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Trump wants to move 100K federal jobs out of D.C. What could that look like?

Smiling Janet Ady in a snowy park setting
Margaret Barthel
/
WAMU
Janet Ady retired from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in January 2020 rather than move west.

This story was reported by WAMU.

Janet Ady didn’t want to leave her job leading a team at the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that oversees wide swaths of U.S. public lands. She loved her work supporting the BLM’s education, interpretation and volunteer programs across the country, the capstone of a career in federal conservation that started during the Carter administration.

But in 2019, President Donald Trump's first administration announced plans to break up the BLM’s D.C. office, moving teams to offices across the West and opening a new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado. Ady’s team would head to New Mexico.

Ady considered making the move; her career in the federal government had taken her to all kinds of places over the years. But she and her husband ultimately decided to stay put. So, in January 2020, Ady retired instead of moving.

She wasn’t alone. She shared her last day in the office with 60 other people who’d made the same choice.

“Everywhere you went, you’re saying goodbye to somebody,” she recalled. “It was huge.”

Because most people quit rather than leave D.C., Ady spent her final months trying to help her team find new jobs. The mood in the office was bleak.

“These are public servants. They are used to working really hard to meet the needs of the public. And it’s really, really wrenching to not be able to do their jobs,” she said.

It was a similar story in two parts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The same year, the Trump administration said it would move the USDA’s Economic Research Service, which studies American agriculture, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a grantmaking and research arm focused on farming innovations, from D.C. to Kansas City.

The relocations at BLM and USDA affected only a small fraction of the overall federal workforce of roughly 400,000 across the D.C. region. Some BLM positions were ultimately moved back to D.C. under the Biden administration. The impact was also muted by the pandemic, which allowed agencies to staff back up with remote workers. But what happened at the BLM and USDA in 2019 and 2020 could offer clues about what possible larger-scale changes during the second Trump administration could mean.

Officials at the time said the moves brought federal workers closer to the agricultural and public lands central to their mission.

“We have decision makers in Washington who are over on M Street and haven’t been on the ground, and they need to be out there better serving the American people,” BLM Acting Director William Perry Pendley said in a 2019 House Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Grand Junction plans. (The BLM’s neighbors at the new office were local oil and gas interests, which raised eyebrows among environmentalists.)

In this most recent election, Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to move 100,000 federal workers out of the D.C. region. Trump adviser Elon Musk, who leads the newly created advisory Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has said he wants to dramatically cut the size of the federal government.

The administration has already taken steps to radically reshape the civil service, offering ‘deferred resignations,’ pausing government diversity programs, and ending telework and hybrid work options.

Economist Laura Dodson was one of the few at the Economic Research Service who wasn’t transferred to Kansas City. She said it was hard to pick up the pieces after her colleagues were relocated or quit.

“When we lost all those people who’d been in their fields for 20 plus years, it does take a lag time for that expertise to build back up,” she said.

Dodson helped organize a union in response to the move for which she now serves as a steward.

“Taking out telework, relocating an agency — they’re just layoffs by another name,” she said.

Both relocations led to widespread departures at the BLM and the affected parts of the USDA. Nearly 300 people left the BLM; a year after the relocation, the affected USDA agencies had lost between 40% and 60% of their staff, according to analysis from the Federal News Network.

The brain drain had significant impacts on research at USDA that tracks global food production and trends in agricultural markets.

“When asked about the reason for the decreased number of economic research reports publications, an ERS [Economic Research Service] official noted that every division within ERS had sustained staffing losses since the agency’s relocation from Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Missouri,” a USDA inspector general report from December 2020 found. “The official acknowledged that the decrease in the publication of economic research reports between FY 2018 and FY 2020 was the result of the staffing reduction.”

USDA leadership initially said the move to Kansas City would put workers at the heart of a thriving “agriculture talent pool, in addition to multiple land-grant and research universities within driving distance,” which would provide ERS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture with “a stable workforce for the future.”

But Dodson pushed back on that argument. She said it was difficult for the agency to fill vacancies after the move until the pandemic opened up the possibility of telework, which allowed for hiring people from all across the country — including from back in D.C.

“There is a lot of agriculture happening to Kansas City, but the nucleus of agricultural economics is Washington, D.C.,” Dodson said.

Eighty percent of the federal workforce already works outside of the D.C. region, and they depend on their colleagues in Washington to keep them informed about the policy direction of the president, Congress, and other government agencies. That's according to Mary Jo Rugwell, the head of the Public Lands Foundation, an advocacy group of former BLM employees. Rugwell retired from a nearly 40-year career at the BLM as the state director for Wyoming.

She thinks moving federal offices out of D.C. would be a distraction from the BLM’s mission of conservation, recreation, and managing leases for mining and oil and gas extraction.

“I think there are more important things for this administration to be concerned about, I really do,” she said.

Max Stier, who heads the Partnership for Public Service, an organization that advocates for the federal civil service, says the relocation efforts decreased productivity in both agencies, costing taxpayers in the long run.

“The lesson that should have been learned from the first term is that this is not the road to better government or to more efficient government,” he said.

Some who do support an overhaul of the federal bureaucracy think moving agencies might distract from larger reform goals. Chris Edwards is an expert on the federal budget with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.

“Congress does not have enough time or resources to properly oversee these hundreds of federal agencies we have,” he said “Just think about how much more difficult oversight would be if all these agencies are spread out across America.”

Edwards supports significant cuts to government programs and reducing generous federal employee benefits, all with the goal of taming the ballooning federal deficit. But he questions whether moving offices out of D.C. would save money.

“A lot of workers and managers would need to fly into D.C. to communicate with White House decision makers and congressional decision makers,” Edwards noted. “So that would add airplane and hotel costs.”

USDA leadership projected in 2019 that the relocation to Kansas City would save taxpayers $300 million over 15 years, including $19 million in annual savings on rent and staffing costs. But a U.S. Government Accountability Office review of the agency’s cost-benefit analysis said it failed to consider “costs related to potential attrition or disruption of activities,” potentially leading to “an unreliable estimate of savings from relocation.”

Edwards is also concerned that relocating agencies could lead to a spoils system, with members of Congress fighting to land federal offices for their districts.

“There’s already sort of a pork barrel problem in Washington where members try to send special interest benefits to their districts,” Edwards said. “I think this would be a whole other level of pork barrel activity.”

Beyond political infighting, large-scale relocations are likely to be complicated by a host of legal issues, including employee union contracts and the unique legal framework of each agency as enacted by Congress, Stier said. He hopes the Trump administration and Musk’s DOGE will put their focus elsewhere. He points to the need for improving the government’s use of technology, hiring practices, and accountability for underperforming employees.

“Every leader of any good organization or any good leader I know understands that their ability to achieve their objectives depends upon their ability to have the right talent and to have that talent on board with their vision,” he said. “The way to make that happen isn’t to traumatize people.”

Margaret Barthel is the Northern Virginia reporter at WAMU.