This story is part of WTOP’s ongoing series, Trump Impact, which looks at how the new administration could change the D.C. region.
Whatever ultimately comes of the new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Trump’s billionaire advisers Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the potential effects on the D.C.-area housing market could be significant.
The federal government employs approximately 283,000 direct workers in the D.C. metro, including 141,000 in the District itself, according to the Office of Personnel Management.
Many of those employees are homeowners, and DOGE — at least in early messaging and whether ultimately impractical — aims to drastically reduce the number of government employees in the D.C. area and across the country, moving some agencies out of the nation’s capital.
“I don’t think our region has any idea about what is about to hit it in terms of recommendations from DOGE. I think it is going to be a lot of relocations and a lot of elimination of jobs,” said Corey Burr at TTR Sotheby’s, who has been representing homebuyers and sellers in the D.C. region for 30 years.
“It’s going to free up a lot of inventory and potentially lead to a regional recession for housing,” he said.
It could also have ripple effects.
“It may lead others who are unaffected by government jobs to put their properties on the market for fear that something greater might take place. This is something we’ve never seen before,” Burr said.
Any increase in the number of homes for sale in the D.C. region would be welcome, considering the biggest factor affecting prices and the pace of sales is the lack of inventory for sale. But an outsized wave of DOGE-related listings could overcompensate for that inventory deficit — at least initially.
“I don’t think it is going to be very long-lived, because I think there is a lot of demand that’s been waiting out there for the right opportunity to strike,” Burr said.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and rebranded the social platform as X. Within a year, he had slashed roughly 80% of its workforce to stem losses and address what he determined was widespread waste and inefficiency.
In November, President-elect Trump named Musk, along with Ramaswamy, to head the Department of Government Efficiency that will operate as an adviser outside of the power of an official government agency, to make recommendations to cut wasteful government spending and restructure, perhaps drastically, federal agencies.
Cutting government waste and cutting government jobs may not be the same thing.
As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, salaries for civil servants amount to about one-eighth of the deficit, and more than 60% of federal government employees work for military and security-related agencies, which President-elect Trump has indicated he plans to expand.
Musk himself, in an interview with marketing firm Stagwell at CES that aired on X last week, expressed doubt about actually achieving his stated goal of achieving the full $2 trillion in cuts to the federal budget.
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