Math is our friend.
It hasn’t always been my friend, as some of my school transcripts might attest, but that was a long time ago and now we have calculators.
When it comes to political analysis, I have grudgingly made friends with math because math is scrupulously nonideological.
When we use math to examine demography, it leads to a liberal conclusion: The United States actually needs more immigration, not less, because an aging population and declining birth rates mean that unless we have more younger workers paying taxes, we won’t have a way to pay for Social Security and other entitlement programs. Or maybe it leads to a conservative conclusion — that we need to chainsaw away almost all other government spending.
When we use math to examine energy, it leads to a conservative conclusion: Right now, Virginia produces about 7% of its energy from solar power. If that little amount of solar produces as much controversy as we’ve seen over land use, how are we ever going to be able to ratchet that share up many times higher? Or maybe it leads to a liberal conclusion: Maybe we need the state to override rural local governments that are balking at solar projects.
Either way, the numbers all remain the same. It’s only how we choose to interpret them that changes.
With that in mind, let’s see what math can tell us about the Trump administration’s plans to slash the federal workforce. That matters to us in Southwest and Southside Virginia because rural school systems get most of their funding from the state, and the biggest source of state funding is the income tax. The biggest geographical source of that income tax is Northern Virginia. In all, the D.C. suburbs account for about 40% of the state’s revenue, so anything that’s state-funded, from schools to roads to prisons to you name it, ultimately owes a lot of its funding to the economic health of Northern Virginia. So how much will these cuts, if they happen, mean to us? Let’s try to find out.
The Congressional Research Service says that as of December, the federal civilian workforce in Virginia numbered 144,483 people. That’s more than any other state except for California.
Beyond that, we start to venture into the realm of speculation because there are some things we just don’t know.
The first thing we don’t know: How many employees would Trump (or Elon Musk, take your pick) like to cut? The Washington Post has at various times cited government officials saying 60% or 70%, so we may not know for sure. The Trump administration may not know for sure. I’ll use both figures so we can see a range.
The second thing we don’t know: Would these cuts fall evenly across the country or more heavily in the D.C. area? There are federal employees in every state. Vermont has the fewest: 3,285. It might seem logical that the axe would fall harder on office jobs in Washington than on workers “out in the field,” but we don’t know that yet.
Since we don’t know, I’m going to err on the side of caution and just use the numbers we know.
If 60% of the federal civilian workforce in Virginia is cut, that’s 86,690 people who will lose their jobs.
If 70% is cut, that’s 101,138 people out of work.
The next thing we don’t know is how many of those people are near retirement age, or otherwise so financially well-off, that they simply decide to exit the workforce altogether. The easy answer is “some,” but we just don’t know how big or small “some” is. Math doesn’t work well with “some.” In any case, in normal times, if one of those workers retired, they’d be replaced, so, again, to be on the safe side, let’s stick with the number we know: Maybe we don’t have exactly that many people unemployed, but we do wind up with that many jobs eliminated.
Let’s put this in context so we can understand how big or small this number is.
Employment statistics for Virginia show that in December there were 136,810 unemployed people in the state. Based on the December numbers, that means a 60% cut would drive the state’s unemployment to 223,500; a 70% cut would take it to 237,948. In percentage terms, a 60% cut would move the unemployment rate from 3.0% to 4.8%. A 70% cut would take the state’s unemployment rate to 5.2%.
The pandemic skews things, but the last non-pandemic time that the state’s unemployment rate was that high — meaning 5.2% — was June 2014 when it was coming down from a high of 7.6% in January, February and March 2010 during the Great Recession. The last time it was 4.8% was January 2015.
That means we’re not talking about another Great Recession, but we are talking about an unemployment rate we haven’t seen in more than a decade.
Here’s one big difference, though: The Great Recession was a generalized recession. Yes, it hit some places harder than others, but it was a national phenomenon. Here, we’re talking about something that would be localized. Furthermore, these cuts would be more localized in Northern Virginia.
The Federal Reserve estimates that 90,400 federal workers live in Northern Virginia.
If 60% of those are cut, that’s 54,240 people. If 70%, that’s 63,280 people.
According to state statistics, there were 38,125 people in Northern Virginia who were unemployed in December, about 27.8% of the total number of unemployed in the state. Now let’s add in those federal workers who might get the axe. With the 60% cut, the number of unemployed in Northern Virginia goes to 92,365, or 41.3% of the state’s total. At 70%, the number goes to 101,405, or 42.6% of the state’s total.
Either way, you can see how this shifts the state’s economic picture. Suddenly, Virginia’s most populous, and most prosperous, region would have the state’s biggest concentration of unemployed people.
Fairfax County is home to more than 50,000 federal workers. If 60% of them are let go, that’s 30,000. If 70%, that’s 35,000. Fairfax County currently has 14,683 unemployed people, according to state statistics, so these cuts would increase that number to either 44,683 or 49,638. The county’s unemployment rate is currently 2.3%; these cuts would take that to 6.8% or 7.6%.
When has the unemployment rate in Fairfax County ever been that high, other than during the pandemic?
It’s hard to say.
The Federal Reserve publishes data that goes back to 1990. During the Great Recession, Fairfax County hit an unemployment rate of 5.9% in January 2010. For most of the past 35 years, though, the county’s unemployment rate has generally been less than 3%, and sometimes as low as 1.5%.
I found some old Fairfax County documents that go back to 1971. The highest unemployment rate the county recorded then was 5.0% in 1975, but even during the bad economies of the late 1970s (which saw voters usher Jimmy Carter out and Ronald Reagan in) and the early 1980s (when voters briefly rebelled against Reaganomics), the unemployment rate in Fairfax was usually in the 3% range.
So what does it mean for Virginia (and the rural areas dependent on an economically healthy Northern Virginia) if unemployment there more than triples — to levels not seen during the living memory of many of our elected leaders?
We don’t know. This is where math fails us.
We are talking about something unprecedented here.
How many jettisoned federal workers would find employment in the private sector in Northern Virginia? How many would move out of town — and out of state — to find non-government jobs? We have no way of knowing. What we do know: Even before this, Northern Virginia has had a problem with net out-migration — more people are moving out than moving in. Since the last census, Fairfax County has actually lost population. So has Alexandria. Those trends seem to have slowed, according to the most recent population estimates from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. But the downsizing of the region’s top employer might change all that.
We also haven’t taken into account the ripple effects. We’ve been looking so far at federal employees, but there are more federal contractors than federal employees. How many of them find themselves out of work as contracts get canceled? What are the downstream effects when so many well-paid workers lose their jobs and they’re concentrated in one place? We’re talking about a lot of money being pulled out of the Virginia economy. Perhaps this is good for the country, but it doesn’t seem good for our part of the country.
I do not mean to sound like an alarmist or an advocate for a bloated federal bureaucracy. Those are my tax dollars at work, too. This, though, is the math, and it doesn’t add up happily for Virginia.
A former president visits Radford
A former president was in the New River Valley over the weekend. I have details on who and why in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons. You can sign up for that or any of our free newsletters below: