Decentralizing the federal government should be a top priority for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
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.
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