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Years ago I read about how Norway was redistributing agencies out of Oslo and into other cities across the country. This felt like it made intuitive sense, as y

Years ago I read about how Norway was redistributing agencies out of Oslo and into other cities across the country. This felt like it made intuitive sense, as you'd maybe get to distribute jobs to other localities and break up the concentration of bureaucracy. I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same.

oldpersonintx2 1y ago
[dead]
bachmeier 1y ago
I'm not sure the current status, but during Trump I, they moved USDA research from Washington, DC to Kansas City.
- xeromal 1y ago
  Doesn't seem like a bad place to move it to!
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963207129/usda-research-agencies-decimated-by-forced-move-undoing-the-damage-wont-be-easy https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963207129/usda-research-agenc... > 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.)
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    It's a horrible place to move it to. 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.
    - nickff 1y ago
      Why is Kansas City such a bad choice? I understand that you think it’s awful, I just don’t know why. From my very naive perspective, KC seems lower cost, and closer to farms than DC.
      - 98codes 1y ago
        Too far from the beach.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        > closer to farms than DC 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.
      - bilbo0s 1y ago
        closer to farms than DC Exactly why it shouldn't be there. No adversarial environment. Corruption flourishes where there is no adversarial environment.
  - LeifCarrotson 1y ago
    It's not a bad place, but you'd have to move it there slowly if you wanted it to work. Establish a satellite campus, bring a few people there from the original HQ who want to move or will accept whatever incentives you can offer to move, hire locals where possible, work to build relationships like internships with UMKC programs or other local businesses and agencies, hire aggressively from people already in the surrounding area, and then over a period of a few years to a decade people looking to get an education and future job in this industry will realize there's opportunity in Kansas City, and you can start closing down the original location and building up the new one. 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.
    - nickff 1y ago
      The way that politics works these days means that any gradual move like that would likely be reversed by the next administration. The unfortunate reality is that if you want something done, the only option is to do it suddenly.
  - micromacrofoot 1y ago
    except that no one wants to move from DC to Kansas City, it's essentially designed to get all your best employees to quit
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      The best employees are probably exactly the ones who'd be ecstatic do the same job but in KC. The people who would rather be within the beltway than do the job are exactly the ones I'd be suspect of.
      - ceejayoz 1y ago
        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.
        potato3732842 1y ago
        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).
        ceejayoz 1y ago
        > 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 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.
njarboe 1y ago
On the other hand keeping all of the federal workforce in D.C, instead of the states, reduces the political desire to prop up federal projects just for the local jobs. Much easier to reduce wasteful spending when you don't layoff people you want voting for you.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  The political desire to prop up federal projects for the local jobs is exactly the reason they want to do the moves. It's corruption all the way down. The corruption isn't an unintended consequence of the moves. The ability to engage in the corruption is the entire point of the moves.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    Giving more states a reason to be invested in the continued existence of the federal bureaucracy is a bad thing?
- easton 1y ago
  I'd assume (?) this effect is minimized by so much of the workforce living outside the district (600k people live in the district, ~6 million in the DC/Maryland/Virginia statistical area). The Maryland and Virginia sides have representation (which is very pro-government jobs, as they should be considering their constituency).
bilbo0s 1y ago
Not familiar with how Norway works? But I am familiar with the US. We have so much corruption that it's a virtual certainty any moves of the kind you postulate would be precipitated by a desire for more and easier access to corruption. We actually have a long history of doing this sort of thing in the US. Sometimes we get more corruption, but the service in question is objectively better off. (Some moves made by the military when the Berlin wall came down.) More often we get more corruption and the service in question is objectively worse off. (NASA being forced, via corruption, to build solid rocket boosters a long way away from where the boosters would be used. Thus necessitating the modularization of the boosters into transportable segments. "No problem! We'll just use O-Rings!") Here's the thing. Whether the results were objectively better, or objectively worse, corruption increased. So the US, as a whole, deteriorates.
- palmfacehn 1y ago
  There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory. If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions? If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed? https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmill-study-3321445 https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmil... >The shrimp treadmill study cost taxpayers more than $3 million over a decade. >The National Science Foundation, not Congress, approved the shrimp treadmill study funding.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    > characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research… It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research. Stuff like $80k to study the bacteria in Yellowstone's hot springs… which brought us PCR. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophilic-bacterium-a-yellowstone-hot-spring-helping-fight-against https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil... > How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions? They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal. > if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed? They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.) https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi... "The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"
dogleash 1y ago
> I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same. If the central office has any say over the location someone works, you get the phenomenon where the population of less-desirable living locations get to suffer local employees that aren't good enough at their job to be given higher prioritization in choosing their station. And the organization looses good workers they can't accommodate.
- firefax 1y ago
  People sometimes want less "desirable" locations because there's lower cost of living -- raising kids in a home with a yard vs a condo or apartment.
- mtalantikite 1y ago
  As a remote worker since 2008, I agree, I don't want someone telling me I have to live in a place I wouldn't want to live for a job. But also, they're already dictating that people have to live in the DC area, which probably has a similar effect. I'm sure there are plenty of highly talented bureaucrats living in Chicago, or Nashville, or Boulder, or Houston, etc etc.
alphager 1y ago
Germany has been doing it since 1949. It leads to stronger regional centers and dishes the capital effect. Germany has many larger cities all over the country. France has been doing the opposite, leading to a concentration in and around Paris and few major cities outside of Ile de France.
- maratc 1y ago
  Germany has been doing it since the Middle Ages, when it was using the HRE moniker for itself.
- Tepix 1y ago
  Most german agencies are in Berlin, there are a few that are (still) in Bonn, the former capital.
rafram 1y ago
The Trump administration is doing the opposite of that — they've been aggressively closing regional branch offices and consolidating agencies in the DC area: https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-administration-closes-regional-white-plains-ny-social-security-hearing-office-hearings-online/84013443007/ https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-a... https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration-shuts-regional-head-start-offices-prompting-child-care-concerns/ https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-legal-offices_n_67d0c2afe4b08ae973d9446e https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-lega... https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-releases/trump-musk-plan-to-shutter-interior-offices-nationwide-devastating-local-economies-and-abandoning-tribes https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-rel... If this NSF move is an indication that the White House now wants to distribute jobs more widely across the country, well, that's a real reversal of course from only a couple months ago.
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  They've done both, and the purpose is the same. Moving office locations gets people to quit.
postexitus 1y ago
The UK is actively relocating many civil service roles from London to various locations across the UK as part of the "Places for Growth" initiative. DVLA is in Swansea, Planning in Bristol, Dept of Work and Pensions in Wrexham, - Great British Energy will be HQ'd in Aberdeen I believe.
iamtheworstdev 1y ago
The counter argument to that is how VC constantly keeps money in SF/Palo Alto/etc because concentrating the workforce has its upside.

oldpersonintx2 1y ago

[dead]

bachmeier 1y ago

I'm not sure the current status, but during Trump I, they moved USDA research from Washington, DC to Kansas City.

xeromal 1y ago
Doesn't seem like a bad place to move it to!
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963207129/usda-research-agencies-decimated-by-forced-move-undoing-the-damage-wont-be-easy https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963207129/usda-research-agenc... > 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.)
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  It's a horrible place to move it to. 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.
  - nickff 1y ago
    Why is Kansas City such a bad choice? I understand that you think it’s awful, I just don’t know why. From my very naive perspective, KC seems lower cost, and closer to farms than DC.
    - 98codes 1y ago
      Too far from the beach.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      > closer to farms than DC 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.
    - bilbo0s 1y ago
      closer to farms than DC Exactly why it shouldn't be there. No adversarial environment. Corruption flourishes where there is no adversarial environment.
- LeifCarrotson 1y ago
  It's not a bad place, but you'd have to move it there slowly if you wanted it to work. Establish a satellite campus, bring a few people there from the original HQ who want to move or will accept whatever incentives you can offer to move, hire locals where possible, work to build relationships like internships with UMKC programs or other local businesses and agencies, hire aggressively from people already in the surrounding area, and then over a period of a few years to a decade people looking to get an education and future job in this industry will realize there's opportunity in Kansas City, and you can start closing down the original location and building up the new one. 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.
  - nickff 1y ago
    The way that politics works these days means that any gradual move like that would likely be reversed by the next administration. The unfortunate reality is that if you want something done, the only option is to do it suddenly.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  except that no one wants to move from DC to Kansas City, it's essentially designed to get all your best employees to quit
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    The best employees are probably exactly the ones who'd be ecstatic do the same job but in KC. The people who would rather be within the beltway than do the job are exactly the ones I'd be suspect of.
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      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.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        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).
        ceejayoz 1y ago
        > 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 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.

njarboe 1y ago

On the other hand keeping all of the federal workforce in D.C, instead of the states, reduces the political desire to prop up federal projects just for the local jobs. Much easier to reduce wasteful spending when you don't layoff people you want voting for you.

bilbo0s 1y ago
The political desire to prop up federal projects for the local jobs is exactly the reason they want to do the moves. It's corruption all the way down. The corruption isn't an unintended consequence of the moves. The ability to engage in the corruption is the entire point of the moves.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Giving more states a reason to be invested in the continued existence of the federal bureaucracy is a bad thing?
easton 1y ago
I'd assume (?) this effect is minimized by so much of the workforce living outside the district (600k people live in the district, ~6 million in the DC/Maryland/Virginia statistical area). The Maryland and Virginia sides have representation (which is very pro-government jobs, as they should be considering their constituency).

bilbo0s 1y ago

Not familiar with how Norway works? But I am familiar with the US. We have so much corruption that it's a virtual certainty any moves of the kind you postulate would be precipitated by a desire for more and easier access to corruption. We actually have a long history of doing this sort of thing in the US. Sometimes we get more corruption, but the service in question is objectively better off. (Some moves made by the military when the Berlin wall came down.) More often we get more corruption and the service in question is objectively worse off. (NASA being forced, via corruption, to build solid rocket boosters a long way away from where the boosters would be used. Thus necessitating the modularization of the boosters into transportable segments. "No problem! We'll just use O-Rings!") Here's the thing. Whether the results were objectively better, or objectively worse, corruption increased. So the US, as a whole, deteriorates.

palmfacehn 1y ago
There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory. If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions? If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed? https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmill-study-3321445 https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmil... >The shrimp treadmill study cost taxpayers more than $3 million over a decade. >The National Science Foundation, not Congress, approved the shrimp treadmill study funding.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research… It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research. Stuff like $80k to study the bacteria in Yellowstone's hot springs… which brought us PCR. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophilic-bacterium-a-yellowstone-hot-spring-helping-fight-against https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil... > How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions? They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal. > if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed? They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.) https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi... "The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"

dogleash 1y ago

> I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same. If the central office has any say over the location someone works, you get the phenomenon where the population of less-desirable living locations get to suffer local employees that aren't good enough at their job to be given higher prioritization in choosing their station. And the organization looses good workers they can't accommodate.

firefax 1y ago
People sometimes want less "desirable" locations because there's lower cost of living -- raising kids in a home with a yard vs a condo or apartment.
mtalantikite 1y ago
As a remote worker since 2008, I agree, I don't want someone telling me I have to live in a place I wouldn't want to live for a job. But also, they're already dictating that people have to live in the DC area, which probably has a similar effect. I'm sure there are plenty of highly talented bureaucrats living in Chicago, or Nashville, or Boulder, or Houston, etc etc.

alphager 1y ago

Germany has been doing it since 1949. It leads to stronger regional centers and dishes the capital effect. Germany has many larger cities all over the country. France has been doing the opposite, leading to a concentration in and around Paris and few major cities outside of Ile de France.

maratc 1y ago
Germany has been doing it since the Middle Ages, when it was using the HRE moniker for itself.
Tepix 1y ago
Most german agencies are in Berlin, there are a few that are (still) in Bonn, the former capital.

rafram 1y ago

The Trump administration is doing the opposite of that — they've been aggressively closing regional branch offices and consolidating agencies in the DC area: https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-administration-closes-regional-white-plains-ny-social-security-hearing-office-hearings-online/84013443007/ https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-a... https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration-shuts-regional-head-start-offices-prompting-child-care-concerns/ https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-legal-offices_n_67d0c2afe4b08ae973d9446e https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-lega... https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-releases/trump-musk-plan-to-shutter-interior-offices-nationwide-devastating-local-economies-and-abandoning-tribes https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-rel... If this NSF move is an indication that the White House now wants to distribute jobs more widely across the country, well, that's a real reversal of course from only a couple months ago.

Jtsummers 1y ago
They've done both, and the purpose is the same. Moving office locations gets people to quit.

postexitus 1y ago

The UK is actively relocating many civil service roles from London to various locations across the UK as part of the "Places for Growth" initiative. DVLA is in Swansea, Planning in Bristol, Dept of Work and Pensions in Wrexham, - Great British Energy will be HQ'd in Aberdeen I believe.

iamtheworstdev 1y ago

The counter argument to that is how VC constantly keeps money in SF/Palo Alto/etc because concentrating the workforce has its upside.