With an influx of hundreds of federal employees filing unemployment claims following President Donald Trump’s purge of the workforce, the D.C. government has launched a resource hub to try to connect them with jobs in the Bowser administration or private sector.

The city is preparing for major economic hardship caused by the mass spike in unemployment affecting the federal government, the District’s largest employer, and is mustering everything from foreclosure prevention aid to a new “public service career hub” to try to mitigate the impact to thousands of D.C. residents.

More than 190,000 federal workers are based in D.C., making up a quarter of the city’s workforce, and about 71,000 of them are D.C. residents. As of Feb. 28, more than 2,000 federal employees have filed unemployment claims with D.C.’s Department of Employment Services, according to data from the agency. That’s compared to 978 in the entire year of 2024.

“I want to recognize that a lot of our fellow Washingtonians are in shock, angry. They are anxious about their futures and how they’re going to take care of their families,” Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) said during a tele-town hall she held for federal workers Wednesday. “I’m so very sorry that they’re having this experience, and I want them to know that D.C. government is going to do all that we can to help in their transition.”

D.C. is joining Maryland and Virginia in seeking to recruit federal workers fired as part of Trump’s chaotic shake-up of the federal bureaucracy, including with a new website — fedsupport.dc.gov — and at a job fair for displaced federal employees on March 14.

The District and surrounding region are expected to be disproportionately impacted by the mass firings given the federal government has formed the bedrock of the region’s economy. D.C. Chief Financial Officer Glen Lee estimated that the city could lose 40,000 federal jobs over the next several years, causing a chain reaction in the economy, including lower sales and income tax revenue, hits to small businesses, a decrease in housing demand and, naturally, a spike in unemployment. As a result, he has projected an average $342 million annual deficit over the next three years.

“Out of 191,000 federal employees that work here, in theory, we ultimately could end up with a tremendous number of claims,” D.C. Council member Anita Bonds, D-At Large, who has oversight of labor issues on the council, told colleagues in a Tuesday briefing.Employees must file where they work, not where they live.

The haphazard nature of the firings have presented numerous challenges for federal employees seeking unemployment assistance in D.C. and elsewhere.

During the council briefing, lawmakers raised concerns about federal employees who were fired as probationary employees for alleged performance issues, even though they may have recently received positive performance evaluations. Employees fired for performance issues typically are not eligible for unemployment benefits.

“I’ve talked to a few managers in the federal government who have indicated, ‘Yes, when I separated my probationary team, I did indicate it was performance,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, how can it be performance if they were just given an award?’” Bonds said in an interview. “I think it’s very difficult arena to navigate.”

Unique Morris Hughes, director of the Department of Employment Services, said during the Wednesday tele-town hall that fired employees accused of performance issues should upload supporting documentation about their performance — such as an evaluation — so that officials can take the full record into consideration when reviewing their applications.

Other employees who called into the town hall were concerned about issues ranging from their benefits to unemployment insurance denials.

One caller named Maria said that she left her job in another state to move to D.C. and take a job in the federal government — only to be let go as part of Trump’s purge. But when she applied for unemployment benefits in D.C., she said she was denied because she had not worked in the city for at least six months. Hughes said she may have to file a joint claim with the state she came from, directing her to D.C.’s new resource website.

Despite the chaos, Bonds and other council members expressed confidence in D.C.’s ability to handle the crush of unemployment applicants. “The director seems to be incredibly hands-on trying to solve this,” council member Charles Allen told colleagues Tuesday, adding he had “a lot of confidence” in Hughes. But, he said, “from the volume we’re seeing, I’m just concerned it becomes unsustainable.”

Bonds shared data showing a stable unemployment insurance trust fund balance, which replenishes with payments from the federal government when federal workers are paid out from it. And she compared the influx D.C. is experiencing now to other periods of upheaval such as during the pandemic or during the government shutdown in the winter of 2018 and 2019, when more than 6,600 federal employees filed claims in just three months.

Since then, Hughes said D.C. streamlined the unemployment application process. “We worked really hard to make it a seamless process,” she said.

Officials said that short of the Trump administration undoing the plans, the way out of the crisis is to connect the impacted employees with jobs as quickly as possible. Nina Albert, deputy mayor of planning and economic development, said the District has a significant number of openings in the technology, health care, marketing and communications and entertainment fields — industries she said the District has been deliberately trying to grow in effort to diversify its economy.

Trump’s upheaval of the federal workforce — led by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service — has complicated Bowser’s efforts to find common ground with the president.

Bowser initially shared Trump’s goal to return federal workers to the office, hoping it would help D.C.’s economy downtown — but she said Wednesday that conversation is now shifting. “Our focus had been, how do we get people back to work? Not slash jobs,” she said. She said she would be advocating in future conversations that the administration slow things down and more carefully consider the impacts of the cuts.

“My biggest concern now is not decimating the federal workforce,” she said. “And I’m not just talking about employees, though I’m certainly concerned about them, but the disruption to services that go along with it, we have to be concerned about. We want to make sure that people can get their Social Security payments. We want to make sure that veterans who are seeking services are able to talk to someone. We want to make sure that people who have their college plans are able to do it, because the Pell Grants are going to be available.”

Bowser also reacted Wednesday to the General Services Administration’s confusing and highly unclear proposed sale of dozens of federal buildings in the city and region, a list that the GSA posted online Tuesday but that was removed by Wednesday morning without explanation. A GSA spokesperson said Wednesday that the list of buildings would be republished after further evaluation.

Bowser had hoped to find real estate opportunities in redeveloping some underused or vacant federal offices in D.C. — but not dozens of them all at once.

“I just don’t know how you can function as a centralized federal bureaucracy without the Department of Justice,” Bowser said, referring to one of the more puzzling buildings on the initial list for disposal. “The biggest thing is — and this will be my ask to the president — is like, you cannot dump buildings on the market without preparation or a plan, because it would be antithetical to making this the most beautiful capital city in the world.”