An utterly depressing statistic is that the Washington, D.C.-area is now the richest region of the country.
At the risk of understatement, that wealth is largely unearned. It’s mostly a reflection of overpaid bureaucrats, greedy politicians, fat-cat lobbyists, beltway-bandit contractors, and other insiders who have their snouts buried in the federal trough.
I’m not a fan of class warfare, but there’s one exception: It’s galling that lower-income and middle-class taxpayers across the nation are subsidizing a gilded class in Washington.
That’s the type of redistribution that should be ended first.
So what can be done to address this inequity? Is there an approach that will curtail D.C.’s entitled, self-aggrandizing elite?
In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Terry Wanzek, a state legislator from North Dakota, makes the case for new legislation that would shift government bureaucracies from Washington to the hinterland.
The Hawley-Blackburn bill calls for moving Agriculture and its more than 100,000 employees to Missouri. Other departments would go elsewhere: Commerce to Pennsylvania, Education to Tennessee, Energy to Kentucky,
Health and Human Services to Indiana, Housing and Urban Development to Ohio, Interior to New Mexico, Labor to West Virginia, Transportation to Michigan, and Veterans Affairs to South Carolina. …The bill’s sponsors pitch their legislation as an employment program…but the main benefit would come from putting regulators into proximity with the people whose lives and businesses they regulate. …This would be a government “of the people”—something that is lacking as the administrative state inexorably grows in Washington, D.C.
This is an interesting proposal. But does that mean it’s a good idea?
Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is not overly impressed.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, he opines that it would backfire.
The bill’s sponsors, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, would send the Agriculture and Education departments to their respective states. Eight other federal departments and most nondepartment agencies would also be dispersed throughout the land, often to places intended to suit their functions—for example, the Transportation Department would be sent to Michigan to be near the auto industry.
…The only understandable part of this plan is conservatives’ visceral desire for revenge. People across the county can see the massive houses Washington bureaucrats and consultants occupy, walled off in single-party strongholds like Fairfax, Va. …But since when did Republicans accept the idea that the federal government ought to be a premier job creator? The GOP insisted for decades that many New Deal agencies and subsequent government bodies should never have been created in the first place, and that their red tape and interference is a dominant cause of economic inefficiency. …It will be impossible to uproot or at least prune the bureaucracy once its seeds are spread to every state. …Would legislators from the “lucky” chosen states ever have the gumption to slash funding from agencies that employ thousands of their constituents and pay them generously? The HIRE Act would tie Middle America inextricably to big progressive government, remaking America in Washington’s image.
So who is right?
I wrote about this topic back in 2016.
Part of me liked the idea, though mostly for punitive reasons.
…it wouldn’t be a bad idea. …locate some bureaucracies in the dodgy parts of cities such as Detroit. Especially departments such as HUD and HHS since they helped cause the economic misery in inner cities. And the Department of Education could be placed somewhere like Newark where government-run schools are such awful failures.
But I concluded it would be a bad idea.
Shouldn’t we focus on shutting down counterproductive bureaucracies rather than moving them? …If we move bureaucracies (whether they are necessary ones or useless ones), does that create the risk of giving other parts of the nation a “public-choice” incentive to lobby for big government since they’ll be recipients of federal largesse? Will we simply get duplication, meaning a new bureaucracy somewhere in America without ever really getting rid of the original bureaucracy in Washington, DC?
So I’m siding with Mr. Crews over Mr. Wanzek.
P.S. I’ve already identified bureaucracies that should be terminated.
- Get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- Shut down the Department of Agriculture.
- Eliminate the Department of Transportation.
- Abolish the Department of Education.
- Pull the plug on the Department of Energy.
- Phase out the Department of Veterans Affairs.
- Privatize the Postal Service.
- Dump the Small Business Administration.
Looking at this list, it reminds me that I need to make the case for the abolition of some other bureaucracies.
International Liberty 
we need a spending cap and term limits… those two items would do more to reform the system than anything else we could do… if we downsize or eliminate government agencies… dismantling DC in the interests of improved communications with citizens would be the icing on the cake… first we must drain the swamp… then plow it under……………………..
Moving them out of DC will automatically slim them down anyway, it’s a good start. What’s not to like?
Hawley is completely correct, given the proven impossibility of ending these useless departments via the legislature.
The departments would be self-winnowing as the employees fought to stay in their beloved Washington suburbs.
Lobbyists would be hard pressed to accomplish their purposes, and the endless merry-go-round from legislator to lobbyist would be challenged.
Your opposition to this is based on your desire to see many departments eliminated. This seems like “better is the enemy of good”. I’d suggest taking the half-loaf.
While I agree that there is a risk of further entrenching the bureaucracies if they were relocated to the various states, I still support the idea, and here’s why.
The problem with having all the bureaus in DC is not just the wealth accumulation of that city. The biggest problem is that the people in those bureaucracies have virtually no contact with actual Americans, the people who live in flyover country. If the people who work at the EPA actually lived near farmers, they might meet those farmers and begin to understand the damage they do to farmers with some of their regulations. If the bureaucrats who promote high speed rail actually lived in a Western state, they might being to see how ridiculous the notion of public transportation is to most of the people who live in those states.
Washington, DC, is a bubble. The bureaucrats live in that bubble. The only way to get them to understand that their job is to help the people who live outside that bubble is to get them to live outside the bubble.
I would go one step further. I would require all legislators to live in their home district or home state for 9 months out of the year. They can do most of their work through ecommuting; they don’t have to all live together.