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.

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).

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.)

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.

>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.

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

Better based on what? How can you call any comment low effort when you provide 0 information to back up your claim that Missouri is 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.

It’s tough when experts are all in DC but results lag behind. You might want to check out how LeadsApp helps organize insights from different regions more effectively. It made following expert input a lot easier for me.