As the federal government shutdown continues, a new report shows how many federal workers the government has lost so far this year. The rest of this year is likely to see even more shocking numbers.
The number of federal workers has declined so dramatically this year that the number of federal jobs in the Washington region is now roughly where it was at the end of the George W. Bush administration. That's according to a new report from the Stephen Fuller Institute at George Mason University.
"We don't know how far that this is about to drop," says assistant director Keith Waters. "We will find out in late November. But in the interim, we're Wile E. Coyote; we know we've run off a cliff, and we're just unsure how far that cliff falls down."
The report focuses on the Washington region, including parts of Virginia and Maryland. But George Mason Center for Regional Analysis director Terry Clower says the ramifications go way beyond Northern Virginia.
"Northern Virginia is a great underpinning for tax revenues that get disbursed across the state. If it really starts going down because people have lost their jobs and because of the knock-on effects of that, this is going to be felt across the state," Clower says. "There will be no corner of Virginia that doesn't one way or another feel this pain."
The timing of the next round of numbers is in doubt with the government shutdown, and that means we might not know the size of the cliff until the end of the calendar year.
