Trump's policies are unevenly impacting employment in the DC area, study shows [View all]

Source: WTOP

Trump’s policies are unevenly impacting employment in the DC area, study shows

Steve Karesh | steve.karesh@wtop.com
May 18, 2026, 4:22 AM

Job losses directly and indirectly tied to President Donald Trump’s policies have hit Black workers in the D.C. area the hardest, a new study found. ... The nonprofit, nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that as of March of this year, the D.C. region had about 115,000 fewer jobs in the region compared with before Trump took office.

That includes the 54,000 federal employees who have lost their jobs since Trump’s return to the White House. ... Many others were laid off from contractors who worked for government agencies, or had worked at nonprofits or research institutions that were receiving federal grants

“The share of regional population with a job fell by 3.2 percentage points in the D.C. region overall, and that’s eight times the change for the U.S. as a whole,” Nina Mast, an economic analyst and one of the study’s authors, told WTOP. ... But the job losses were not evenly distributed. For Black workers in the area, the share of the population with a job fell by six percentage points, compared to 3.2% for the region as a whole.

“That is a huge decline in the employment rate in just a year’s time,” Mast said. ... “And we’re now seeing as a result that these actions have really pushed regional Black employment to pandemic-era lows,” she said. ... She said years of progress have been erased.

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Steve Karesh
Steve joined WTOP News at the beginning of 2026 as an anchor and reporter.
steve.karesh@wtop.com

Read more: https://wtop.com/local/2026/05/trumps-policies-are-unevenly-impacting-employment-in-the-dc-area-study-shows/