Alicia Contreras was in Tunisia, working as the deputy country representative for Libya for USAID, when she received the news: she was fired. The Trump administration had ceased the cooperation agency’s operations and terminated most overseas staff. What she didn’t expect back then was that after a double major, an MBA and 17 years of experience as a public servant, she wouldn’t be able to find a job back at home.

Contreras moved back to the Washington DC area last September and immediately started her job search. She looked for positions in both the public and private sectors, in-person, hybrid and remote. She focused her search mostly on the US capital city and its two nearby states, Maryland and Virginia, because of her family commitments: she has two children, ages three and six. Six months later, none of her close to 100 applications have been successful.

“The job market is pretty bad here. I got a request to do like an AI video interview, but other than that, most of it has been rejections,” she said. “I feel like it’s saturated.”

Hers is not an isolated case. Washington DC’s unemployment rate is now the highest since August 2015, excluding the pandemic, according to the most recent data. More than 300,000 jobs have been cut from the federal government, the region’s largest employer, since 2024. The cuts came after Donald Trump led a purge of federal employees, a move he said was meant to “eliminate waste” and a task he assigned to Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency” (Doge).