Years ago I read about how Norway was redistributing agencies out of Oslo and into other cities across the country. This felt like it made intuitive sense, as you'd maybe get to distribute jobs to other localities and break up the concentration of bureaucracy. I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same.
dogleash · 4h ago
> I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same.
If the central office has any say over the location someone works, you get the phenomenon where the population of less-desirable living locations get to suffer local employees that aren't good enough at their job to be given higher prioritization in choosing their station. And the organization looses good workers they can't accommodate.
firefax · 2h ago
People sometimes want less "desirable" locations because there's lower cost of living -- raising kids in a home with a yard vs a condo or apartment.
mtalantikite · 2h ago
As a remote worker since 2008, I agree, I don't want someone telling me I have to live in a place I wouldn't want to live for a job. But also, they're already dictating that people have to live in the DC area, which probably has a similar effect. I'm sure there are plenty of highly talented bureaucrats living in Chicago, or Nashville, or Boulder, or Houston, etc etc.
alphager · 3h ago
Germany has been doing it since 1949. It leads to stronger regional centers and dishes the capital effect. Germany has many larger cities all over the country.
France has been doing the opposite, leading to a concentration in and around Paris and few major cities outside of Ile de France.
Tepix · 3h ago
Most german agencies are in Berlin, there are a few that are (still) in Bonn, the former capital.
maratc · 3h ago
Germany has been doing it since the Middle Ages, when it was using the HRE moniker for itself.
postexitus · 3h ago
The UK is actively relocating many civil service roles from London to various locations across the UK as part of the "Places for Growth" initiative. DVLA is in Swansea, Planning in Bristol, Dept of Work and Pensions in Wrexham, - Great British Energy will be HQ'd in Aberdeen I believe.
njarboe · 4h ago
On the other hand keeping all of the federal workforce in D.C, instead of the states, reduces the political desire to prop up federal projects just for the local jobs. Much easier to reduce wasteful spending when you don't layoff people you want voting for you.
easton · 4h ago
I'd assume (?) this effect is minimized by so much of the workforce living outside the district (600k people live in the district, ~6 million in the DC/Maryland/Virginia statistical area).
The Maryland and Virginia sides have representation (which is very pro-government jobs, as they should be considering their constituency).
bilbo0s · 4h ago
The political desire to prop up federal projects for the local jobs is exactly the reason they want to do the moves. It's corruption all the way down.
The corruption isn't an unintended consequence of the moves. The ability to engage in the corruption is the entire point of the moves.
rafram · 3h ago
The Trump administration is doing the opposite of that — they've been aggressively closing regional branch offices and consolidating agencies in the DC area:
If this NSF move is an indication that the White House now wants to distribute jobs more widely across the country, well, that's a real reversal of course from only a couple months ago.
Jtsummers · 2h ago
They've done both, and the purpose is the same. Moving office locations gets people to quit.
bachmeier · 4h ago
I'm not sure the current status, but during Trump I, they moved USDA research from Washington, DC to Kansas City.
> She says that more than half of agency employees decided to quit rather than uproot their families and move. Despite aggressive recruiting in Kansas City and making many new hires, both USDA research agencies are now roughly half the size they were before the move.
(As intended, of course.)
LeifCarrotson · 4h ago
It's not a bad place, but you'd have to move it there slowly if you wanted it to work. Establish a satellite campus, bring a few people there from the original HQ who want to move or will accept whatever incentives you can offer to move, hire locals where possible, work to build relationships like internships with UMKC programs or other local businesses and agencies, hire aggressively from people already in the surrounding area, and then over a period of a few years to a decade people looking to get an education and future job in this industry will realize there's opportunity in Kansas City, and you can start closing down the original location and building up the new one.
If you do this with no plan and no incentives in a matter of a year or less, it's going to decimate the whole agency.
nickff · 3h ago
The way that politics works these days means that any gradual move like that would likely be reversed by the next administration. The unfortunate reality is that if you want something done, the only option is to do it suddenly.
micromacrofoot · 3h ago
except that no one wants to move from DC to Kansas City, it's essentially designed to get all your best employees to quit
potato3732842 · 3h ago
The best employees are probably exactly the ones who'd be ecstatic do the same job but in KC.
The people who would rather be within the beltway than do the job are exactly the ones I'd be suspect of.
ceejayoz · 3h ago
The best employees can probably jump ship to get a job that doesn't require relocation halfway across the country.
The ones that grudgingly move are the ones who can't.
potato3732842 · 3h ago
The people who see the rest of their career being in agriculture will be very happy with the move. It's much easier to parlay your job studying agriculture into a job for someone who makes equipment for or an academic institution or trade group dealing in agriculture when you're in the same economic region. Moving isn't the end of the world to most of them because most of them knew it was in their future at some point.
The people who will get the shaft here are the career bureaucrats who see themselves jumping to another agency as they can either make that way harder for themselves by moving or quit because they are already located in the best place for their intended career track.
Given the choice I know exactly who I'd rather have staffing the agency.
Replace USDA with 18F or (pre Doge) USDS and the insanity of your agreement is laid bare for even the most uncritical reader to identify. Of course such agencies would be better off (from a hiring perspective) in SF or some other tech city than they would in DC (of course their customers are in DC so that kind of complicates things).
ceejayoz · 3h ago
> Replace USDA with 18F or (pre Doge) USDS and the insanity of your agreement is laid bare for even the most uncritical reader to identify.
"In 2024, 18F consisted of approximately 91 distributed employees working remotely across the United States."
They wouldn't have wanted to all relocate to KC either.
potato3732842 · 2h ago
Nitpick all you want. My point stands. USDA draws heavily on the ag sector talent pool so it should be where that talent pool is. Maybe that's not KC, maybe some other city in middle america is better. But KC is still way better than DC.
micromacrofoot · 3m ago
So admittedly KC isn't the best for the AG sector, but somehow it's still magically better than DC... where all the experts who have worked for the USDA and who are the most familiar with how it operates, live.
Forget the point, you don't even have a leg to stand on.
potato3732842 · 1m ago
I'm not saying it's not the best. I'm hedging against people like you making low effort comments that contribute nothing to the discussion like that by saying it might not be the best but it's better than DC
ceejayoz · 2h ago
> USDA draws on the ag sector talent pool...
71% of their budget goes to stuff like the food stamp program, interacting with tens of thousands of schools and state/local governments and whatnot.
The talent pool for bureaucrats (and researchers, and statisticians, etc.) is fundamentally more important.
(And let's not pretend there's no agriculture on the East Coast.)
bilbo0s · 4h ago
It's a horrible place to move it to.
If we make moves, Ok. How about this..
We move these agencies to get adversarial impulses going in service of cost control.
We move the USDA to the middle of New York City.
Urban Development to Tomah Wisconsin. (I'll settle for Nacogdoches Texas just to make sure the South gets some of these HQ's).
Department of the Interior should be moved to Miami Fl.
Department of Defense to Berkeley California.
And so on and so forth.
All should be legally obliged to hire only locals in civilian roles.
Having the USDA in Kansas City guarantees the tax payer gets robbed blind.
nickff · 3h ago
Why is Kansas City such a bad choice? I understand that you think it’s awful, I just don’t know why. From my very naive perspective, KC seems lower cost, and closer to farms than DC.
ceejayoz · 2h ago
> closer to farms than DC
Virginia and Maryland have plenty of farms.
A quick look on Google Maps shows one within ~10 miles.
But, ultimately, the USDA isn't there to farm.
bilbo0s · 1h ago
closer to farms than DC
Exactly why it shouldn't be there.
No adversarial environment. Corruption flourishes where there is no adversarial environment.
98codes · 3h ago
Too far from the beach.
bilbo0s · 4h ago
Not familiar with how Norway works?
But I am familiar with the US. We have so much corruption that it's a virtual certainty any moves of the kind you postulate would be precipitated by a desire for more and easier access to corruption. We actually have a long history of doing this sort of thing in the US. Sometimes we get more corruption, but the service in question is objectively better off. (Some moves made by the military when the Berlin wall came down.) More often we get more corruption and the service in question is objectively worse off. (NASA being forced, via corruption, to build solid rocket boosters a long way away from where the boosters would be used. Thus necessitating the modularization of the boosters into transportable segments. "No problem! We'll just use O-Rings!")
Here's the thing. Whether the results were objectively better, or objectively worse, corruption increased. So the US, as a whole, deteriorates.
palmfacehn · 3h ago
There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
> How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.
> if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.)
"The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"
econ · 55m ago
I envision a tent city, tents to live, tents to work, executive party tents etc
njarboe · 4h ago
So are the NSF employees going to share the building? The article doesn't say.
FirmwareBurner · 4h ago
Why the clickbait title? The article is called "HUD Plans to Move Operations From Washington to Virginia"
ceejayoz · 4h ago
The article's title is a bit like describing WWII as "many Germans resettling in Poland".
good! just demolish their old HQ in L'Enfant Plaza, all of which is a national embarrassment of cheap, demoralizing, poorly-rendered wannabe brutalism and shitty 80s dead-tech modern
If the central office has any say over the location someone works, you get the phenomenon where the population of less-desirable living locations get to suffer local employees that aren't good enough at their job to be given higher prioritization in choosing their station. And the organization looses good workers they can't accommodate.
France has been doing the opposite, leading to a concentration in and around Paris and few major cities outside of Ile de France.
The Maryland and Virginia sides have representation (which is very pro-government jobs, as they should be considering their constituency).
The corruption isn't an unintended consequence of the moves. The ability to engage in the corruption is the entire point of the moves.
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-a...
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-lega...
https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-rel...
If this NSF move is an indication that the White House now wants to distribute jobs more widely across the country, well, that's a real reversal of course from only a couple months ago.
> She says that more than half of agency employees decided to quit rather than uproot their families and move. Despite aggressive recruiting in Kansas City and making many new hires, both USDA research agencies are now roughly half the size they were before the move.
(As intended, of course.)
If you do this with no plan and no incentives in a matter of a year or less, it's going to decimate the whole agency.
The people who would rather be within the beltway than do the job are exactly the ones I'd be suspect of.
The ones that grudgingly move are the ones who can't.
The people who will get the shaft here are the career bureaucrats who see themselves jumping to another agency as they can either make that way harder for themselves by moving or quit because they are already located in the best place for their intended career track.
Given the choice I know exactly who I'd rather have staffing the agency.
Replace USDA with 18F or (pre Doge) USDS and the insanity of your agreement is laid bare for even the most uncritical reader to identify. Of course such agencies would be better off (from a hiring perspective) in SF or some other tech city than they would in DC (of course their customers are in DC so that kind of complicates things).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F
"In 2024, 18F consisted of approximately 91 distributed employees working remotely across the United States."
They wouldn't have wanted to all relocate to KC either.
Forget the point, you don't even have a leg to stand on.
71% of their budget goes to stuff like the food stamp program, interacting with tens of thousands of schools and state/local governments and whatnot.
The talent pool for bureaucrats (and researchers, and statisticians, etc.) is fundamentally more important.
(And let's not pretend there's no agriculture on the East Coast.)
If we make moves, Ok. How about this..
We move these agencies to get adversarial impulses going in service of cost control.
We move the USDA to the middle of New York City.
Urban Development to Tomah Wisconsin. (I'll settle for Nacogdoches Texas just to make sure the South gets some of these HQ's).
Department of the Interior should be moved to Miami Fl.
Department of Defense to Berkeley California.
And so on and so forth.
All should be legally obliged to hire only locals in civilian roles.
Having the USDA in Kansas City guarantees the tax payer gets robbed blind.
Virginia and Maryland have plenty of farms.
A quick look on Google Maps shows one within ~10 miles.
But, ultimately, the USDA isn't there to farm.
Exactly why it shouldn't be there.
No adversarial environment. Corruption flourishes where there is no adversarial environment.
But I am familiar with the US. We have so much corruption that it's a virtual certainty any moves of the kind you postulate would be precipitated by a desire for more and easier access to corruption. We actually have a long history of doing this sort of thing in the US. Sometimes we get more corruption, but the service in question is objectively better off. (Some moves made by the military when the Berlin wall came down.) More often we get more corruption and the service in question is objectively worse off. (NASA being forced, via corruption, to build solid rocket boosters a long way away from where the boosters would be used. Thus necessitating the modularization of the boosters into transportable segments. "No problem! We'll just use O-Rings!")
Here's the thing. Whether the results were objectively better, or objectively worse, corruption increased. So the US, as a whole, deteriorates.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmil...
>The shrimp treadmill study cost taxpayers more than $3 million over a decade.
>The National Science Foundation, not Congress, approved the shrimp treadmill study funding.
It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.
Stuff like $80k to study the bacteria in Yellowstone's hot springs… which brought us PCR. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil...
> How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.
> if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.)
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
"The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administrat...