A few years ago, I was eating breakfast in a DC hotel listening to two men talk about their schedule for the day. Their business was decorating homes for Christmas, and they were discussing their heavy workload.
As I listened quietly the men were describing premium rates for DC families who wanted their decorating services completed fastest. The average rate was $15,000 per residence for 30-day interior holiday decorating, and the rates went up from there. They were overwhelmed with business calls.
I sat there stunned doing spit-takes with my coffee while thinking, “holy cow, who has that kind of money to blow, just renting Holiday decorations?” One of the client names was familiar, Kellyanne Conway. “Jumpin’ ju-ju bones, this is an actual thing they do up here,” I thought. My mind was blown, but this put context to the economic bubble that isolated DC from the rest of ‘real’ America.
Yesterday, I read a New York Times column describing how the professional political employees and their families have been impacted by President Trump and the downsizing of the federal workforce.
Amid the tear-filled typeset meant to generate sympathy this part jumped out at me: “The District of Columbia currently has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, at 6.7 percent, in large part because of major reductions in the federal work force, including U.S.A.I.D., and cuts to government grants and contracts.” {CITATION}
Almost all of the $35 billion spent by USAID in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not to people in need overseas. Eliminating USAID has now created an unemployment problem for all of those DC-based federal contractors, NGOs and USAID employees. The NYT article gives examples of the terrible state of affairs. This is one:





