Blow Up Washington

As the dust settles from the 2024 presidential election, a new administration makes its way to Washington where it will find the same federal bureaucracy, four years older, four years more deeply entrenched, impassively waiting for the new reformers to expend their energy for change like a large ocean wave breaking on an unyielding rocky shoreline.

The entire history of the republic has taken place against the backdrop of steady expansion in the scope and concentration of power at the federal level. Once a new federal agency is put in place, to alleviate one or another societal alleged need or political expedient, removing it becomes a Sisyphean task. Good luck getting rid of the Department of Education. Over time, the old physical swamp at the center of Washington, D.C., has been replaced by a bureaucratic swamp—the marshland was drained, to be succeeded by an archipelago of imposing granite and concrete buildings, housing an alphabet soup of government entities: FBI, FTC, FRB, HUD, IRS, ITC, and so on. As more and more power flowed from the states to the central government, the capital became encased in ever-expanding rings of deep blue congressional districts peopled by equally expanding legions of government workers. The growth of the federal government is thus matched by the suburban sprawl that spreads every year farther into the countryside.

As power and control accumulates in Washington, tax revenue and other resources flow out of the rest of the country and into Washington like stuff being sucked into a black hole—even economically depressed areas are taxed to “feed the feds,” driving up real estate prices and congesting the roadways in the nation’s capital.

While too many new presidents have embraced this process, Reagan sought to reverse it, only to slow the sprawl for a few years. Is the lesson, then, that Washington will continue to expand at the expense of the rest of the country? Is this process unstoppable? It needn’t be. While striking a balance between the attributions of the federal and state governments is complicated, controlling the physical location of government activity is much more straightforward.

Let’s disperse the government agencies away from the gridlocked highways and overpriced real estate of the Washington, D.C., area to the economically depressed regions of the country they serve, recycling the federal budget back to the economy from which it came.

A move in this direction was carried out during the first Trump administration when many employees of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) were reposted to Kansas. Since then many have managed to continue to work remotely from Washington—in 2023, the USDA had the third-emptiest government headquarters in D.C.—but a little avid direction from the agency could suffice to get them to move or to quit. In the latter case they could be replaced by people who would reside in the Sunflower State. And what goes for USDA would go equally well for all the other acronyms in the alphabet soup.

What kind of expenditure are we talking about? The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) database on the federal workforce, Fedscope, indicates that as of March 2024, the last month for which data are available across agencies, there were 449,503 federal employees in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. That’s just under 20% of all federal workers. Their average salary (only 99.2% of these employees have their salary listed) was $133,000 (higher than the average salary of the remaining 80%, which is approximately $99,000). Then there are associated expenses, such as office space, that don’t include the numerous employees of federal contractors who also cluster along the exits from the Capital Beltway like penguins in an Antarctic breeding ground. But it gives us an idea as to magnitude of the issue: Right now we are dropping $60 billion into the overheated Washington, D.C., real estate market, and putting almost half a million federal workers into the same bumper-to-bumper commuting traffic on the capital’s congested road system.

Among the cabinet level agencies whose employees are most heavily concentrated in and near the capital are the surviving fragments of HEW (United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare), now broken into the perhaps soon-to-be-abolished Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services. Of DoE’s 4,245 employees, 64% reside in D.C., MD, and VA, with an average yearly salary of $151,000 as of March 2024, while 51% (that is 46,348) of DHS personnel live in and around the capital, making $147,000 a year as of March 2024. The Department of Commerce is also heavily concentrated in Washington and its surroundings, where 23,142 of its employees work, earning an average of $144,000.

Other departments are much less concentrated in the environs of the capital. For example the Veterans Administration is already fairly dispersed, delivering service to veterans where they live all around the country. But they still have 25,671 employees based in or near Washington, albeit only 5% of their total workforce, who earn an average of about $119,000 a year. The USDA, already the object of some dispersion to Kansas, has but 10%, that is 9,290, of its workers living in Washington, D.C. Even with no reductions in force, dispersing this gigantic payroll to economically distressed parts of the country that are currently paying taxes that support the salary extravaganza on the banks of the Potomac would help those areas address their economic challenges. Doing so would also be an act of simple fairness.

If the agencies are in fact dispersed throughout the country that supports them, recycling tax dollars into the local economies from which they came, it would not only be beneficial to the country at large, but also, unlike the well-intentioned but only temporarily effective reforms of the Reagan era, it would prove irreversible. Once the government agencies that now crowd Washington and its suburbs are relocated to Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the poverty pockets of the West, the states that would welcome them will fight in the halls of Congress to keep their share of the $60 billion-plus payroll from returning to the banks of the Potomac. Unlike the other reforms being considered by the incoming administration, this comes with its own constituency for meaningful and lasting decentralization.

Would the relocated agencies be unable to function? During COVID, their headquarters had little difficulty shifting to remote work. In fact, as of last year, almost a third of federal workers work remotely on a full-time basis, with only 6% reporting “in-person on a full-time basis,” according to a recent report from Sen. Joni Ernst’s office. They should have no problem adapting quickly to new latitudes and longitudes, and if their presence were to lead to improved internet connectivity in the rest of the country, all the better!

But wouldn’t transferring these federal employees and all this federal money currently concentrated in Washington to other, redder parts of the country simply “turn the map blue” as government workers continue to vote for their beloved big government party? The economic multiplier effect of relocating economic resources to the country will be “linear”: each dollar spent in Enid, Oklahoma, instead of Bethesda, Maryland, benefits the local economy of Garfield County, Oklahoma. The effect of relocating partisan voters depends a great deal on context: In a typical deep red congressional district an extra 40,000 government workers mean the Republican candidate wins the next election with 60% of the vote instead of 65%, while pumping millions of dollars into the local economy. Relocating government workers to swing districts or to swing states could have a much larger impact on elections. However, if the agencies were spread widely and carefully their political impact on the regions that received them would be small, while the economic return would be substantial.

A physically decentralized government will do more for the nation. It will also cost less—a lot less, if coupled with a reduction in the size of the bureaucracy. Some government workers, those with a weaker vocation for civil service, will simply quit rather than relocate. Employees who would otherwise have hung on for years and even decades filing lawsuits, disability claims, and grievances, will voluntarily separate from government service, greatly simplifying the gritty and drawn-out business of “reductions in force” envisioned by the new department of government efficiency (DOGE) to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Whereas government unions, media and politicians would rail against mass firings, there is much less political advantage to be had from aligning with people who would rather quit than live next door to the median voter in Iowa. Of course, it may be that in time the dispersion process will lead to a more ideologically diverse government workforce, as federal bureaucrats see our great country up close rather than viewing it at a distance through the haze of Washington preconceptions.

Meanwhile, Washington would better be able to serve its mission as our political capital and as a sanctuary for our national history. It would make it easier for Americans seeking to visit their seat of government to communicate with their elected representatives in Congress, more attractive to museumgoers, and more vibrant as a cultural center. At the very least, it would cut down on traffic congestion, alleviate summer smog and lead to higher tourist revenues. Besides, who knows what interesting uses the locals would come up with for all the newly vacant office buildings? Perhaps for once the unwritten law of ever-expanding centralization may be broken.