DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Misguided Bet on Trump to Save the City’s Economy

As supporters gathered at the Capital One Arena in downtown DC to witness the inauguration of President Donald Trump for a second term, many of DC’s office buildings lay empty with record-high vacancy rates. With the city’s economic recovery still uncertain, Mayor Muriel Bowser is turning to the newly sworn-in president in a bid to revitalize DC’s economy. In a recent meeting, Bowser sought Trump’s partnership to bring federal employees back to the office after years of remote and hybrid work post-COVID. The mayor has blamed this shift for shrinking the city’s tax revenue and dealing a blow to ridership on the region’s mass transit system, Metro. Bowser says they discussed collaborating on the “federal workforce, underutilized federal buildings, parks and green spaces, and infrastructure,” which Trump did not publicly corroborate. After years of disagreement with President Joe Biden on DC’s future, Bowser now looks to a president who has disparaged the city and challenged its autonomy as a key partner in its recovery.

The full return of the federal government to its DC offices could jumpstart Washington, DC’s stagnant downtown and provide a much-needed ridership boost for Metro. But the mayor’s hopes for recovery by bringing workers back to the office face significant headwinds. Among them is the growing effort—led by figures like Elon Musk—to shrink the federal workforce, which would likely counteract any economic benefits from a return to office. Despite the pandemic’s impact, the federal government had already begun downsizing its office footprint in downtown DC, with moves like relocating the FBI and parts of the Department of Agriculture and Department of Interior. On President Trump’s first day in office, he promptly signed a return-to-office mandate, ordered a hiring freeze, and gutted federal worker protections—moves that Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wrote would “result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”

Critics of remote work, like Musk and Ramaswamy, point to a federal workforce working from their couches and kitchen tables as an economic problem. However, just 10 percent of federal employees nationwide are fully remote, much smaller than the roughly 46 percent eligible for remote work. Hybrid workers, who represent less than half of the federal workforce, spend more than half their working hours in person. Of all federal employees, fewer than one in five work in the DC metro area, and there’s no definitive estimate on how many employees would return to DC under a full federal return-to-office policy. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE)—the union that represents federal and DC government employees and has pushed against Republican efforts to alter the federal workforce—has expressed frustration with Bowser’s approach, saying it uses “our members as political pawns in an effort to coax federal workers back into the office instead of exploring [innovative] methods of fostering growth in the local economy.”

“The city’s future doesn’t lie in luring workers back to offices—it lies in transforming its neighborhoods with more housing, better transportation, and more public spaces.”

Studies on remote work in DC reveal no easy solutions. On the one hand, the city has seen population outflows to lower-cost smaller metropolitan areas and rural areas. On the other, its net aggregate adjusted gross income has risen. While DC has one of the highest rates of remote work in the country, the decrease in remote work since 2020 hasn’t been enough to ease Bowser’s concerns about the shrinking commercial real estate market and its effects on the city’s tax base. As Brookings Metro’s William Frey and Alan Berube have written, COVID-era demographic shifts present mixed outcomes to policymakers nationally, and these trends don’t appear to be slowing. Meanwhile, national efforts are underway to direct billions of dollars into place-based economic development, including targeted investments in underserved communities and long-underfunded historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Rather than longing for the status quo of an old economy, Bowser should be continue looking ahead to these new approaches that create resilient neighborhoods—ones where you can live, work, and play, not just work.

Should the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency be successful in its aim to cut the federal budget by $2 trillion and reduce the federal workforce by half, it’s questionable how a return-to-office mandate for the city’s remaining federal workers could offset the resulting economic decline. Research from the DC Policy Center shows a strong relationship between office occupancy and general sales tax collections in DC, so Bowser could be forgiven for hoping that a quick influx of federal workers back to DC offices could provide an immediate economic boost. But this scenario is unlikely, and it overlooks the broader possibilities for long-term growth.

Instead of depending on a volatile federal government for a solution, Bowser and the DC Council should look to local innovation. Bruce Katz, head of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University, and Florian Schalliol, founder of Metis Impact, urge local governments to take action in areas where the federal government falls short. Katz and Schalliol suggest creating a “unified ecosystem” of local regulations, private capital, and philanthropic support, freeing cities to reimagine vacant space and address the housing crisis without waiting for federal intervention. This advice is particularly useful for DC, which could free itself from federal control by investing in its existing residents, most of whom are not federal employees.

Bowser’s meeting with Trump shows a dangerous trend of ceding power to and relying on federal leadership, even when that leadership has historically been dismissive of DC’s needs. If she wants to truly invest in the city’s future, Bowser should stop looking to the federal government for salvation and turn toward DC’s own residents. The city’s future doesn’t lie in luring workers back to offices—it lies in transforming its neighborhoods with more housing, better transportation, and more public spaces. In the end, it’s the systematically neglected, underfunded communities of DC’s residential tax base that will determine the city’s future—not the whims of part-time residents, Florida politicians, and billionaires. They, after all, wouldn’t call DC a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.”

Updated at 3:00 p.m. on January 24, 2045: This article has been changed to include information from a new interview from the Washington Business Journal with Mayor Muriel Bowser.

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