Move the Agencies Out of Washington, and Watch Who Complains

Try an experiment. Walk into any room of people and propose that a federal agency should move its headquarters to Kansas. Not abolish the agency. Not cut its budget. Just move it, a few hundred miles from the nearest Metro stop. Then sit back and watch the reaction. You will hear about brain drain, lost expertise, the sanctity of coordination, and the unique irreplaceable talent that, apparently, can only be found inside the Beltway.

Folks, the Pentagon budget gets defended with less passion. And that reaction is the best evidence there is that the idea works. When a proposal touches nothing but a zip code and the whole establishment goes into mourning, you have found out what the zip code was worth.

Let me make the argument properly, because it is a serious one, and then give the other side its due.

The thesis

A reform that moves an agency's headquarters, and a share of its decision-makers, to the region it regulates does something no regulatory-reform statute does: it changes the culture of the agency. People who live among the farmers, ranchers, miners and manufacturers they regulate hear from them in the grocery store, at church and at the ballgame. People who live inside the capital hear mainly from other people in the capital. The idea is not magic. It is simple proximity, and proximity changes behavior.

Here is the argument in four numbered premises.

1. Agencies are shaped by their surroundings. An institution's people, networks and assumptions come from where it sits. An agency clustered with its peers, its lobbyists, its congressional overseers and its trade press adopts their preoccupations.
2. Distance from the regulated lowers the cost of ignoring them. If you never meet the rancher whose grazing permit you are reviewing, he is a file number. If you live in his town, he is a neighbor.
3. Relocation also broadens who works for the government. A headquarters in a smaller city draws from a different pool of applicants, and it can reduce the pull of the capital's revolving door between agencies, contractors and lobbying shops.
4. The resistance reveals the stakes. The fiercest objections come from people whose lives and incomes are tied to the capital region, and they are not wrong that something would change. That change is the point.

What the Constitution has to say about the capital

The Constitution says very little about where agencies should sit. Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 grants Congress power over the "Seat of the Government of the United States," a district not exceeding ten miles square. It does not say every executive office must be in the district, and in fact the early federal government's customs houses, land offices, post offices and courts were scattered across the country. The Founders' federal government was a thin one in Washington and a long arm everywhere else. The idea that administration should be concentrated in a single city is a modern habit, not a constitutional mandate.

The relevant principle is closer to Madison's in Federalist 45: the powers of the federal government are "few and defined," while those of the states are "numerous and indefinite." An executive branch that operates far from the capital is closer to that picture than one that clusters every decision in a single corridor.

The 2019 test case: Kansas City

The most important modern experiment began when Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced, in August 2018, that two research agencies of the Department of Agriculture would leave Washington, and USDA chose the Kansas City area in June 2019: the Economic Research Service, which produces economic analysis of farm and food policy, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which funds agricultural research and education at universities. The department gave several reasons: attracting and keeping qualified staff without the burden of a high cost of living, placing USDA resources closer to stakeholders, and lowering employment costs and rent.

The move was carried out in the fall of 2019. It was also controversial. About 75 percent of the affected employees declined to relocate and left the agencies, according to the Congressional Research Service, and both agencies faced the difficult task of rebuilding staff. Critics, including the employees' unions and many researchers, argued that the loss of experienced people damaged the quality of the research and that the decision was made without enough analysis. Congressional Democrats raised objections. The department's inspector general found in August 2019 that USDA had legal authority for the move but had not complied with approval and reporting requirements in the appropriations act, and in a 2022 report the Government Accountability Office found that staffing and productivity dropped after the move, with ERS producing fewer key reports and NIFA taking longer to process grants, and that both had largely recovered by the end of fiscal 2021 with a workforce that was mostly new and less experienced.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of story where each side's talking points can drift away from the record. What can be said with confidence is this: the move happened in the fall of 2019, and a large share of the original staff did not go. What is disputed is how much the output suffered and for how long. For the numbers, read the audit reports. The reports are public, and I would rather send you to them than hand you a figure I cannot stand behind.

The second test: the Bureau of Land Management

The Bureau of Land Management is the interesting case, because the logic of moving it is hard to resist. The agency manages a vast stretch of public land, most of it in the western states. Its headquarters had been in Washington, two thousand miles from most of what it manages.

In 2019 the Interior Department announced that it would move the bureau's headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, and relocate hundreds of positions to western offices. The relocation was completed in 2020, and positions were reassigned to state and field offices around the West. The department argued that a western headquarters would put decision-makers closer to the land and to the communities that live on and around it.

In September 2021 Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced that the bureau's director and other leadership would be stationed in Washington, while Grand Junction would remain a western hub. The department said a presence in the capital was needed to reach the policy, budget and decision-makers, and cited the fact that of the 328 positions moved out of Washington, only 41 of the affected employees relocated. So here the experiment was reversed, a little more than a year after the move was completed. It is a reminder that even good ideas fail if they are implemented hastily, or if the next administration is determined to reverse them.

A fair reader will ask: does that mean the experiment failed? Not necessarily. A year or two is a short time to judge a change in an institution's culture. And the reversal is itself a data point about the strength of the capital's pull. The institutions that benefit from the status quo are well organized.

The best arguments against, stated fairly

Here is the steelman. It is a good one, and an honest reformer should be able to recite it.

One: expertise walks out the door. When an agency moves, a large share of its experienced staff may decline to move, because they have families, spouses with jobs, children in school, and mortgages. The institutional memory leaves with them. A research agency, whose product is the judgment of experts, is especially vulnerable.

Two: coordination suffers. Federal policy is made in interagency meetings, in congressional hearings, and in conversations with the White House and its Office of Management and Budget. An agency that is far away will have a harder time being heard. Distance can also mean a loss of influence, which, depending on your view, is either a bug or a feature.

Three: the costs are real. Moving expenses, severance, lost productivity during the transition, and duplicate facilities are costs up front. The savings in rent and salary come later, if they come at all.

Four: the process matters. When relocation is announced abruptly, with limited consultation and little published analysis, it invites the suspicion that it is an effort to weaken the agency rather than improve it. A critic can say that moving an inconvenient agency is a quiet way of dismantling it.

Those are real concerns, and I would not wave them away. The answer is not to deny them but to design around them, which brings us to the practical question.

The answers, numbered

1. Expertise leaves, but expertise is not unique to Washington. The land-grant universities, state agricultural departments, and regional research centers are filled with experts. An agency that moves can recruit from them. The first year is hard; later years are not. The question to ask is not "who left?" but "who is there five years later, and what are they producing?"
2. Coordination is a modern problem with modern tools. The federal government already runs its field offices across the country, and the pandemic taught every organization that meetings can happen without everyone sharing a building. An agency that must be present in Washington for some functions can keep a small liaison office there, as the Bureau of Land Management in effect did after 2021.
3. Cost should be measured honestly, not assumed. An agency that relocates ought to publish its analysis of cost and benefit in advance, and a follow-up report afterward. A reform that cannot survive that scrutiny does not deserve to proceed. A reform that can, deserves to.
4. The suspicion of sabotage is answered by transparency. If the goal is a better agency, say so, measure it, and allow Congress to review the plan.

Why a conservative should care

This is not a petty fight about real estate. It goes to the heart of a long conservative argument: that the administrative state is not merely a set of rules but a culture, a self-reinforcing community of people who share assumptions about what government is for. You can pass all the reform statutes you like, and the culture will find a way around them. Culture changes slowly and only under pressure.

Moving an agency changes the people who work in it, the people who surround it, and the people who can walk into it. A headquarters in a region that depends on the agency's decisions faces an informal accountability that no statute can create. The rancher at the next table at the diner is a stronger oversight mechanism than most congressional hearings.

There is also an argument from the Founders' own approach to federalism. The idea that the federal government should be a distant, capital-centered institution runs against the instinct of Madison and Jefferson, who wanted the powers of the central government to be limited and its agents to be within the reach of citizens. A government that is a visible presence in the places it affects is a government that people can hold to account. See America's Richest Counties Ring the Capital, and That Is No Accident for what happens to the neighborhood around a government that never leaves the capital.

A practical agenda

If you wanted to build a program from these lessons, it might look like this, and each item is something Congress or an administration could do within the Constitution.

• Choose agencies whose work is tied to a region. Land management, agriculture, energy, mining and fisheries are natural candidates. A policy that is mainly about land in the West should be run substantially from the West.
• Publish the plan and the numbers in advance. Cost, staffing and timeline, with a commitment to report results after two and five years.
• Provide transition support. Reasonable relocation assistance and time to decide, so that the experienced employees who want to stay with the agency can do so.
• Write it into statute. The Bureau of Land Management story shows that an administrative decision can be reversed by the next administration. If a relocation is worth doing, it is worth enacting, so that the next Secretary cannot undo it with a memo.
• Pair relocation with structural reform. Moving the building is not enough if the incentives stay the same. Combine it with the reforms in Every Agency Should Have to Justify Its Existence Again, the Texas Sunset Way and The Federal Workforce Is Smaller Than You Think, and That Is the Problem.

The verdict

The honest conclusion is a measured one. Moving agencies is not a cure-all. The Kansas City experience shows that it is costly and disruptive, and the Grand Junction reversal shows that the establishment will fight to restore its center of gravity. But the test of a reform is whether it changes the thing it aims at, and a change of address does exactly that. It alters who works for the government, who sees the people the government serves, and who can easily reach the officials who decide. If it did nothing, no one would bother to fight it so hard.

And that, folks, is what I like about it. A reform whose opponents say that it would change everything is telling you, in their own way, that they agree it would work.

The case in brief

1. An agency's culture is shaped by where it sits, and agencies clustered in the capital absorb the assumptions of the capital.
2. The Constitution fixes the seat of government but does not require every executive office to sit in it, and the early federal government's administrators were spread across the country.
3. The 2019 moves of the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to the Kansas City area, and the Bureau of Land Management's move to Grand Junction and its return to Washington in 2021, show both the promise and the cost of relocation.
4. The strongest objections, lost expertise, weaker coordination, up-front cost and process, are real, and they are answered by planning, transparency and statute rather than by leaving everything where it is.
5. The intensity of the resistance is evidence that location matters.

What you can do: Find the federal agencies that manage land, farms or industries in your state, check where their decision-makers sit, and write to your Representative about whether more of them should work where the regulated live.