Trump Won’t Just Change Washington Politics — He’ll Change Life in the City

The incoming administration won’t just alter the federal workforce. It will touch the lives of everyone who lives in the district.

A person looks at election results on their phone.

Donald Trump’s victory signals radical changes ahead for Washington, the capital city — but also for D.C., the home town.

After years of imagining themselves safely ensconced in a blue bubble, residents of the metropolis that houses the government could be looking at major economic dislocation, professional upheaval and the transformation of everything from city budgets to municipal abortion laws and even local public school curriculums — all as a result of the national election.

That represents a major break with tradition, and could have a huge personal impact on the capital’s regular citizens as well as its power-class insiders.

Candidates have forever vowed to transform how “Washington” functions. But for the most part, the way locals live, work and play doesn’t change much from administration to administration: The decadeslong boom that turned the capital region into the ultimate liberal metro area (and left four of the country’s six richest counties in the Washington suburbs) began under Reagan and trundled along even as the political pendulum swung back and forth.

Now, though, people who spend their days staffing the government, researching policy or lobbying decision-makers may find that their home lives are not so immune from politics after all. Trump II arrives in office with specific plans for remaking the bureaucracy, loud grievances against the local government and broad power over things like abortion rights — none of which existed when he first took over in 2017. In my conversations around town this week, ordinarily sanguine D.C. denizens found it a jarring realization.

Start with those homes. Washington has long lived under the assumption that it is recession-proof, thanks in large part to government jobs and federal contracting. Trump has sought to reclassify and possibly fire tens of thousands of federal workers, and relocate tens of thousands more to other parts of the country. On a civic level, that’s the equivalent of a few big factory closings. (About a quarter of the District’s 800,000 jobs are federal; there are many more around the region.)

Given that many locals now have the bulk of their wealth tied up in the once-affordable region’s hefty real estate prices, those are factory closings that could have a massive impact even on those whose jobs remain secure. When lots of your neighbors lose their jobs, it tends to whack property valuations.

Work, too, could change significantly. Trump’s efforts to strip civil service protections for chunks of the federal workforce — and related efforts like the Heritage Foundation’s recent campaign to access bureaucrats’ emails in order to hunt down insufficiently loyal workers — represent a big change in a culture that has historically prided itself for a kind of nerdy, dispassionate expertise.

White House suspicions of federal careerists are commonplace. But the idea of a system under which people could actually be bounced for political reasons represents a huge change. For that matter, the idea of a system where non-politicals can be mass-fired at all is radical: People who made careers working for Uncle Sam have long accepted the trade-off of job security in exchange for not getting to earn as much as top private-sector pros.

Whatever else it would do to public policy, the end of that bargain would change the meaning of work for huge numbers of people in and around Washington.

These big moves would probably lead to a political and legal fight. On a smaller level, the return of a Trump administration would likely upend the expectations some workers have developed over the last five years by ordering a much stricter work-from-home regime for 200,000 federal jobs currently located in the District. This longtime GOP cause would likely please the city administration, which has pushed return-to-office in the name of shoring up downtown businesses. But it would still mean an immediate and tangible change for federal workers.

The most jarring possible changes, though, might have to do with the local laws of the capital itself. Under the Nixon-era bill that established the city government, Congress is still allowed to pass city legislation whenever it wants. Historically, this has led to occasional bouts of grandstanding around hot-button issues like drug legalization, but it has rarely been a transformative power in a city whose local rules still look a lot like other blue areas. Few federal lawmakers want to be responsible for city hall tasks like gas-stove regulations.

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