Donald Trump’s hatred for Washington, DC, is well-documented. He has tied his campaign to cut federal jobs explicitly to draining “the swamp.” These cuts to the federal workforce will devastate everything from food safety to disease research and cybersecurity. Sometimes missing in the justified outrage at these job cuts is that their impact will reach far beyond the DC area. I used the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) to look at which counties will suffer the most from Trump’s cuts — both due to lost services provided by federal workers and through economic damage from lost jobs.
The QCEW classifies all civilian employees in each county by whether their employer is a private enterprise, local government, state government, or federal government. I pulled the data for 2023 and generated the percentage of employees in each county who work for the federal government. Of the 3,142 counties and independent cities in the QCEW, eighty-four have at least 10 percent of the workforce employed by the federal government. Only five of those counties are in the DC area.
The map below shows the share of federal employees in each county by category: less than 1 percent, between 1 and 10 percent, and over 10 percent. Just under half of the counties in the country have at least 1 percent of their workforce employed by the federal government. Counties in the western part of the country are especially likely to have at least 1 percent of their workforce employed by the federal government. Scattered throughout the country are counties with particularly high shares of federal employees.
One of these counties with a very high share of employees working for the federal government — higher than any other county in the country — is Martin County, Indiana. A whopping 61 percent, or about 4,800 of the 7,900 people employed in the county work for the federal government. This appears largely driven by…
Auteur: Kevin Werner
