Hawley to Introduce Bill to Move Federal Agencies out of Washington D.C.

[JA]

Hawley to Introduce Bill to Move Federal Agencies out of Washington D.C. to Economically Stagnant Areas

Days after squaring off online against “elitist” critics of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue’s relocation of agency jobs, 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, according to a summary of the bill provided to National Review.

The “Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy (HIRE) Act,” which is cosponsored by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), would move 90 percent of the positions within ten executive agencies to economically distressed regions that have a stake in the work of those respective agencies.
[...]
“Every year Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars fund federal agencies that are mainly located in the D.C. bubble. That’s a big part of the problem with Washington: they’re too removed from the rest of America. The Hire Act will move policymakers directly into the communities they serve, creating thousands of jobs for local communities and saving taxpayers billions of dollars along the way,” Hawley said in a statement.

I fully support this legislation.

[The Free North]

A good proposal. The government shouldn't be able to dictate what regions are or are not economically prosperous on a grand scale, but in areas like this where they do have more sway, it makes sense to redistribute jobs to other areas.

[Landslide Lyndon]

Not a bad idea. Moving a few agencies to West Virginia for example would be a shot in the arm of local economy.

[This user has not been convicted of 34 felonies]

This is...good? Seems pretty good.

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

This is a bad idea.

[DrScholl]

How much is that going to cost? Moving agencies can't possibly be cheap since workers would have to be paid to relocate. If money is going to be spent on anything it may as well be spent on creating a new WPA for economically depressed areas that will train people already living in those communities to do things like setup rural broadband.

[RI]

Hawley is one of the best GOP Senators.

[McNukes™ #NYCMMWasAHero]

I absolutely support this. It's one of few areas where both Republicans and Democrats can pretty much agree.

How much is that going to cost? Moving agencies can't possibly be cheap since workers would have to be paid to relocate. If money is going to be spent on anything it may as well be spent on creating a new WPA for economically depressed areas that will train people already living in those communities to do things like setup rural broadband.

Relatively little. The main problem is training new employees when the ones who work in DC quit rather than move. Property values in these areas are seriously depressed and the government stands to profit from selling DC properties. This will also increase the cost of lobbying; hopefully we can just raise the excise taxes on that and pay for this.

[MichaelRbn]

Initiatives like this are usually proposed by people who have no idea that the vast majority of Federal employees (over 75%) Are located outside the DC area.

[Politician]

Hawley is one of the least awful GOP Senators.

[McNukes™ #NYCMMWasAHero]

Initiatives like this are usually proposed by people who have no idea that the vast majority of Federal employees (over 75%) Are located outside the DC area.

That's true, but the concentration of government employment in MD/DC/NoVA is still ridiculous. The federal black hole has essentially consumed all of the talent.

[Catholics vs. Convicts]

How will they chose where each agency will move to? Who gets to decide which states will get the respective boons?

[Nutmeg]

How will they chose where each agency will move to? Who gets to decide which states will get the respective boons?

https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/index.html

[McNukes™ #NYCMMWasAHero]

How will they chose where each agency will move to? Who gets to decide which states will get the respective boons?

The impetus for this was that 2000 Agriculture Department jobs are moving from DC to a more rural area. So I'm guessing they'll just decide by the poorest area of a state which has a very high concentration of a specific industrial area. For instance, I could see a ghetto in Manhattan getting the SEC, or an impoverished area of California getting the FCC.

[Nutmeg]

As more jobs become eligible for telework (technologically, legally, and socially), this will become irrelevant. The rural decline in this country also is the product of people voting with their feet -- preference and not just necessity. More educated people (the right people for these jobs) seem to prefer living in cities where there simply is more to do. I don't see why this is a bad thing. It's just a fact.

Also why do people from rural areas love to hate the nation's capital? Hawley couldn't wait to get out of Missouri by competing for a job in the wicked capital city.

[7,052,770]

Good idea, but don't just put them all in the Midwest. The Deep South needs help too, as do other regions.

[Crumpets]

One other benefit is that this prevents a single hurricane or other disaster from taking a big chunk of the government out at once.

[Progressive Pessimist]

He's a very unique Senator, I'll give him that.

[JA]

As more jobs become eligible for telework (technologically, legally, and socially), this will become irrelevant. The rural decline in this country also is the product of people voting with their feet -- preference and not just necessity. More educated people (the right people for these jobs) seem to prefer living in cities where there simply is more to do. I don't see why this is a bad thing. It's just a fact.

Also why do people from rural areas love to hate the nation's capital? Hawley couldn't wait to get out of Missouri by competing for a job in the wicked capital city.

People don't move to cities on a mass scale because of leisure qualities. Urbanization is a product of industrialization and capitalism. Urban areas are also built upon countless pointless jobs that exist merely to keep the existing system of capitalism afloat, not because they are actually needed.

The decline in rural employment is due to automation and outsourcing. The countryside is the life blood of the American economy; coal, natural gas, petroleum, wheat, soy, corn, dairy, meat, etc... that's what keeps the American economy going. It is pumped from the countryside to the cities where it is managed, traded, sold, and bought. In years past, when automation and outsourcing were not as destructive to the rural populace, their labor was essential and taken for granted at significant costs because most realized their dependency on these Americans and their labor.

Today, they're deliberately overlooked or treated with disdain while their land and resources, along with the labor of a shrinking few, is intensely exploited while all the wealth produced therefrom is extracted and transferred to the urban parts of America. The American countryside is, like the developing world, part of the periphery of exploitative and extractive capitalism, whereas the core are places like New York and LA, which take for granted their existence and wealth, which is entirely dependent on the exploitation of the "hicks" and their resources.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

So now Republicans think government jobs are a solution to economic development?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Good concept. I'm suspicious of Hawley's motivations, especially considering the ins and outs of the DOA drama this seems to be in response to, but good concept that I fully support. The federal jobs involved are also probably way, way better jobs than the "Money for Nothing"-on-steroids neo-Gilded Age peonage that was promised during the obscene jockeying for Amazon HQ2.

[Gass3268]

This is a stupid concept and should be resisted at all costs. The Trump regime already did this (probably illegally) by moving USDA jobs to Kansas City. Only 60 of the 300 employees followed and it ruined the UDSA statistics division. People didn't want to uproot their families and move halfway across the country. This is just more Republican attacks on hardworking Federal employees. Hopefully the next Democratic President moves these jobs back to Washington where they belong and gets these folks their jobs back.

https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1171491079050317827?s=2

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1170987056681668608?s=20

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Not a fan of this for two reasons:

1. Agencies work synergistically and rely on being in close quarters with each other. This is somewhat easier to do remotely in the telecom age but spacing these agencies out (especially in harder-to-access areas like Grand Junction, CO) will ultimately hamper their efficiency.

Spatial agglomeration is pretty common in high-skill industries. There's a reason tech firms like to be in Seattle and the Bay Area and not Detroit - it's because there are other similar companies there nearby to facilitate/compliment work and there's a large pool of skilled labor nearby.

2. I'm going to get a lot of flak for telling an honest truth, but, most people who you want working in government agencies won't want to live in places like where Hawley wants to move these agencies to. Highly skilled, educated people want to live 1) around other highly skilled, educated people (before we deride the "elitist" tendencies here, let's acknowledge that this runs both ways) 2) in areas with reliable public services including schools for their children, 3) around cultural/lifestyle amenities and 4) around similar job opportunities within their field for ease of job security (you have more leverage over your employer when you can find a new job without having to sell your house and move across the country).

We want skilled people doing agency and regulatory work and these skilled people can already easily find more high-paying work elsewhere. Don't further hamstring the federal government's ability to recruit talented workers by making them work somewhere they don't want to work.

(of course, that's the whole point)

[Beet]

I strongly support this concept. You said it best ^ ^ ^. Under free market capitalism, 95% of the country will be left to rot while elite jobs concentrate in only a few areas. We've seen what a dystopian nightmare this kind of concentration has created in places like the Bay Area. What's been described by The Denver Poster is a hellish future where a few regions of the country have very high costs of living/well funded public schools/all the valuable industries & large swathes become filled with resentful left-behinds who turn to things like opioid addiction because their towns are decaying. This is literally how we got Trump.

The whole point of each state having a Senator is that the smaller states can use their democratic representation to push forward their interests, and this is what Hawley is doing. The House should also bring back earmarks for the same reason.