If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.
For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.
and all the current employees that don't want to move are fungible?
Honestly? Probably.
No one is really all that special.
Why do you think specialist knowledge about crop and livestock management is that fungible? Particularly as it interfaces with the federal bureaucracy?
I don't have a strong opinion on this. But I think a farm and food specialist in D.C. probably has more sway than tens of distributed experts in Iowa and Kansas. Part of the purpose of these agencies is to inform policy. That's hard to do if you're not near the room.
They actually often are in the short term (see the "significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover" quote in the article about the similar relocation from Trump's first term), and a gutted department of agriculture can remain incompetent longer than you can avoid supply chain disruptions and food poisoning.
What you do is open small distributed offices led by a driven person eager to live in that area, and let the small offices grow over the years as the DC offices shrink. Careers aren't that long on the timescales governments work on, you just have to be patient and be ok with slow, incremental progress in your own career instead of big splashy doge headlines followed by desperately trying to rehire and hire new expertise when you realize what you've actually done.
I'm skeptical though that 100% (or even more than 60%) of the workers in the DC offices are true specialists in agriculture vs. office workers who happen to do agricultural work. Certainly there's a set of institutional knowledge to be maintained. But the most committed specialists are going to be the ones who are willing to move to e.g. Ogden Utah, as the previous commenter mentioned. The slightly specialized office workers, being able to swap into some other role for ${BUREAUCRACY} are less likely to move and less likely to need to. There are people in Ogden and ${RURAL_CITY_[1-5]} who are able to do the support work needed.
However, as you say, the time scale is important and I did not really take that into account.
Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.
Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising.
If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
Imagine if the EPA was located in Detroit. I bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase, the last thing you want if you want these cleaner newer trucks on the road).
If the pencil pushers who sent steel production to elsewhere had their offices in Cleveland maybe we'd have less clean but more steel production domestically instead of offloading that tonnage of production to parts of the world where it's dirtier still, say nothing of the shipping to get it here (the last rebar I bought came from Oman).
To be fair, it also makes it incredibly difficult to import a truck made for any other market into America.
If only we had like fifty sovereign governments spread out across our nation.
I guess my functional question is why agriculture requires federal regulation to the tune of the USDA. (And I'm asking this genuinely. As a not farmer.)
There's a different answer "why" to each of these programs' origin stories, but in general, they were a response to issues that previously existed and weren't being addressed. e.g. the school lunch program was created because we don't expect children to skip meals at school due to their parents inability to provide for them. And it was done nationally because many states failed to solve the issue themselves.
The ones who are around the capital are the ones doing policy or back-office work that’d be the equivalent of a corporate HQ, and they have benefits from being concentrated in a region where there’s a lot of other Federal back office work because they can recruit from a talent pool of people who are experienced in the particular requirements of Federal work. It’s the same sort of agglomeration effects that drives finance to concentrate in NYC or the film industry to concentrate in LA.
Taking the USDA as an example, it doesn’t literally operates farm. The vast majority of what it’s doing is functionally insurance and financial services. The stuff that needs direct interaction with farms like inspections or scientific research are done out of field offices.
If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.
The comparison is particularly galling when you consider how many of these DMV white-collar government employees are black.
DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot.
Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.
Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016.
Why is such an egregious comment at the top?
apothegm•2h ago
tencentshill•2h ago
quentindanjou•2h ago
SoftTalker•1h ago
/s
mothballed•1h ago
bognition•1h ago
CGMthrowaway•1h ago
And also milk: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8374
magicalist•1h ago
lol yes what we really need right now is unregulated interstate sales of raw milk. Luckily that was introduced in 2024 (last congress) and went nowhere.
delichon•1h ago
whoiskevin•1h ago
ne0flex•1h ago
[1] https://tinyurl.com/hb95amyw
blackjack_•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
We have the Food Freedom Act in Wyoming [1]. It technically requires meat be sold "for future delivery provided that the processing of the animals is done by the purchaser or by a Wyoming or federally licensed processing facility."
But in my experience, ranchers are liberal with how they define me "processing" my meat. (In one case, he pointed out the bits of silver skin he hadn't trimmed. So I "processed" those off at home.)
[1] https://www.wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2015/HB0056
naravara•59m ago
The instinct to see a bureaucratic system working poorly and resolving to opt out instead of fixing it is precisely why everything sucks right now. You can’t just work and vibe and spend your way out of living in an advanced industrial society.
jalapenoj•56m ago
xbar•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
Genuine question: do we have historical analogs or studies for the costs and benefits of concentrated versus decentralised regulation?