Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) will introduce legislation on Wednesday that would move the majority of the federal bureaucracy out of Washington D.C. to economically depressed areas. . .
Under the bill, the Department of Agriculture would be relocated to Hawley’s home state of Missouri while the Department of Education would move to Blackburn’s Tennessee, in order to disperse the economic benefits associated with relatively high-paying government jobs that currently accrue to just a few zip codes.
As I see it, the economic argument for this is sound. It seems like a great way to redistribute wealth from the DC area, which is now one of the wealthiest areas in the country, to poorer areas.
But there really is a Deep State, and there is simply no way that a mere elected official like Hawley is going to get anywhere butting up against it.
A relative considered moving to Iowa to get a promotion in the government, then realized that the change in the Cost of Living adjustment would leave him no better off.
It is quite frankly a scandal that the richest countries in the USA are all around DC.
asdf, many of your arguments have social justice equivalents that only differ by preferred in-group. The crowd throwing rocks at the Google bus also think that the Silicon Valley situation is scandalous.
I think it has more to do with path dependencies and the natural patterns that emerge around value systems.
Place where all the tax dollars go happens to be richest part of country? Do we need some kind of complicated explanation of my psychology.
I live in this part of the country. I’ve worked for government contractors in the DC area and know lots of people that do. The impression I get is off a scandalous racket based on my own first hand experience.
asdf, I wasn’t trying to promote a complex psychological explanation; your premise doesn’t pass the causation-vs-correlation sniff test. Agglomeration effects, as Ryan and others so eloquently laid out below, are going to naturally occur around the federal capital of the world’s leading economy/military. Similar effects dominate Silicon Valley which makes people throw rocks at the Google bus.
Companies in Silicon Valley have to sell a product to a free individual who voluntarily pays for it with their own money. Whatever you might think of Silicon Valley, their output passes the test of being worth more than their inputs.
The federal contractor nexus that is the DC metro area passes no such test. The only test they have to pass is that someone in the government values their services more than someone else’s. Since they aren’t spending their own money, there is no way of knowing what value they actually assign to the service they are paying for, outside of the fact that it is beneficial to the person assigning the contract.
The entire contractor industry may in fact boil down to people who scratch each others backs to get windfalls for themselves. That DC may have agglomeration effects for such back scratchers is not a point in its favor!
Let’s give a simple contrast. Famously, the Obamacare website was a total disaster. It crashed and was basically unusable at launch. It was so bad South Park made fun of it. The original budget for the website was $93.7M. To date estimates for the cost are as high as $2.1B.
Now, there were certainly a lot of problems with how the politicians managed this. It wasn’t quite as simple as building a website. But at the end of the day, $2.1B to build a website that didn’t work is pretty bad. Silicon Valley can build a website that works.
My problem with the DC area isn’t that there are a lot of people making a lot of money. There are a lot of people making a lot of money who work for the government of Singapore. My problem is that it doesn’t seem like they are earning their money. People in the market pass a market test. People in government pass a more subjective test (Singapore civil servants pass it, DC contractors don’t in my view). So yes I think its a scandal that so many people are getting so rich of our government when we aren’t getting a product in return that seems worth it.
There is some universe in the multiverse, where the Democrats response is:
I think what your are proposing (and Doctor Kling echoes) makes a fair bit of sense. We would support this if you and your colleagues support an Amendment to then make DC a state. If the gains of de-institutionalized, de-centralizing, and even — if you have watched “Yes, Prime Minister” — de-incentivize big government by having the “state” live among the plebes, it may be worth giving the Dems that win.
With D.C decentralized, then you just return the land to Maryland, not make it a state.
Montana has a population of one million, more than Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming with populations of 550k. Bernie will likely live longer than Vermont. All these states have high exits, lose about 1% of population a year. They are dying and the Constituion has no cure except Senate shutdowns. Hence the inefficiency of earmarks, we have to have all state earmarks in most government programs, making them very inefficient.
There is a solution, but the solution requires that we first recognize that our nation’s founder made some bad blunders which need correction. Hence the Constitutional Blunder Correction Act. The second nudget item in the Swamp, after the interest payments, should be a bribe, the House bribes the Senate with something like 150-250 billion., each budget period. Money passed back to states at a rate per senator. Basically we have to bribe the small states to keep the Senate operational.
It is a plain fact that the Constitutional duty of small state Senators to shut the swamp until their coffer’s are full enough, written right into the Constitution. We have no choice, either shut down the Swamp in two or three years or make the bribe, you choose.
Ummmm, OK. It has the feel of a new kind of an affirmative-action meets a make-work project. The ideal time to relocate an institution is during a natural expansion (take Amazon HQ2 as an example).
“The floor space is be cheaper” is unlikely to be a critical economic variable in the long run.
+1
It isn’t just floor space (although selling some buildings in DC would probably put a decent dent in the deficit.) The cost of living around DC is nuts, kept in check largely by how insane the traffic is keeping most people not related to the government out. The savings in the cost of building space is likely to be dwarfed by the savings in salaries you could offer due to lower costs of living. In many DC departments the average income is in the six figures range, which is pretty out of line with industry salaries for the same credentials. Not to mention the extremely generous benefits and job security. You could probably see a 10% reduction in costs without too much trouble just by moving out of the super expensive areas.
This is actually a good test of whether the “Deep State” or the democracy runs the government. Distributing the gains from government over many congressional districts would be strongly favored by the democracy side of the government. But it would be strongly opposed by the Deep State, a group who has very little democratic power. If something like this doesn’t happen, the only conclusion can be that the Deep State has far more power than democracy to control the government (when it wants).
You might need to consult your dictionary and distinguish between “only”, “plausible”, and “likely”. Deep State vs. Elected Representatives is sometimes a useful lens but I think the power/incentive distribution is more of a spectrum than a binary choice.
We are not a democracy. Try reading the Constitution.
“the economic argument for this is sound.”
Maybe, if ignore more than 100 years of economic research on agglomeration economies, or if you think government is unique among industries with lots of high-ed workers in not having agglomeration benefits. There is a reason industries cluster; government is not special in this respect. Maybe you have heard of Silicon Valley, or Motor City, Michigan, or the Boston biotech corridor. Now, you may argue that government is more concentrated than its agglomeration benefits would justify, but you’d first have to grapple with the fact that the vast majority of federal civilian employees already work outside the DC metro area! You’re not even starting from correct facts! https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/federal-workers/. I am guessing you did not know that.
So, you could start from facts and good economics and try to build an argument from there, or you could just lazily invoke the deep state. You chose the latter, which is a shame, because given your background you probably could actually come up with some good insights!
government is an industry?
Yes, has all the the Hallmarks of an industry in a distorted and constrained market, inside Congress. Ignoring the market aspect of governance may simply the world for uneducated economists, but the math does not lie on this.
there is no math in economics
ask our host
but the question I’m asking is what factors that make agglomeration a positive for real industry also apply to gov?
From the WaPo article, the proper conclusion should be to distribute the rest of D.C.’s workforce just like the military forces and support workers are.
Also, the main point is being missed- the D.C. metro area isn’t just the federal workforce that lives there- it is all the private businesses that “serve” the federal government that makes the area really rich and ripe for redistribution. Call it social justice, if you like.
D.C.’s workforce just like the military forces and support workers
—
And the defense industry plus, via earmarks, almost the entirety of discretionary spending. But it is inefficient which is the major cause of our, now, period bankruptcies that happen back there during each recession..
Anyone that bothers to actually spend five minutes looking into this would know that the Federal government already does this to an impressive level.
This is true. Especially in Tennessee. Add in government support of health care and, well…
https://www.careerinfonet.org/oview6.asp?soccode=&id=&nodeid=12&stfips=47&from=State
Finally, pluses to both of you. How is ignored so often? our priors, our priors do not work if we have to account for mal distribution of the states.
Seriously, think Krugmam and his ’50 Hoovers.’ A scam idea which he knows very well not to be true as he himself did the agglomeration theory.
Not a native speaker of libertaribro, I had to look that up…
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/opinion/29krugman.html
This has happened before, at least in smaller ways. The FBI moved its fingerprint and possibly other forensic services to West Virginia. That wasn’t a whole department but I’m pretty sure it happened because senator Byrd wanted to bring jobs to his state. I’m not sure what the balance was between people moving from DC and the new hires in W. Virginia but I got the impression that people there liked it.
Happened a couple of times, once we had a civil war and wiped out about 3% of the population over the issue. We are not a democracy, we are republic in the Senate, democracy in the House.
Leaving behind the swampy deep state, these are reasonable ideas for the government to research although the impacts are limited in the long run. And Department of Agriculture and Education don’t need close to DC at all times.
1) If you don’t like Department of Agriculture swampy today, putting in Tennessee will make it a lot swampy and even benefit the people they regulate. State government activities are a lot swampier than Washington DC. You know the lobbyist will move and then dominate the local press. (Actually the best paying jobs in DC are the lobbyist not the government themselves.)
2) I can’t stand Josh Hawley whose every utterance is I represent ‘Real Americans’ not the coastal elite or identity minorities. He incredibly divisive politics IMO.
3) Why in the hell should I care about TN? As a Californian I think one problem we have we over-pay taxes that pay for food stamps for KY and TN. They bash for terrible we are. As a liberal maybe we should cut federal stamps and CA manage their own.
Wouldn’t there more logic for Des Moises, Omaha or Fresno, CA?
I spent some time in DC working. A friend from DOE told me that they’d tried to move some departments elsewhere, but it never really worked. To protect their budgets, they had to have people in Washington.
the USDA was supposed to move two research departments to kansas city by the end of sep
anyone knows if that happened yet?
first page of google gives news reports on delays
The delusional idea that we are a Constitutional democracy is a deliberate scam. It allows central planners to assume proportional effects in the center such the GDP factory makes sense.
It is deliberate, it is designed to create favors for the central planners, cover their expenses. Pure fraud. You can always tell the fraudulent economists, they start with the phrase ‘This democracy..’ It is a deliberate lie because I know for a fact that economic schools make the dimwits read the Constitution. Some think it is a rhetorical flourish, it is not. It is conscioust fraud.
“Deep State” has multiple meanings in current usage today, and before uncritically using the term, they should at least be discussed. I hear these three the most:
(1) The Deep State is simply the unelected bureaucrats who keep their jobs from one administration to another; especially the second group described in Jerry Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
(2) The Deep State is a group of bureaucrats and appointed officials, mostly from the Obama administration, who are actively trying, sometimes in concert, to prevent Trump from putting his policy agenda into real effect. This is at least partly a conspiracy theory.
(3) The Deep State is a group of bureaucrats and appointed officials, centered in the intelligence community, who formed a conspiracy long ago, maybe as early as the Eisenhower administration, to permanently control the world order themselves and profit corruptly from arrangements like that recently uncovered in the Ukraine. When someone is about to blow the whistle on them they have him murdered. Thus Benghazi, and Epstein too.
I believe that all three of these groups are real and need to be taken down; but that (3) is most deserving of the label “Deep State” and the others ought to be called something else.
Prof. Kling – this is why I wish you’d show more discretion and not use such horribly misused terms as “Deep State”. I don’t know if the above post was generated by some social media ops team, or if there really is a jdgalt out there who believes this stuff, but either way, the term is dangerous.
The term can really hop across the three types of meanings cited like a California wildfire. It can go from a perfectly reasonable frustration with the consequences of bureaucracy, all the way to bizarro Benghazi/Epstein conspiracy madness, often with no hesitation whatsoever.
This happens because some find it useful, and a great deal of effort is made to conflate the crazy with the real. Hopefully you will find it more important than you have to stand clear of what this term tends to trigger in reader’s minds. We can talk about issues of bureaucracy without going there.
I don’t think we should be encouraging politicians to think of federal employment as an ongoing jobs program for constituents. De-centralizing the federal government could greatly increase the number of elected officials with a vested interest in perpetually expanding the size of the federal government. Look at how this has affected defense spending, at all the senators and representatives who devote so much political capital to preserving military bases in their states/districts or DoD contracts for constituents. Even putative ‘anti-militarist’ officials (e.g. Sanders) have their hands out for military spending. I don’t think we want to reproduce that system with every other part of the government (more than we already do, that is).
Roger Kimball has a good piece on this: https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/09/move-washington-out-of-washington/ that points out how decentralization of the bureaucratic state would play from the anti-lobbying perspective. Moving power out of DC means the K street crowd has to decentralize too. This might sell to the Warren Administration especially if the savings were used as an offset towards Medicare-For-All. And moving a lot of high salary feds into lower cost locality pay areas would also be efficacious in addressing income inequality. In fact, repealing the whole locality pay system under the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA) as well as the saved-pay and saved grade provisions in the title 5 general schedule pay provisions would remove disincentives to appropriately site age would greatly boost the feasibility of actually consolidating all the different federal health care programs (FEHB, Tricare, Medicaid, VHA, IndianHealth Service, etc.) into Medicare. Huge savings. And eliminating up to 400,000 federal jobs very pro-democracy .