How Washington managed this transformation, however, is not a story that the rest of the country might want to hear, because we largely financed it. As the size of the federal budget has ballooned over the past decade, more and more of that money has remained in the District. “We get about 15 cents of every procurement dollar spent by the federal government,” says Stephen Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an expert on the region. “There’s great dependence there.” And with dependence comes fragility. About 40 percent of the regional economy, Fuller says, relies on federal spending.

Congress may have passed legislation to avert the middle-class tax increases of the so-called “fiscal cliff,” but it has only postponed what is known as the “sequester” — $1.2 trillion in budget cuts. And that’s on top of several hundred billion dollars in cuts that the Pentagon has already agreed to. The capital’s boom days, in other words, might be over. “Rather than leading the nation, we’re going to be lagging it going forward,” Fuller says.

Peak Washington of the early 2010s, many economists believe, got its start during the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Reagan’s messianic push to get government out of the way of private-sector growth famously led to lower taxes and reduced regulation. It also led to a subtle change in the way government did business. Hiring became secondary to contracting, and more and more public projects were outsourced to private firms.

Washington’s economy did well under Reagan (added military spending gave it a boost), but the move to contract out more and more government work proved to be a crucial long-term change. In 1993, Bill Clinton announced a “reinventing government” initiative, which ultimately included cutting the federal work force by about 250,000 positions. The agencies winnowed their rolls, but over the course of the Clinton years, their budgets expanded, and in many cases, the work just went to contractors. Those contractors often came at a bloated cost, too. In a study released in 2011, the Project on Government Oversight found that using contractors can cost the federal government about twice as much as federal employees for comparable work. According to the study, the salary for a federally employed computer engineer would be about $135,000; a contractor might bill the government around $270,000 for similar work.

It was not until the Bush years, though, that this increasingly wealthy not-federal-but-still-government work force truly metastasized. The amorphous war on terror and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security — plus the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — bloated the country’s spending by about $1 trillion. The contracting dollars that were pumped into the local economy, Fuller says, more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, when it reached $80 billion a year. This, in turn, created hundreds of thousand of desk jobs and fostered a sprawl of nameless, faceless office parks lining the roads out to Dulles Airport.

In the process, tens of thousands of new workers, often well-paid young white-collar professionals in areas like technology, bioscience and engineering, also entered the local economy. And many of these young professionals, as Abdo hoped, worked 14-hour days and wanted to live near work, friends, coffee shops and yoga studios. This infusion of human capital, combined with proximity to the Federal tap, proved attractive to a huge number of other businesses looking to hire. Google has opened an outpost in Washington. LivingSocial owns a huge, hiply decorated space downtown. Audi, Intelsat, Hilton Worldwide and dozens of other firms have opened up offices or moved their headquarters to the region. The health care sector, with its proximity to the National Institutes of Health, has greatly expanded, too. “Maryland got the life sciences, and Virginia got the death sciences,” Jim Moran, the Democratic congressman who represents much of the military corridor in Northern Virginia, said. “Of course, NoVa, given the two wars, it’s done even better than suburban Maryland.”