In 2008, as the Great Recession was starting to take hold, my travels reporting on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign took me to one American city after another that was reeling from major layoffs. I visited places such as Kokomo, Indiana, which was losing so many jobs at its Chrysler and Delphi plants that by year’s end it was labeled one of America’s fastest-dying towns, and Lorain, Ohio, where Obama visited a National Gypsum plant that closed four months later.

The situation now is sharply reversed. As a result of Elon Musk’s relentless scythe, the Department of Government Efficiency, the big layoffs are in and around Washington. In the week ending Feb. 22, unemployment claims in the District of Columbia rose 25% from the week prior and were four times as high as one year earlier — and that’s only the beginning. The district’s chief financial officer has predicted that the city, where the federal government accounts for roughly a quarter of all wages, could lose as many as 40,000 jobs over the next few years, more than a fifth of its total, which he estimates would cost the city more than $1 billion in revenue.

The losses are already manifest beyond the numbers: in the resumes from highly educated professionals flooding LinkedIn, in pleas from laid-off young people seeking others to take over their apartment leases, in hushed discussions about this or that family pulling up stakes and leaving town.