Not only would I feel safer but our taxes would go down. Maybe we can have OHSA move in next door. BTW, I love this author, the sister of the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Bare Bottum.
When Federal Employees Telecommute, Why Are Agencies in D.C.? The idea of moving offices to the heartland has been floated for years. It’s never been more relevant.
By Faith Bottum Nov. 26, 2021 5:42 pm ET The metropolitan area of Detroit has around 1.7 million square feet of vacant office space. Surely there’s room for the Federal Highway Administration in all that. With only 41,000 people, Pine Bluff, Ark., has around 41,000 square feet of vacant commercial space. Couldn’t the headquarters of, say, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Business-Cooperative Service be squeezed in there somewhere? Detroit has been in decline for decades, losing 65% of its population since 1950, and Pine Bluff is often named high on lists of declining towns. So why can’t the federal government move some of its operations to those cities?
The answer is that it’s against the law. A 1947 U.S. Code provision requires “all offices attached to the seat of government” to be “exercised in the District of Columbia.” Congress would need to approve any plan to move federal agencies out of Washington. The idea of relocating federal agencies was interesting when it was proposed in the 1990s—and when it was proposed again in 2018 and 2019. But the redistribution of federal offices seems more than interesting now. It has become pressing—and more possible—in the post-Covid world. The Biden administration is clearly against the idea. In July 2019, amid much opposition from government workers unions, the Trump administration (using congressional approval to reorganize the Interior Department) set in motion a plan to move the Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colo. Further ideas were floated for the USDA to relocate two research agencies to Kansas City, Mo., and Interior to transfer the U.S. Geological Survey to Denver.
This month, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland declared the BLM project a failure and announced that the bureau will move back to Washington. And maybe the project actually was a failure. The BLM saw 287 employees either retire or leave the agency rather than relocate, and of the 41 who agreed to move, only three ended up in Grand Junction. Critics insist that this attrition is what Mr. Trump wanted all along, but some Democrats favored a Western BLM headquarters, which Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet called a “positive development.” And surely there exist nonideological reasons to want to halt Washington’s bloat and aid declining American cities.
Federal agencies employ at least 140,000 workers in Washington, with around 70,000 each in Maryland and Virginia suburbs, where Congress has gradually allowed some to spread. About 45% of those employees were listed as eligible for telework in September 2021 data from the Office of Personnel Management. At some agencies, such as the Education Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, nearly everyone is authorized to telecommute. More than 90% of Energy and Interior department employees are. Agencies that need to work closely with elected officials—the National Security Agency, for example, and the State Department—obviously should remain near the Capitol and White House. But why exactly is the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington? Or the National Institutes of Health in the suburb of Bethesda, Md.? Or the National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Va.? In 2019, Sen. Joni Ernst introduced an act that called for complete repeal of the 1947 provision in the federal code. Sens. Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn added a proposal to move the headquarters of 10 federal agencies out of Washington. Both efforts failed, and support from Andrew Yang, the eccentric 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, gained them little traction.
But the appeal has grown with the effects of the pandemic. It makes little sense to have Zoom conferences only between offices on K Street and M Street. Over the internet, Indianapolis is as close as Dupont Circle. A federal agency would make a big difference to Detroit. Federal employees would materially aid Pine Bluff—just as they would help Spokane, Wash.; Rapid City, S.D.; Sioux City, Iowa; Dayton, Ohio; and Savannah, Ga. Moreover, spreading out the American bureaucratic complex would benefit democracy. Too many executive agencies become politicized simply by their presence in the Beltway hothouse. Too much federalism is lost in the interlocking directorates and alphabet soup of Washington’s political culture. Decentralization would protect the nation against first-strike attacks, making the government harder to decapitate. The pandemic has demonstrated that spreading government out is possible. Talent has already been scattered across the country because of the pandemic, and if Washington doesn’t need to be the center of everything, then Washington shouldn’t be the center of everything. Ms. Bottum is the Joseph Rago Memorial Fellow at the Journal.