By Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post (c) 2024
President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters say they want to move 100,000 federal jobs out of Washington to places that they describe as less expensive, closer to stakeholders and, as Trump put it in a campaign video, “filled with patriots who love America.”
Trump tried to move federal jobs out of Washington during his first term – on a much smaller scale – and that resulted in mass departures of experienced workers, questionable cost savings and broad interruptions to government work.
In 2019, the Trump administration said it would move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters and its nearly 600 jobs to the small city of Grand Junction, Colo. When the new offices opened a year later, just three of the bureau’s employees walked in the door.
About 40 more were assigned to other offices out West. But nearly 90 percent of headquarters employees opted to leave the agencyor work remotely rather than head West. It was “a giant brain drain,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, who took over as the agency’s director under President Joe Biden in 2021.
Trump officials also moved the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City. The relocation of the roughly 700 jobs disrupted the agencies’ work and raised doubts it was a money-saving decision, according to interviews and a critical government watchdog report that noted the agencies shed half their staff, including in key positions.
Laura Dodson, an agricultural economist and vice president of a workers local union, called it an “unnecessary kneecapping of an agency.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment. Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a second Trump term drafted by the Heritage Foundation, defended the move of land management employees as “the epitome of good governance,” saying it was “not only well-informed, but it was also implemented efficiently, effectively, and with an eye toward affected career civil servants.”
While the vast majority of the nation’s 2.3 million federal workers are already spread across the United States, Trump and his supporters have long been critical of the roughly 320,000 federal workers concentrated in and around the nation’s capital. Trump has often derided government employees in Washington as part of the “deep state” that he wants to shatter.
Their latest plan would affect nearly 1 in 3 federal workers in the Washington area – a sprawling region of 6.3 million people that extends far beyond the halls of power on Capitol Hill to the Pennsylvania state line and into West Virginia, according to the Office of Personnel Management.
The campaign promise to move federal jobs is separate from pledges by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s government efficiency czars, to slash the federal workforce via mass layoffs and by closing entire agencies.
So far, both efforts have been heavy on rhetoric and scarce on details.
The America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned presidential transition group, said moving 100,000 jobs and relocating entire agencies from D.C. would pierce the “Beltway bubble” and save $1.4 billion a year in payroll costs. It named two small agencies as prime targets: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, to be “headquartered in the coal field” in Pittsburgh, and the Air Traffic Organization, the command center for the nation’s air traffic controllers, to be moved to an unnamed destination. Together, they employ fewer than 1,000 people in the D.C. area.
It’s not clear that 100,000 jobs could depart the nation’s capital without drastic actions such as emptying the Pentagon in Northern Virginia or the medical research campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. – the two campuses are home to roughly 40,000 employees inside the Beltway. Nine big agencies, including Defense and Health and Human Services, account for the bulk of the federal jobs in the D.C. area.
About 100,000 other jobs are sprinkled across a roster of 119 lower-profile agencies in and around Washington, including the Peace Corps and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, according to Office of Personnel Management data.
What is clear is that the loss of so many government jobs would deliver a stiff blow to Washington’s local economy, said Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. It would have harmful knock-on effects, too, with the lost purchasing power from so many departing high-paying positions.
“It would put us way behind in terms of economic growth,” Clower said.
Relocating some federal agencies could make sense after evaluating factors such as whether a particular local area is a good fit, according to a 2019 report from the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think tank.
The job migrations of Trump’s first term started with an email in the summer of 2018 from then-Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to the staff of the Economic Research Service, a collection of economists who track things like vegetable production and farm trade fluctuations. The economists had once been spread across the country and focused on regional topics but had been brought together in Washington decades earlier to focus on national issues.
The small agency has a reputation for providing expert analysis on federal policy, said Susan Offutt, a former administrator under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “It speaks truth to power,” she said.
Purdue said the ERS would be leaving D.C. for Kansas City, a move that would streamline operations, save money and help recruit and retain employees. To many inside the agency, it felt like a punishment, according to current and former workers.
“It was a terribly dramatic day,” said Dodson, the union official.
In the email, Perdue also said the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, which provides funding and grants for agricultural research, would be moving. The small agency was nearing the end of its lease on a Washington office building and needed to move anyway.
Employees at the two agencies were informed they needed to be in Kansas City by September 2019. A small crew would stay in Washington.
According to a cost-benefit analysis by the Department of Agriculture, released in June 2019, moving the workers to the Midwest would save taxpayers nearly $300 million over 15 years, mostly through lower payroll and office costs. But a separate review that month by the Agriculture and Applied Economics Association, a professional trade group, argued that the USDA analysis overstated the price of D.C.-area office space and failed to account for the lost value of the research that would have been conducted by employees who would leave the agency. As a result, the association said, the move would not save money but would instead cost taxpayers at least $83 million.
The Government Accountability Office released a report in 2022 that called into doubt many of the touted benefits of the move, writing that top Agriculture officials overlooked key evidence. For example, “it didn’t factor in potential costs related to the attrition of staff or the disruption of agencies’ activities due to the relocation.”
Of about 550 workers expected to make the journey to Kansas City, only 85 did, according to union officials. “A whole bunch quit or left for other agencies,” Dodson said.
Others got extensions to move or were allowed to work remotely, mostly from home, according to the GAO.
After the pandemic hit, sending most workers home, many federal agencies such as the National Institute for Food and Agriculture decided to allow more remote work. The GAO report said that decision helped the agency eventually staff back up.
Today, about 20 employees are assigned to the Kansas City office, said Tom Bewick, a vice president of the local union, who is based in Virginia. At the ERS, about 40 employees are assigned to Kansas City, according to Dodson, who does her job from Maine.
The situation made an impression on Michigan State University professor Scott Swinton, who visited Kansas City in 2022 to catch up with six former PhD students who worked at the ERS. When he emailed the group about lunch and an office tour, three replied that they didn’t live in the area. The other three said they never went into the office.
In 2023, the GAO released another report that found that after relocating to Kansas City, the two agencies lost more than half their employees,produced fewer research reports and took longer to process farming research grants.
It took the agencies two years to reach prior staffing levels and get production back on track at its new Kansas City headquarters, according to the GAO. But the new workers had less experience. “We got back up to our same staffing levels, but we never got back the expertise that we lost,” Dodson said.
On paper at least, the case for moving the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Colorado appeared stronger. Almost all of the millions of acres of public land that the agency manages – and 97 percent of its roughly 10,000 employees – are out West. In 2019,the Trump administration said it wanted to put the decision-makers closer to the action.
The move was originally supposed to involve 600 positions. The agency wound up targeting about half that, mostly because of existing job vacancies.
Then President Joe Biden took office in 2021, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced that the move would be reversed, arguing that the bureau’s leaders needed to be closer to policymakers and other Interior agencies, said Stone-Manning, its director. Being based in Washington also made it easier for constituents and lobbyists to find agency employees, she said.
The reversal was a huge relief to the agency’s workers in Washington, who she said are now are awaiting the second Trump administration with trepidation. “I think there will be disruptions again,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Grand Junction office became the bureau’s new western headquarters. About 40 people now work there in good-paying jobs that have been a boon to the small city of about 70,000 just west of the Rockies, said Curtis Englehart, executive director of the Grand Junction Economic Partnership.
“We felt like it was a win,” Englehart said.