Why job-hunting in DC is uniquely soul-crushing right now

If you ask D.C. job-hunters how the search is going, the response sounds something like a primal yowl: “It’s a black hole,” “I honestly don’t know if I will ever find work in the U.S. again, let alone D.C.,” “It’s been hell,” “[It’s been] traumatic and debilitating,” “I’m dead inside,” and “It’s akin to screaming into a void.”

We all know the basic facts of why it’s been so hard to find work in the District over the past two years: DOGE’s budget-slashing and other federal cuts, local and national media cuts, and arts and culture institutions like The Kennedy Center in disarray. And the numbers are awful: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, five counties in the DMV area, including Washington D.C., accounted for the largest percentage change in U.S. unemployment from March 2025 to March 2026. But the data points on their own don’t fully express why, exactly, it’s felt so soul-sucking for so many people.

I started applying for jobs earlier this year after losing mine while on maternity leave, and found a confusing landscape. There wasn’t much available in my field of writing, editing, and nonprofit work. Most jobs ghosted me; some sent automated rejections right away, some sent automated rejections months later. When I did finally get an interview with a climate organization I was excited about, the woman interviewing me began our call by saying, “I don’t know what’s happening in the job market, but we had thousands of applications. So, good job for being one of the first to apply.” A few days later she sent me an email saying they went with someone more “aligned” for the position, though I’m not sure how she came to that conclusion, as she had talked for 13 minutes of our 15-minute call.

My experiences made me wonder what the job search was like for other people, so I reached out via a survey with The 51st and phone calls and learned that the situation was even worse than I’d imagined. The existential misery of D.C. job-hunters has not slowed over the past two years — and there’s no immediate sign of it going away.

Certainly, the DOGE cuts were a big factor in setting the mood for D.C. job-hunters during this period. The sheer scale of the cuts, the speed and apparent carelessness with which they were carried out, and the competitiveness created across sectors by the number of job hunters pouring onto the market have all simultaneously contributed to a colossal wave of economic and personal devastation across the region. “There is no other USAID,” said Bonnie Carlson, a former USAID civil servant who was laid off in September 2025, “and more than 11,000 of us just hit a microscopic job market for international development and humanitarian assistance professionals all in the same year.”

“They eliminated whole sectors,” said Jaime Jarvis, whose solo consulting practice ended abruptly when the government dismantled USAID. “The market isn’t just competitive. It’s fundamentally changed.”

Many of the job-hunters in D.C. were federal employees who believed they would never have to find a job again — and now, instead, their seniority and skills may actually be working against them. Eric Podberesky, a former USAID contractor, said, “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been told I’m overqualified for a position and then ghosted.” Stephanie Schmidt, a former USAID contractor, added, “My entire industry disappeared, so I’m both too senior (in terms of titles and transferable skills) and too inexperienced (in terms of basic experience in other fields).”

Former senior-level staff are now entering their pre-retirement years without a safety net, applying for jobs they never would’ve dreamed of considering five years ago. “We lost more than half of our household income,” said Sarah Paige, a former USAID employee. “I was the breadwinner. We now live with unpaid medical bills, and have not been able to put anything away for retirement since last year. And we are in our 50s.”

Sarah Nichols, another former USAID contractor, said, “I've dropped off resumes at coffee shops and restaurants just to have income, and had the employees candidly tell me how they've gotten a hundred applications from former feds for a waitressing position.”

On top of the financial hit, there’s also a draining loss of purpose for many feds who entered government work to make a difference. “I previously found my whole identity through my career, so the loss feels very big,” said Shannon Pryor, who worked for Save the Children and the Department of Global Health until their funding from USAID was cut. “Watching nothing work out, no matter how hard I tried, shattered so many of my preconceived notions about how the world worked,” said Clara de Pablo, who lost her government job in January 2025.

As all of these new job-hunters are flooding the market, they’re also encountering some demoralizing trends in how job-hunting works in 2026. Job-hunting has always been an uncompensated full-time job in itself, but in such a saturated market it feels more time-consuming and less productive. “I've been putting in three to five apps a day, which involves answering the same questions over and over, coming up with edits to my resume when needed to highlight a specific skill, and creating a new cover letter with each job,” said Meredith Dougherty, who recently lost her job with a nonprofit organization headquartered in D.C. “Add to that the fact that 100+ others are applying for the same jobs.”

On top of the usual application materials, some jobs are asking for answers to curated questions, or for the same resume information to be put into their built-in data collectors, or for lengthy tests with no compensation. “I received a ‘screening questionnaire’ that took me hours to complete,” Catherine Baker, a DOGE’d USAID contractor, said. “I hadn’t even gotten an interview request but was asked to complete this within 48 hours, which I did, and then received no response after multiple follow-ups.”

Increasingly, the human side of the job search seems to be missing. When I started looking for jobs, I quickly noticed those LinkedIn “over 100 people clicked apply” tags popping up on positions that were only hours old. Many of those same jobs were mysteriously reposted only days later. People have interviewed with AI agents and received automated responses months after applying to jobs. Meanwhile, on the other side, hiring managers described their frustration at random bots that make up some of the “100 people” who have clicked “apply.” “It’s like the customer service thing, where you’re dealing with a bot, and you’re like, ‘I just want to talk to a human,’” said a hiring manager at a media organization in the D.C. area who requested anonymity to speak frankly without fear of retribution.

Other job-seekers report getting ghosted after making it to final rounds of interviews, even when an employer gave an exact timeline for when job-seekers should hear back. Their follow-ups went nowhere. Hiring managers I spoke to offered some familiar advice: meet with recruiters so there’s a face to the name, make your cover letter stand out with qualifications other than “I was part of the government layoffs.” But D.C. job-seekers maintain these methods feel like a relic of some ancient time. “When you network with people, they are so sympathetic and badly want to help, but they are inundated with requests to chat and can’t do much,” said Deborah Horowitz, a former USAID institutional support contractor. Chris Adams, who was DOGE’d from USAID, added, “Networking has been a challenge because I have spent the last 15 years building my network among development professionals who are now all competing for the same types of scarce opportunities.”

Month after month, year after year, the toll of job hunting only deepens. Helena Okolicsanyi, who was laid off from an ed tech job in 2025 after only six months, has applied to 400 positions over the past year and a half while also “navigating nine jobs, four of which are unpaid,” including caregiving for her mom who has dementia. (Several of the people I spoke to mentioned that they were now either part-time or full-time caregivers for family members with the space opened up by unemployment.)

“I’ve gotten to the final round [of interviews] at least 30 times,” Okolicsanyi said. “I wish I knew when this period of uncertainty was ending.” Hiring managers, on their end, describe a saturated market and the overwhelm of trying to narrow things down. The anonymous media hiring manager said that for every 100 applications, she’ll likely only interview five. “People are applying for jobs that I don't think they would normally have applied for to begin with,” she said. “You don’t want to disqualify someone for not having every single little thing that you have on your list, but at the same time, you have to find ways to narrow the list.”

In such an unprecedented atmosphere, the path forward seems unclear. Many who wrote to The 51st said they were considering career pivots, and some have left or are considering leaving D.C. altogether. But leaving an entire life behind isn’t a simple solution, especially when many cited the community in D.C. as the only thing getting them through. People described the importance of support systems: friends, family, fellow laid-off coworkers, therapy, group activities, and church congregations. Melanie Walker, who lost her job as part of “a shift in corporate strategy,” reminds herself “that life is not about work.” And yet, it’s difficult to live a life without work, especially in the current economy.

“The hardest part isn’t even the rejection anymore,” said Bert Hart, a multidisciplinary graphic designer who’s looking for full-time work to support his growing family. “It’s what happens after enough of it. Hit after hit after hit, and eventually rejection starts trying to rewrite your opinion of yourself. That’s the part I’m fighting. But I also know something else: If I stop applying, stop trying, stop putting myself out there, then I know with 100% certainty that I won’t get the job. So I keep going. Still believing that somewhere behind all these bots, barriers, and black holes of applications, there is a human being who might actually say, ‘Hey. Let’s talk.’”