV isn't a contained sector — it's an anchor. Nearly 1 in 10 workers in the region are direct federal employees, but a much larger share work in sectors that exist because the federal government is there: contracting, consulting, legal work, IT services, research, communications. When the anchor moves, everything attached to it moves too. Professional and business services shed jobs. Retail contracted. The information sector declined. Venture capital flow to DMV startups dropped at a moment when it was growing everywhere else in the country [1]. There's a word for a policy that causes an entire regional economy to contract: harmful. There's not a polite way to dress it up.

The federal government is not a passive bystander to the DMV region's economy — it is an anchor, and the loss of approximately 54,000 federal jobs in the span of 12 months is not an exercise in efficiency, but an industry shock bearing consequences for the entire region.

— Brookings Institution, DMV Monitor, March 2026

Who Specifically Got Hurt

One of the things missing from the "92% left voluntarily, services intact" narrative is a demographic breakdown of who specifically did the voluntary leaving. The federal workforce is 19% Black — compared to 13% of the overall civilian workforce [2]. The agencies that faced the deepest cuts were disproportionately staffed by women and workers of color: the VA (64% female), Education (63% female), Treasury (61% female), Housing and Urban Development (59% female), Health and Human Services (52% female) [3]. These were not random choices. These were the agencies that DEI critics had spent years describing as bloated and ideologically captured. After the fork expired, the Brookings data shows that year-over-year unemployment increases among Black workers in the DMV region were more than twice as high as for white workers. Women's unemployment in the region rose 1.5 percentage points — three times higher than the national average for women [1]. And the Institute for Women's Policy Research found that Black women accounted for more than half of all job losses among women nationwide in 2025, despite making up less than 15% of the female workforce [1]. That's not a rounding error. That's a policy result. The federal government had been one of the primary pathways to Black middle-class stability in America for generations — partly because the private sector, historically, wasn't. Federal jobs offered union protections, pension benefits, and a career ladder that didn't depend on who you knew at the country club. For a Black IT specialist in Prince George's County, a federal job wasn't just employment. It was the 401(k) that accrued, the mortgage that got paid, the savings that accumulated over decades of structural disadvantage. The median income for Black federal workers in 2024 was around $97,000. The wealth-building function of that stability is harder to quantify but real [2]. The DOGE project cut that pathway. The framing of "voluntary departure" makes it sound like each of those workers made a free and unfettered choice. They made choices under conditions they didn't create and couldn't fully control.

"Voluntary" Is Doing a Lot of Work Here

There is a certain school of thought — one that has received significant airtime this week — that the 92% voluntary departure rate among federal workers vindicates the DOGE project. The argument goes: if these people chose to leave, they weren't that necessary; if services are still functioning, the cuts weren't that damaging; if the government is still running, the skeptics were wrong. This argument has a few problems. First, "voluntary" departure under conditions of engineered uncertainty isn't the same as freely choosing to leave. A worker who receives an email giving them 48 hours to resign with pay or face an unspecified restructuring isn't making the same kind of choice as someone who decides to retire comfortably on their own schedule. The "fork" was designed to look like an offer while functioning like a coercive instrument. Many workers, particularly those closest to retirement, made rational decisions to take the certainty of a payout over the uncertainty of staying. That's not evidence that their jobs were unnecessary. That's evidence that they were risk-averse in a situation where risk was manufactured. Second, "services intact" is a narrow metric. The IRS is collecting taxes. Social Security is processing claims. The air traffic controllers are still on duty. These things are true. They measure whether the federal government can perform its most visible functions at a degraded level. They don't measure what happened to 56,000 people in one region of the country. They don't measure the private sector contraction, the venture capital flight, the 64% surge in home listings as families decided to leave [3]. Saying "services are intact" while a region hemorrhages 56,000 jobs is a bit like saying the restaurant is fine because the kitchen is still open — without mentioning that the dining room is empty. Third, efficiency is supposed to produce measurable gains. If DOGE's workforce cuts were genuinely about right-sizing government, the savings should exceed the economic damage. The White House projects $29 billion in annual savings. The DMV region's job losses represent an industry shock of historic proportions in a metro area of 6.4 million people. DC's chief financial officer has forecast a mild recession in 2026 and a $1 billion revenue loss over three years for the District alone [4]. Those costs don't show up in the OPM spreadsheet. They show up in unemployment checks, in children changing schools, in small business owners watching their lunch crowds disappear.

What Actually Gets Measured

The OPM data released last week measures how many people left the federal workforce and notes that most left voluntarily. That's the number that's been circulating. It's a real number. It doesn't tell you where those people went, whether they found equivalent work, whether their families moved or stayed, whether the communities they lived in are economically healthier or worse. Those outcomes are harder to track and harder to celebrate, which is presumably why they're not in the press releases. Brookings tracked them. The findings aren't complicated: the DMV region absorbed a workforce shock that would have devastated any regional economy in America. It happened to hit hardest at Black workers, women, and workers in their late careers — people who had specifically chosen federal employment because the private sector historically offered them less stability, lower pay, and fewer protections. The private sector did not absorb them as promised. The venture capital fled. The small businesses lost their lunch crowds. The home listings spiked as families calculated their options. This is what efficiency looks like when you measure it all the way through, instead of stopping at the point where the press release looks good.

The Second Shoe

The administration plans to cut an additional 140,000 federal positions in 2026. OPM has proposed new rules that would overhaul reduction-in-force procedures, de-emphasizing seniority and restructuring how "performance" is evaluated — changes that AFGE National President Everett Kelley says are "rigging" the system to make politically targeted firings easier [5]. The new rules would cap how many workers can receive high performance ratings, creating a forced distribution that allows managers to fire people who haven't underperformed on any objective measure. In other words: the fork-and-deferred-resignation phase, where workers had some agency over their departure, may be giving way to a phase where they don't. The 56,000 jobs lost in 2025 happened largely through what the administration could describe as a voluntary program. What happens next is harder to characterize that way. And the DMV region, which has already lost its largest employment anchor's first round of cuts, is about to face a second one. Marcus is still looking for work. He's had interviews. The market for federal IT specialists is saturated — a lot of people with his background and his clearances are applying for the same positions. His youngest starts high school next fall. He's not thinking about moving yet. He's hoping he doesn't have to. The efficiency spreadsheet doesn't have a line for that.