> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
Forget the point, you don't even have a leg to stand on.
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
The USDA move was so bad that they lost a significant number of employees and were still working with significantly less experience years later. This is outrageously expensive and disruptive to any company or agency.
Not to mention the fact that about 5 years later the administration is making massive additional cuts to the agency after relocating and rehiring for it. It's just churn for nothing.