This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Virginia’s 7th Congressional District is one of about two dozen districts nationwide that analysts say could determine the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
It could also determine the future of federal workers who live in Northern Virginia in case former President Donald Trump is elected again.
Trump’s platform includes a pledge to move federal workers out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, and also to reclassify them under control of the president.
About 150,000 federal civilian workers live in Virginia, according to a September report by the Congressional Research Service.
Trump said up to 100,000 federal workers could be moved out of the “DMV” area.
“Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out. And I mean immediately out of Washington to places filled with patriots,” Trump said in a video.
During his administration, Trump created a new classification for federal workers: Schedule F.
“Faithful execution of the law requires that the President have appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals,” Trump’s executive order said. The reclassification could lead them to be able to be fired more easily.
In the 7th, both Eugene Vindman, the Democrat, and Derrick Anderson, the Republican, say they oppose the relocation part of Trump’s agenda.
“Can you imagine tens of thousands of jobs being eliminated?” said Vindman at a debate in September. “That's one way to make sure costs go down, by destroying the economy. That's unacceptable.”
Vindman also said reclassifying federal workers would make them beholden to politics.
“It could be a Republican, it could be a Democrat, and frankly, it's unacceptable,” he said. “It weakens us in national security, because what it does is you're replacing experts with political hacks.”
Anderson said he wouldn’t vote for a relocation plan or legislation that would weaken U.S. national security.
“I'm not going to vote for legislation that's going to remove jobs from our district; bottom line,” he told VPM News in an interview after the debate. “This is not a time that we can afford for folks to lose their jobs.”
Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan organization that rates federal agency performance and workplaces, said that dispersing federal employees could affect governance.
“The big problems that we face all require multi-agency, often multi-sector and multi-level government response,” he said. “Having leadership collectively together is a good way of trying to create better coordination.”
Anderson did say he supported rethinking federal property use during the time of working from home.
“If we're not going to use the entire building, we should not have that contract, and make sure we can get government taxpayer dollars back into the hands of taxpayers,” he said.
Another Northern Virginia candidate, State Sen. Suhas Subramanyam (D–Loudoun), who is seeking election to the 10th Congressional District, also opposes the plan.
“If federal civil servants and federal contractors are fired across Virginia, it would be a recession for our economy, a self-imposed recession,” he said.
Many government contractors are located in the area due to the proximity to federal agencies, and civil servants have more spending power than the average worker.
Federal employees across the state as a whole make an average of $54.50 an hour, according to May 2023 data. The average wage for all employees in the Washington area is $42.49.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, when asked about the plan to relocate employees, said that Northern Virginia’s job market could absorb those employees.
The absorption of tens of thousands of federal employees would be a sizable portion of the 300,000 person increase in the civil labor force under Youngkin’s entire tenure. In January 2022 the labor force was roughly 4,278,000 people and 4,568,000 in August 2024
After then-President Trump moved two agencies out of the Washington area, not all employees followed, according to the Associated Press.
“What it ended up doing was actually destroying those organizations,” said Stier, who says that the changes could affect governance.
“All those experts who lived in the DMV,” he said, “Very few of them were willing to relocate to the places where those agencies were moved.”
More Virginians do support moving the employees than opposing the decision, but not a majority in any region, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll. In Central Virginia and the Tidewater region, support for the plan was nearly half among those who answered the question. 26% of participants skipped the question or had no opinion.
The Washington Metro system also relies heavily on support from federal employees, who made up 40% of its daily commuters, the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission said in its annual report last year. Virginia Sen. Mark Warner and Youngkin both have called for a return to office work for federal employees.
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