13 ms·
Let’s relocate a bunch of government agencies to the Midwest
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoThe author suggests moving all 20k NIH employees to Cleveland, and seems to think that all 20k will go along with this instead of finding different employment that doesn't involve uprooting their families and moving to Ohio.
- benbrown 10y agoThe basic premise may be disruptive in a "Big Bang" move but could be accomplished gradually by building new facilities and shifting project flow over time. Also, the DoD makes fast changes like this all the time as the result of BRAC. Government employees don't tend to just up and change jobs - they are career workers who like the stability and promise of a pension.
- metaphor 10y ago> ...the DoD makes fast changes like this all the time as the result of BRAC. Nothing fast results from a BRAC decision.
- MistahKoala 10y agoWould the German experience of transitioning from Bonn to Berlin be of much relevance here?
- mschuster91 10y agoIt's STILL not completed, over two and a half decades after the wall fell. The amount of money wasted is incredible (7.5M € in 2016 in direct costs, http://www.merkur.de/politik/hendricks-stellt-bericht-zum-bonn-berlin-umzug-vor-zr-6828708.html http://www.merkur.de/politik/hendricks-stellt-bericht-zum-bo...), not to mention wasted time and the loss of efficiency because teams and management are split across Germany.
- MistahKoala 10y agoReally! I had no idea. I barely ever see a reference to Bonn in anything I read about Germany these days; I'd formed the impression that everyone had moved in the 90s.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago(a) The difference between moving civilians and moving military personnel is that if a civilian doesn't want to go they can just resign, but if the military person doesn't want to go they have to suck it up and go anyway. (b) The "good" government pension hasn't been available since the 80s, (b') uprooting your family and moving hundreds of miles away is a pretty big blow to stability.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MonkeyKing01 10y agoHe also assumes that should those people not move, that Cleveland has enough people with the right skillsets to fill the gap.
- mavelikara 10y agoThe more relevant question is this: are there enough people with right skillsets willing to relocate to Cleveland?
- douche 10y agoMoney talks, and the same salary goes a lot farther in Cleveland than DC. It's really dumb that we compress all of our workforce into a few cities, especially in an age when 90% of office jobs can be done just as efficiently anywhere with a high-speed internet connection, rather than face-to-face in a cube farm.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago> the same salary goes a lot farther in Cleveland than DC It's not the same salary, DC's locality pay is higher than Cleveland's : https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2016/CLE.pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... vs https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2016/DCB.pdf https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
- Fomite 10y agoThe author also doesn't realize how intertwined many agencies are, including the NIH. It's not uncommon to have meetings that have NSF, DoE, DoD, NIH and HHS employees all in the same room. This was especially valuable during public health emergencies.
- saycheese 10y ago66% of Americans live within 100 miles of the border. It would make more sense to move all the Americans living in the middle (sometimes middle of nowhere) and focus on making the cost of living in major cities more affordable; 9 of the top 10 cities are all within 100 miles of the border.
- djrogers 10y agoHave you considered that some of the 34% of people living in 'the middle' prefer to live there? I find it hard to believe you are seriously advocating the forced relocation of citizens in the name of making 'more sense'...
- saycheese 10y agoI'm suggestioning that American stop subsidizing vast unpopulated areas of its country for the benefit of a subset of the country. Once the subsidies are deverted, the areas will naturally depopulate.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- madengr 10y agoSubsidize? Maybe those vastly unpopulated areas of the country ought to stop feeding those 100 miles from the coast.
- dao- 10y agoAutomation is a thing, fewer and fewer people work in farming, and those who do spend less and less time doing manual labor. I'd rather support this trend and work towards full automation and remote control.
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- madengr 10y agoBack in the early 90's the CIA had planned to move to WV; never happened obviously.
- greglindahl 10y agoSen. Byrd moved a bunch of federal facilities to the part of WV closest to DC. No entire departments, but significant back-office operations are there. Here's an FBI example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Criminal_Justice_Information_Services_Division https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Criminal_Justice_Informati... Looks like Byrd was behind the attempted CIA move, here's how that ended: http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal92-1108662 http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal92-...
- kevindong 10y agoFor context: the `Sen. Byrd` referred to above was the senator from West Virginia from 1959 to 2010. Clearly, he was trying to get federal dollars for his state.
- xherberta 10y agoObviously they wouldn't move to WV and say they didn't.
- 60654 10y agoPretty weird to see a discussion of the economy in the midwest without a single mention of Chicago - you know, the third largest city in the US... ;)
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoI'm from Indiana. Chicago is its own beast, and most midwesterners don't really identify with it and it has its own sort of issues and problems and isn't so representative of the other cities. And so it goes that you are gonna wind up with different moving benefits if you go to Chicago rather than Detroit, Cincinatti, Louisville, Indianapolis, and so on. (and Different disadvantages as well).
- vinay427 10y ago> Chicago is its own beast, and most midwesterners don't really identify with it This is certainly not true with people in the Detroit area, in my experience. Maybe it's true in the rural Midwest but in urban and suburban Midwest, Chicago is definitely viewed as an integral part as was Detroit some time ago (and possibly still today). This seems like a case of "if it doesn't fit the argument, let's not count it."
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoIt isn't that it isn't integral - in fact, I see it as integral enough that I truly think Chicago keeps the midwest alive, at least portions of it. It is just different. A lot of the problems that other midwestern cities have - decline of factories, for example - chicago is able to make up for to an extent. And to me, that is the main thing: The chicago experience doesn't match the average Midwestern city experience - and discussing chicago directly takes a bit of time. Hence the exclusion in the article.
- vinay427 10y agoThis seems like you're justifying the "if it doesn't fit the narrative, it doesn't count" case that I mentioned. Chicago is still a Midwestern city whether it's doing well or it's doing poorly, just as Detroit is a Midwestern city when it was booming decades ago and when it's not currently. "Midwest" is a geographic and perhaps cultural term, not a term that refers to failing cities.
- rhexs 10y agoI've worked with a lot of ex-federal employees that left mostly due to cost of living in DC (need a married couple both working with a federal salary to live anywhere close to work) and not enjoying the incredible sprawl of the area. Always fantasized about government jobs being relocated to less populated areas. Would be a great chance to develop better planned cities or help rejuvenate areas. Just a fantasy though. About as likely as high-speed rail from SF to NY.
- achamayou 10y agoIt's been done before, check out Brasilia, Yamoussoukro, Naypyidaw more recently. I think it's fair to say that it's not been a massive success, and that federal employees generally did/do everything they could to stay in the old capital. Aside from the fact that the entertainment and cultural options available tend to be limited, distance from the rest of the family and friends, as well as the perspective of being tied very strongly to a single employer are usually unappealing. You run a real risk of losing anyone senior/competent, and keeping only the most junior of your staff, who have no other option but to relocate. To stand any chance of success, I would think that the process needs to be fairly gradual, with good transport connections with the historical centres of activity.
- spangry 10y agoThe process also needs integrity. I've seen a few of these proposals now. The good ones have a clear rationale for relocation: the Australian Federal Treasury, for instance, is moving a sizeable chunk of their workforce from the capital (Canberra, population ~400,000) to Sydney (population ~5m). Why? Because the financial industry in Australia, and many regulators in the Treasury portfolio, are based in Sydney. Seems logical to do this if you agree that lower-level, person-person connections are valuable (I think they are). The bad ones have no clear rationale, and co-incidentally the relocation target happens to be a marginal electorate in some regional area...
- maxerickson 10y agoDC itself is an example of a new planned city for a government capital. It just happens to be pretty old (for a US city).
- aaron695 10y agoSo move jobs to a place where people don't want to be?
- Noseshine 10y agoAnd the main reason people don't want to be in such places? No jobs!
- SiVal 10y agoYou can move the jobs without moving all the people. There are a lot of people outside of the DC Metro area who have the necessary qualifications for most federal jobs. When I was a kid, my father worked for a federal agency in an office that was two hours from Washington and, for some reason, they moved all 400 jobs out of our town to Philadelphia. The jobs all moved even though many of the people didn't.
- aaronhoffman 10y agoHow much of the money that would be re-injected into these communities was taken via taxes in the first place?
- jawbone3 10y agoThe point is that most taxes would be from other states, so it is a net wealth transfer to the new hosting state no matter the tax rate.
- pmorici 10y agohttps://mises.org/blog/which-states-rely-most-federal-spending https://mises.org/blog/which-states-rely-most-federal-spendi... The current situation is that 39 of the 50 states get back more in Federal spending than they put in in Federal Taxes.
- nightski 10y agoJudging by comments it fees like the HN crowd has an incredibly warped view of the Midwest. It is amusing because it is a rather great place to live.
- Chos89 10y agoA lot of snobbish comments here IMO, coming from Europe I'm getting an image of the Midwest as a place where 99% people work in agriculture and don't know how to read or write.
- vinay427 10y agoIt's a very misleading stereotype because where I grew up in the Midwest, seemingly 80% of my classmates had a parent who was an engineer.
- hiram112 10y agoA few of the Midwest states in the corn belt consistently out performed the rest of the nation in the pre college tests that used to be given to most of the nations students, though part of this was due to the lack of minority students.
- thesagan 10y agoBeing from the midwest, and working from within and without, there's been definitely been a growing anti-midwest sentiment coming from the coasts. As if it's dead and now should be written off. Abandon the place, like Detroit. Go to S.F. instead, where C.O.L. is extreme, and because jobs should concentrate. (Well, yes, to a degree.) Since its industrial-labor power fell we've been seen as more of a joke than of anything serious. (Which drives the politics a bit wacky, too.)
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoI've lived and travelled all over the country and the only thing the Midwest has going for it is it's not the South.
- jlgaddis 10y ago
- oakesm9 10y agoIt's on a different scale, but in the UK the BBC decided to move a lot of their operations out of London. This was party done as a political move to spread the jobs out from the south east of the UK to the north of England, which is in a similar postindustrial situation to the Midwest (I presume). They needed up moving most of the tech and R&D departments, children's programming, and see news, sport, and radio shows.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gibsjose 10y agoAlthough I don't think this is feasible or even necessarily the right thing to do, I personally am dying to go back to the Midwest. Coming from beautiful, friendly, cold Northern Michigan, I'd be ecstatic to get out of the DC area, but good luck moving the other 10,000 NASA employees. It's a different culture in the Midwest. Some good, some bad, but overall I personally prefer the ability to have friendly conversations with strangers back home than the (generalizing here) awkward, egotistical, self-interested metropolitan area here. The first questions you are asked in DC are inevitably "Where do you work?" and "What's your title?". That being said, DC is a beautiful city and there's a lot of great things here. But still, I'd much prefer to be camping on a beach on Lake Michigan...
- hellofunk 10y agoI think you are really stereotyping here. I suspect your impressions are based more on your social circles than the actual culture. If your circles are in work related settings or with other transplants from outside D.C., the experienice is a lot different than if interacting with D.C. natives. Likewise for non midwesterners who move to the Midwest.
- Chathamization 10y agoVery much this. If you're a transplant that's come for work and spend you're time with other transplants that have come for work, it's not surprising that you'll end up talking about what you do for work. This is particularly true if you go to generic young professional events (whereas if you go to, say, a language meetup people will ask you more about your experience with the language). There's nothing particularly wrong about this, but it will give you a skewed view of things if you think it is representative of the entire area (for instance, transplants who think that native Washingtonians are virtually nonexistent).
- threatofrain 10y agoI'd also say that a lot of people just ask where you work as a matter of conversation, not because they're interested in what you can do for them in business. Opening a conversation that way unfortunately has a lot of side effects.
- mtberatwork 10y agoThere are government agencies and regional offices in the midwest already. DFAS in Indianapolis, for example, is housed in one of the largest government buildings outside of the Pentagon. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Finance_and_Accounting_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Finance_and_Accounting...
- spaceisballer 10y agoI really do enjoy the DC area, however I would love to be back in the Chicago area. Sure it would be a locality pay cut, but housing is so much more affordable.
- user5994461 10y agoManagement 101: Go back to reading peopleware before taking (or suggesting) stupid decisions. All case studies ever done about relocating an entire company to far away have _always_ gone bad. People didn't follow. Of the few who did, some will realize next year that it was a bad idea and leave. All your present and past employees will distrust you because you forced them to abandon their life.
- heysunshine123 10y agoSo this guy wants just a little bit of a planned economy. Not too much, mind you. Just the right amount. Newsflash: If doing business gets easier, then more business will be done. More business leads to more economic activity and more jobs. It's not that complicated.
- Tempest1981 10y agoBut momentum is definitely factor. Once you have a successful city/region, people flock there, often to the point of overcrowding. Businesses want to be where the "talent" is.
- cmurf 10y agoAlready exists. It's called the Denver Federal Center. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Federal_Center https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Federal_Center
- beansbeans 10y agoThe supposed precedent for this is that DC survived sequestration? The worst thing to happen during sequestration was a week or two of furloughs -- the author is proposing the permanent removal of tens of thousands of jobs. More than half of federal employees are over 45. So you're either forcing them to uproot their families, or (more likely) forcing them to switch careers at an age where that's not so easy.