Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi has long predicted that the city’s unemployment rate would top 11 percent, a line that hasn’t been crossed since December 1983. In June, the CFO noted that the District is “likely to benefit from the current short-run expansion of the federal government” but over the longer run, he said, the city’s economy is vulnerable to federal spending cuts.
“The District’s economy slowed when the U.S. economy slowed in the downturns of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and again in 2001,” Gandhi told D.C. leaders last month when he revised his revenue estimates downward. “The recent slowdown in District employment, and especially the sharp decline in resident employment, shows that the District labor market is not immune to general problems in the nation’s economy.”
