One of the best ideas I heard from Donald Trump for his second term is to move as many as 100,000 federal employees to “new locations outside the Washington Swamp” to places “filled with patriots who love America.” This initiative will save tax dollars and help depoliticize federal agencies. There also are important security and fairness reasons to relocate these agencies across the United States.
I speak from experience. In the early 1990s, the late Senator Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) drafted legislation to move thousands of CIA employees to West Virginia. Byrd proposed closing 21 CIA offices in Washington, DC, and its Virginia and Maryland suburbs and moving them to large campuses in Jefferson County, West Virginia.
My wife and I were CIA employees at the time, and we were thrilled about the potential move of our office out of the DC area. We were unable to afford a house without a lengthy commute on our federal salaries because the large presence of federal workers and contractors had driven housing prices through the roof. (Five of the seven wealthiest U.S. counties are in the DC suburbs.) We also disliked the liberal culture and high taxes of the DC area.
Unfortunately, the Washington establishment, including many well-paid senior CIA officers and contractors, blocked Senator Byrd’s attempt to relocate CIA offices to West Virginia. As a result, when my wife could no longer work full-time because of the disability of one of our children, we ended up buying a house 50 miles from DC with a roundtrip commute of 2.5 to 3 hours per day.
Moving federal agencies out of the DC area to areas with affordable housing and reasonable commutes are two good reasons why the Trump administration should decentralize the federal government. The current practice of locating these agencies within a few miles of the White House and Congress reflects a bygone era before telephones, email, and video conferences. Most federal employees rarely interact with members of Congress and the White House and can do their jobs more efficiently and economically in more affordable and less congested areas of the country.
There’s also the issue of fairness. DC, Maryland, and Virginia receive huge tax revenues from federal employees’ salaries and retirement checks. They also benefit from large federal expenditures like the DC Metro, DC airports, free federal museums, etc. Since technological advances have made it unnecessary for these agencies to be located near our nation’s capital, it is time to share the wealth of federal agencies by spreading them across the United States. There is no reason why this government spending and jobs should continue to be concentrated in one part of the country.
Many of these moves would make these agencies more effective and accountable to the American people.
For example, relocating the Agriculture Department headquarters to a farming state would move the agency closer to the Americans it was created to serve. Agriculture employees could interact with farmers and ranchers on a daily basis. The Agriculture Department could also hire many employees who actually live on farms and ranches.
The same would be true for moving the headquarters of the Transportation Department to Detroit or the Interior Department to Utah or Wyoming. Other possibilities: move the Department of Health and Human Services to North Carolina’s Research Triangle, move the FBI headquarters to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, move the Energy Department headquarters to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and move the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters to Florida. Large portions of the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, Department of Homeland Security, IRS, and other agencies should also be moved to locations across the U.S.
There are two other crucial reasons for decentralizing U.S. government agencies away from the Washington, DC area.
The most important is security. Given growing threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; drones; and violent demonstrations by radical groups, keeping large numbers of federal agencies and employees in the Washington, DC, area is a significant and avoidable threat to national security and the continuity of government. Spreading federal agencies across the United States would make it harder for a U.S. adversary to deal a devastating blow to the federal government with a single attack.
Decentralizing federal agencies also would help depoliticize them and fight the so-called “deep state.” The resistance by federal employees to the president’s constitutional authority as the head of the federal government is driven by a self-serving Washington, DC, culture consisting of entrenched employees, former employees, federal contractors, think tanks, and the mainstream media. Many of these employees do little work and are extremely hard to fire. Even worse, nearly 90% of federal government office space in Washington is vacant because most federal workers began working from home during the COVID pandemic and never returned to their offices.
Moving federal agencies out of the corrupting influence of the DC bubble would weaken deep state resistance to presidential control of federal agencies. It would also attract new employees from other parts of the country who are more interested in working hard to serve their country.
An added bonus of moving federal agencies to other areas of the U.S. is that many career employees in the DC area will quit instead of moving to new offices in the heartland. Such relocations can thus be a way to get past the red tape of downsizing these agencies and firing problem personnel. This was proven in 2019 when President Trump moved the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to Grand Junction, Colorado. Of 328 BLM employees given relocation orders, only 41 agreed to move. Unfortunately, President Biden reversed this move in 2021.
Decentralizing the federal government should be a top priority for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Despite the many good reasons for doing this, DC’s entrenched bureaucrats and interest groups will fight hard to stop this initiative. Only a disrupter administration like the second Trump presidency can pull this off.
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Fred Fleitz previously served as National Security Council chief of staff, CIA analyst, and a House Intelligence Committee staff member.
Before anyone moves to Cheyenne, WY or Bixby, AZ, let us ponder the meaning of “efficiency”. Does simply decentralizing the federal workforce accomplish the goal of making government more efficient? Or, should we begin from the beginning, and assess the purpose and efficacy of agencies themselves? Do the American people need dozens of agencies directly employing hundreds of thousands of people, along with the hundreds of thousands of citizens employed by contractors?
The amount of bloat in D.C. is obvious. How does simply redistributing it throughout the country reduce the bloat? The entire Administrative State needs a thorough purge. If nothing else, I’m sure the good people working at Costco collecting tons of butter to be destroyed simply due to a failure to include on the label “Contains Milk Products” ought to highlight the futility of the belief behind these agencies themselves: that they do any productive work whatsoever!
I am all for moving most of the agencies out of DC…after at least 50 % are outright fired and, if guilty of malfeasance, prosecuted. What the author suggests-- a sort of cock block for government employees who would subvert government to their own ends-- does not address the fact that there needs to be a reckoning for the administrative state that has become bloated, corrupted and antithetical to the founding principles of this country & that slap down needs to be so emphatic that it will be several generations before they try this end run around duly-elected individuals again.
Musk runs X with far less than the number of employees that ran Twitter. Efficiency is one thing. Another thing is that X is successful because people like it, use it and pay for it. That is what competition and a free market is about. If such competition were applied to government agencies would they all exist? No. So the answer to your question is that because they would not survive in the marketplace we don’t need them.
The Executive Branch is where the gun carrying agencies are. They also make laws, adjudicate laws and execute the laws they make. Most need to go and what they do is kind of unconstitutional - at the least it is far removed from what any thinking Framer would object to after fighting a war with Britain. Eliminate most and neuter the rest.
Of course they will fight like Hell to carry on. It is all administrative welfare. No one is better equipped than Trump is. He has the spirit and was given a clear yes by beleaguered voters (the majority). His Administration is a seminal one.