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President-elect Donald Trump’s new government efficiency co-czars, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, want to slash the size of the federal government.
If they do so, that will certainly have a major impact on Northern Virginia (which might have indirect impacts on the rest of the state because revenues from Northern Virginia go toward subsidizing schools and other state programs across rural Virginia).
Something else they want to do may have more direct impacts on Virginia beyond the D.C. suburbs. They want to end remote work.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the Covid-era privilege of staying home,” the pair wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal last week.
Their ultimate goal may be to pressure some of these remote workers to quit, which would help reduce the federal workforce, but Musk has never liked remote work. He tried to ban it at Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX. In an interview with CNBC last year, he called remote work “morally wrong” because some professions can’t work from home due to the nature of the job. This always struck me as backwards thinking for someone who otherwise positions himself as being so futuristic, but I will admit to some bias: All of us at Cardinal work remotely. We have employees spread from Bristol to Richmond. We’ve never all been together in the same place, except on Zoom. I personally find that remote work has improved my productivity because I don’t have to spend time commuting to Roanoke every day. I also see remote work as a way to accomplish one of Trump’s goals indirectly: He’s mused about moving entire government departments out of Washington; remote work could accomplish the same thing, indirectly, over time by decentralizing the government workforce across all 50 states.
I shall try to set those feelings aside, though, to look at what the math tells us. How many federal employees work remotely? And how many of those have gravitated to someplace other than Northern Virginia? I’ve heard anecdotal accounts of Northern Virginia workers — federal employees or otherwise — who have migrated to Louisa County, where they are close enough to drive into the office periodically. I’ve also heard some wonder why there’s a nuclear plant built at Lake Anna, not understanding that the lake was built expressly for the nuclear plant. We also know that many rural localities (including Botetourt County, where I live) have expressly pitched themselves as a place for remote workers. What effect might the new administration have on curtailing those aspirations? Let’s see what we can figure out.
Some basic facts:
- An August report by the Office of Management and Budget says that more than 1.1 million federal workers, about 46% of the civilian workforce, are eligible for at least some amount of remote work. What we don’t know, however, is how many of those might be in Virginia.
- The share of Virginians working remotely has tripled since before the pandemic. A 2019 report by the Census Bureau put the figure at 5.8% of the Virginia workforce. A 2022 report (the most recent data available) put the figure at 18.2%.
- Virtually every locality in Virginia has seen the number of remote workers increase; Russell County is the only exception. However, the most dramatic increases have come in and around Northern Virginia.
Before the pandemic, Nelson County was the state’s remote work capital, with 11.74% of its workers being remote. Other top remote-work counties were around Charlottesville and the Chesapeake Bay, prime examples of what demographers call “rural resort” counties.
After the pandemic, the top localities for remote work in Virginia were almost all in Northern Virginia. Falls Church saw its remote workforce surge from 6.81% to 28.67%, one of the highest rates in the country. Arlington County went from 6.71% to 26.99%. Loudoun County went from 7.88% to 23.51%. Fairfax County went from 6.65% to 21.69%. Alexandria went from 5.56% to 22.11%. The only locality in the state outside Northern Virginia where the remote workforce topped 20% of the total workforce was our previous champ of Nelson County, which came in at 22.8%.
Based on that data, it appears that remote workers are now the biggest, or second-biggest, part of the workforce in some Virginia localities. (I wrote more about this in a column earlier this year.)
Again, there are limitations to the data: We don’t know how many of those remote workers in Northern Virginia are federal workers, but it seems safe to assume that many of them are.
For our purposes today, I’m not particularly concerned about them. They can hop on the Metro and commute into D.C. and carry on any philosophical arguments about remote work around the water cooler.
Instead, I’m more curious about the number of federal workers who may have made more permanent relocations elsewhere in Virginia, beyond the range of commuter rail.
I’ll warn you right now, we won’t be able to figure out an exact number, but let’s see how close we can come. We have three ways we can look at this.
Are you a federal worker who has relocated to rural Virginia? If so, let us know.
1. Federal employment in congressional districts outside Northern Virginia has exploded
For all the statistics that governments produce, there is no easy-to-find data on how many federal employees are in each locality. We do, however, have data on how many federal employees are in each congressional district, presumably because the federal government likes members of Congress to know that sort of thing. The catch in comparing pre-pandemic numbers with post-pandemic numbers is that congressional lines have changed since then. However, in many parts of Virginia, they haven’t changed that much, so we can make some general comparisons. This map shows every congressional district in the country, comparing the 116th Congress (elected in 2018) with the 118th (elected in 2022 with new lines) but I’ll call your attention to some highlights:
- The 9th District in Southwest Virginia saw federal employment grow from 230 to 1,317. There are no significant federal installations in the district, beyond the Forest Service, and adding Franklin County and parts of Bedford County couldn’t have changed the number that much. More likely, this reflects a growth in remote workers.
- Likewise, the 6th District, which runs from the Roanoke Valley up through the Shenandoah Valley, has no significant federal installations, either, and didn’t change its shape radically. Somehow, though, the number of federal workers increased from 315 to 1,929.
- The 5th District might be the clincher, though. Its shape did change pretty dramatically. The “old” district extended from the North Carolina line all the way up to Fauquier County, which is within commuting distance of D.C. The “new” district is a more compact district that doesn’t go north of Albemarle County. Even though the 5th shed its D.C. exurbs, the number of federal workers increased from 338 to 2,676.
It seems likely that these increases are almost entirely due to remote workers. Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service who shared this data, also suggests the real numbers might be higher. “These numbers are likely an underestimate because they don’t tend to include most remote workers who occasionally go into the office,” he said.
2. A Census Bureau report shows ‘D.C.-based’ workers have declined in Northern Virginia and increased by double digits in other parts of Virginia
The Census Bureau produces a report with the wonderful name of Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics, which would also be a great name for a ’70s prog-rock band. It’s based on actual data, not a survey, so Lombard says it has “a higher degree of accuracy” than survey-based data. It counts people whose “workplace” is Washington, D.C., and shows their residence by Local Workforce Investment Areas. If someone’s workplace is in D.C. but their residence is well beyond commuting distance from D.C., they are “most likely a remote worker,” Lombard says. Seems reasonable.
Here’s the map of Virginia’s Local Workforce Investment Areas:
Now, here’s how the number of “D.C.-based” workers has changed in each of those zones from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic:
You’ll see that the overall number of D.C.-based workers in the state hasn’t changed much (up 1%) but has shifted around a lot — down in Northern Virginia and up everywhere else. Almost everywhere is up by double digits, with the biggest percentage increase in the New River/ Mount Rogers area from Montgomery County to Bristol and the biggest numerical increase in the Richmond metro area. Now, a D.C.-based worker need not be a federal worker, but any federal workers would be included within these numbers, so this is another directional suggestion that a lot of federal workers have taken advantage of remote work to migrate well beyond the Washington metro area.
3. IRS data shows the number of people moving from Northern Virginia into parts of rural Virginia has increased since the pandemic
Our friend for this is the Internal Revenue Service, which tracks where people file their income taxes from and produces an annual report. That data is also limited — the IRS doesn’t report some numbers, to protect confidentiality — but it still gives us something to go on. Here’s what I set out to find: How many people from Northern Virginia have moved to other places in the state? That won’t tell us how many are federal workers, but we’ll at least know whether the potential number is high or low.
Here’s what we find: In the counties about an hour’s drive from Northern Virginia, we see a distinct increase in people moving in from Fairfax County after the pandemic. (Fairfax is the easiest to track because it’s so large.)
We see this in the northern Shenandoah Valley:
- Frederick County: In the three years before the pandemic, 988 people from Fairfax moved in. In the three years since, 1,336 moved in — an increase of 35.2%.
- Warren County: In the three years before the pandemic, 808 people from Fairfax moved in. In the three years since, 977 moved in — an increase of 20.9%.
We see this in the Piedmont north of Interstate 64:
- Louisa County: In the three years before the pandemic, 221 people from Fairfax moved in. In the three years since, 314 moved in — an increase of 42.0%.
- Spotsylvania County: In the three years before the pandemic, 1,767 people from Fairfax moved in. In the three years since, 2,179 moved in — an increase of 23.3%.
We see this on the Northern Neck, in some of those “rural resort” counties near the Chesapeake Bay:
- Westmoreland County: In the three years before the pandemic, 145 people from Fairfax moved in. In the three years since, 199 moved in — an increase of 37.2%.
We also see these trends run lower the farther south we look, but there’s often a smaller spike. Roanoke saw its migration from Fairfax County rise 18.2%. Montgomery County actually saw its Fairfax migration decline after the pandemic. One place that probably saw a big spike is Franklin County, thanks to Smith Mountain Lake. We can’t say for certain because one year of data before the pandemic is suppressed because the numbers were too small, but neither of the two years available comes close to any of the three years from 2020 onward.
Elsewhere the numbers from Fairfax are often too small to register, given the IRS’s strict privacy requirements, but the previous data shows there are definitely people from Northern Virginia moving into more rural parts of Virginia. We don’t know for certain how many of these Northern Virginia movers are federal workers, but it seems likely that some are. I remember talking about a year ago to a federal worker who had moved to the Lewisburg, West Virginia, area because he found he could work remotely and live in a rural area with lots of outdoor amenities. Trump ought to be claiming credit for all that because it was the remote work policies his first administration enacted that set all this in motion.
I do know this: Economic ecosystems are like biological ones. They’re often connected in ways we can’t see at first. We know that as remote work became more accepted, we saw the number of remote workers rise throughout Virginia, especially in places near D.C. If the new administration eliminates remote work, we simply don’t know what economic impact that would have throughout the state. Lombard points out that many of these remote workers may not be federal workers but federal contractors or others whose business is tied to the government. “A federal back-to-office policy that was effective would likely also pull many of these workers back into D.C. if their clients were working in person,” Lombard says. That means any change in federal work policies could have a long ripple effect across the state.
While some data is murky, this much is clear: Anything that slows down this migration from Northern Virginia is bad for rural Virginia. (It might be good for Northern Virginia, but our role here at Cardinal is to look out for Southwest and Southside specifically, and rural areas more generally.) In all these places, the newcomers from Fairfax County make a lot more money than the locals — so that’s a lot of extra spending money being injected into local economies.
The median household income in Westmoreland County is $56,647; the newcomers from Fairfax County average $145,895.
The median household income in Franklin County is $66,275; the newcomers from Fairfax County average $162,103.
The Trump administration is understandably concerned about far bigger things than the economy in some rural parts of Virginia, but it’s quite possible that Trump’s desire to cut the size of the federal government will have some unintended economic consequences for some of the rural counties that voted so enthusiastically for him.
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