President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters say they want to move 100,000 federal jobs out of Washington to places that they describe as less expensive, closer to stakeholders and, as Trump put it in a campaign video, “filled with patriots who love America.”

Trump tried to move federal jobs out of Washington during his first term — on a much smaller scale — and that resulted in mass departures of experienced workers, questionable cost savings and broad interruptions to government work.

In 2019, the Trump administration said it would move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters and its nearly 600 jobs to the small city of Grand Junction, Colo. When the new offices opened a year later, just three of the bureau’s employees walked in the door.

About 40 more were assigned to other offices out West. But nearly 90 percent of headquarters employees opted to leave the agency or work remotely rather than head West. It was “a giant brain drain,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, who took over as the agency’s director under President Joe Biden in 2021.

Trump officials also moved the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City. The relocation of the roughly 700 jobs disrupted the agencies’ work and raised doubts it was a money-saving decision, according to interviews and a critical government watchdog report that noted the agencies shed half their staff, including in key positions.

Laura Dodson, an agricultural economist and vice president of a workers local union, called it an “unnecessary kneecapping of an agency.”

Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment. Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a second Trump term drafted by the Heritage Foundation, defended the move of land management employees as “the epitome of good governance,” saying it was “not only well-informed, but it was also implemented efficiently, effectively, and with an eye toward affected career civil servants.”

While the vast majority of the nation’s 2.3 million federal workers are already spread across the United States, Trump and his supporters have long been critical of the roughly 320,000 federal workers concentrated in and around the nation’s capital. Trump has often derided government employees in Washington as part of the “deep state” that he wants to shatter.

Their latest plan would affect nearly 1 in 3 federal workers in the Washington area — a sprawling region of 6.3 million people that extends far beyond the halls of power on Capitol Hill to the Pennsylvania state line and into West Virginia, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

The campaign promise to move federal jobs is separate from pledges by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s government efficiency czars, to slash the federal workforce via mass layoffs and by closing entire agencies.

So far, both efforts have been heavy on rhetoric and scarce on details.

The America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned presidential transition group, said moving 100,000 jobs and relocating entire agencies from D.C. would pierce the “Beltway bubble” and save $1.4 billion a year in payroll costs. It named two small agencies as prime targets: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, to be “headquartered in the coal field” in Pittsburgh, and the Air Traffic Organization, the command center for the nation’s air traffic controllers, to be moved to an unnamed destination. Together, they employ fewer than 1,000 people in the D.C. area.

It’s not clear that 100,000 jobs could depart the nation’s capital without drastic actions such as emptying the Pentagon in Northern Virginia or the medical research campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. — the two campuses are home to roughly 40,000 employees inside the Beltway. Nine big agencies, including Defense and Health and Human Services, account for the bulk of the federal jobs in the D.C. area.

About 100,000 other jobs are sprinkled across a roster of 119 lower-profile agencies in and around Washington, including the Peace Corps and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, according to Office of Personnel Management data.

What is clear is that the loss of so many government jobs would deliver a stiff blow to Washington’s local economy, said Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. It would have harmful knock-on effects, too, with the lost purchasing power from so many departing high-paying positions.

“It would put us way behind in terms of economic growth,” Clower said.