Interesting, I always heard the nice parts of DC are about as expensive as Seattle, and the traffic is even worse. I've known a few people to take software gigs for government contractors in that area, but none of them stayed around very long - said the salaries were not great and that they weren't getting any of the perks of tech culture that are common elsewhere (no casual dress code, were micro-managed, lots of lazy coworkers). I imagine it was just the specific body shops that hired them that were the problem though.