More than 30,000 federal workers based in Washington, D.C. left their jobs in 2025, an exodus of highly educated, relatively younger employees who constituted “a significant share of [D.C.’s] federal employment knowledge base,” according to a blog post by the D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer’s Office of Revenue Analysis.
The departures – which came as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce – totaled 30,813. Combined with 8,457 new federal hires, the net loss to the District of Columbia was about 22,356 jobs and $3.656 billion in annualized pay.
“Overall, the loss of a large share of highly educated, relatively younger members of the federal workforce in the District between January and December 2025 was significant,” the D.C. government post said.
Of the 30,813 federal workers who separated from federal service, 8,266 had Masters degrees – or 27 percent – while 2,015 held doctorates. People with some college or higher education accounted for 78 percent of the total job reductions, amounting to the loss of about $3.738 billion in total annual pay, the post said.
The workers, the majority of whom quit or retired, took home an average salary of $148,208 – and about 53 percent were younger than 50. The largest loss of federal employees, more than 10,000, occurred in September when many federal buyouts took effect.
The stream of departures affected some of the nation’s most important national security agencies. Leading the D.C.-based job reductions was the Department of Justice, with 3,097, followed by the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Homeland Security.
More than 12,000 of the D-C.-based federal employees quit, while about 11,000 retired, more than 2,600 were terminated, and more than 3,700 were laid off. The data analyzed for the blog post also included an unexplained category called “other separation.”
The data provides a demographic window into the White House’s sweeping campaign to downsize the federal workforce.
Overall, a total of 348,219 people quit, retired, were laid off or otherwise left federal employment last year, shrinking the federal workforce by 10.3 percent, according to a March 13 Pew Research Center report.
More than 17,000 of those who left federal service in 2025 held IT management or telecommunications-related roles.
The effects on federal agencies were illustrated by a March 16 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which documented the departures of more than 17,000 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees, about 17 percent of the IRS workforce.
The resignations and early retirements have created a “major workforce challenge” that poses “severe risks” to IRS operations, including during the current tax filing season, GAO said.
According to the nonprofit and nonpartisan organization Partnership for Public Service, losses among technology professionals were especially acute, raising concerns about agencies’ ability to meet digital transformation demands.