4 ms·

If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC. It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games. Th

by rayiner 8mo ago

If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC. It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games. There’s no reason USDA of all agencies should have thousands of employees in DC.

showerst 8mo ago
I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs. If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect. For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.
1234letshaveatw 8mo ago
So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns. No question that the USDA should be in someplace like Iowa or Nebraska
- magicalist 8mo ago
  > So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns and all the current employees that don't want to move are fungible?
  - atroon 8mo ago
    > all the current employees that don't want to move are fungible? Honestly? Probably. No one is really all that special.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > Honestly? Probably Why do you think specialist knowledge about crop and livestock management is that fungible? Particularly as it interfaces with the federal bureaucracy?
      - 1234letshaveatw 8mo ago
        Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge?
        JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge? I don't have a strong opinion on this. But I think a farm and food specialist in D.C. probably has more sway than tens of distributed experts in Iowa and Kansas. Part of the purpose of these agencies is to inform policy. That's hard to do if you're not near the room.
    - magicalist 8mo ago
      > No one is really all that special. They actually often are in the short term (see the "significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover" quote in the article about the similar relocation from Trump's first term), and a gutted department of agriculture can remain incompetent longer than you can avoid supply chain disruptions and food poisoning. What you do is open small distributed offices led by a driven person eager to live in that area, and let the small offices grow over the years as the DC offices shrink. Careers aren't that long on the timescales governments work on, you just have to be patient and be ok with slow, incremental progress in your own career instead of big splashy doge headlines followed by desperately trying to rehire and hire new expertise when you realize what you've actually done.
      - atroon 8mo ago
        You make a good point. I'm skeptical though that 100% (or even more than 60%) of the workers in the DC offices are true specialists in agriculture vs. office workers who happen to do agricultural work. Certainly there's a set of institutional knowledge to be maintained. But the most committed specialists are going to be the ones who are willing to move to e.g. Ogden Utah, as the previous commenter mentioned. The slightly specialized office workers, being able to swap into some other role for ${BUREAUCRACY} are less likely to move and less likely to need to. There are people in Ogden and ${RURAL_CITY_[1-5]} who are able to do the support work needed. However, as you say, the time scale is important and I did not really take that into account.
    - boelboel 8mo ago
      I've known people working in federal government where firing them would be a serious problem, as in they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough. Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.
      - ninalanyon 8mo ago
        > they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough. Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising. If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
  - drstewart 8mo ago
    Apparently they are in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-civil-service-roles-moved-out-of-london-in-latest-reform-to-the-state https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-civil-servic...
- donkeybeer 8mo ago
  Whos stopping them from building new houses? Nobody ever seems to be giving the simplest answer to housing problems.
cucumber3732842 8mo ago
The last thing some legislators and lobbyists who've cooked up a law that will make their benefactors rich at the expense of some other random industry is to have the enforcement bureaucracy in charge of actually doing it pushing back because it's nonsensical. Imagine if the EPA was located in Detroit. I bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase, the last thing you want if you want these cleaner newer trucks on the road). If the pencil pushers who sent steel production to elsewhere had their offices in Cleveland maybe we'd have less clean but more steel production domestically instead of offloading that tonnage of production to parts of the world where it's dirtier still, say nothing of the shipping to get it here (the last rebar I bought came from Oman).
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase To be fair, it also makes it incredibly difficult to import a truck made for any other market into America.
daffy_duck 8mo ago
[dead]
JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC If only we had like fifty sovereign governments spread out across our nation.
- ninalanyon 8mo ago
  When the federation was created was the concentration of power in the capital intended? Or was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent?
  - naravara 8mo ago
    The entire point of the Constitution was to concentrate more power in the Federal Government because the structure we had under the Articles of Confederation was an unworkable mess.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent? I guess my functional question is why agriculture requires federal regulation to the tune of the USDA. (And I'm asking this genuinely. As a not farmer.)
    - kube-system 8mo ago
      $189 billion of USDA's $213 billion budget is the Food and Nutrition Service. They're administering SNAP, WIC, school lunch programs, etc. These jobs are policy, distributing money, coordination with state programs, etc. There's a different answer "why" to each of these programs' origin stories, but in general, they were a response to issues that previously existed and weren't being addressed. e.g. the school lunch program was created because we don't expect children to skip meals at school due to their parents inability to provide for them. And it was done nationally because many states failed to solve the issue themselves.
boelboel 8mo ago
Thousands of employees isn't even that much for USDA. There's also good reason to have headquarters of organisations close to headquarters of other organisations. It just lowers efficiency (which they might be after)
naravara 8mo ago
80% of the federal workforce is based outside of the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. The ones who are around the capital are the ones doing policy or back-office work that’d be the equivalent of a corporate HQ, and they have benefits from being concentrated in a region where there’s a lot of other Federal back office work because they can recruit from a talent pool of people who are experienced in the particular requirements of Federal work. It’s the same sort of agglomeration effects that drives finance to concentrate in NYC or the film industry to concentrate in LA. Taking the USDA as an example, it doesn’t literally operates farm. The vast majority of what it’s doing is functionally insurance and financial services. The stuff that needs direct interaction with farms like inspections or scientific research are done out of field offices. If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.
- h2zizzle 8mo ago
  Only if Trump gets his way. https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-barc/beltsville-agricultural-research-center/ https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-barc/b...
- neutronicus 8mo ago
  > If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC. The comparison is particularly galling when you consider how many of these DMV white-collar government employees are black.
  - naravara 8mo ago
    Combat veterans as well since they get explicit preference in hiring.
h2zizzle 8mo ago
>It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games. DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot. Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.
lithobraking 8mo ago
The data [1] says that the gov is fairly spread out. According to the OPM site, 7.4% of USDA employees work in the DC area. California has more USDA employees (10.3%) than DC. Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016. [1] https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
kube-system 8mo ago
The small percentage of USDA employees that are in the DC area are mostly administering policy related things which absolutely make sense to be in that area.
muddi900 8mo ago
As other comments pointed out, the department is very much spread out. It can be confirmed via a simple google search. Why is such an egregious comment at the top?

by rayiner 8mo ago

showerst 8mo ago

I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs. If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect. For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.

1234letshaveatw 8mo ago

So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns. No question that the USDA should be in someplace like Iowa or Nebraska

magicalist 8mo ago
> So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns and all the current employees that don't want to move are fungible?
- atroon 8mo ago
  > all the current employees that don't want to move are fungible? Honestly? Probably. No one is really all that special.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > Honestly? Probably Why do you think specialist knowledge about crop and livestock management is that fungible? Particularly as it interfaces with the federal bureaucracy?
    - 1234letshaveatw 8mo ago
      Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge?
      - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge? I don't have a strong opinion on this. But I think a farm and food specialist in D.C. probably has more sway than tens of distributed experts in Iowa and Kansas. Part of the purpose of these agencies is to inform policy. That's hard to do if you're not near the room.
  - magicalist 8mo ago
    > No one is really all that special. They actually often are in the short term (see the "significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover" quote in the article about the similar relocation from Trump's first term), and a gutted department of agriculture can remain incompetent longer than you can avoid supply chain disruptions and food poisoning. What you do is open small distributed offices led by a driven person eager to live in that area, and let the small offices grow over the years as the DC offices shrink. Careers aren't that long on the timescales governments work on, you just have to be patient and be ok with slow, incremental progress in your own career instead of big splashy doge headlines followed by desperately trying to rehire and hire new expertise when you realize what you've actually done.
    - atroon 8mo ago
      You make a good point. I'm skeptical though that 100% (or even more than 60%) of the workers in the DC offices are true specialists in agriculture vs. office workers who happen to do agricultural work. Certainly there's a set of institutional knowledge to be maintained. But the most committed specialists are going to be the ones who are willing to move to e.g. Ogden Utah, as the previous commenter mentioned. The slightly specialized office workers, being able to swap into some other role for ${BUREAUCRACY} are less likely to move and less likely to need to. There are people in Ogden and ${RURAL_CITY_[1-5]} who are able to do the support work needed. However, as you say, the time scale is important and I did not really take that into account.
  - boelboel 8mo ago
    I've known people working in federal government where firing them would be a serious problem, as in they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough. Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.
    - ninalanyon 8mo ago
      > they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough. Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising. If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
- drstewart 8mo ago
  Apparently they are in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-civil-service-roles-moved-out-of-london-in-latest-reform-to-the-state https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-civil-servic...
donkeybeer 8mo ago
Whos stopping them from building new houses? Nobody ever seems to be giving the simplest answer to housing problems.

cucumber3732842 8mo ago

The last thing some legislators and lobbyists who've cooked up a law that will make their benefactors rich at the expense of some other random industry is to have the enforcement bureaucracy in charge of actually doing it pushing back because it's nonsensical. Imagine if the EPA was located in Detroit. I bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase, the last thing you want if you want these cleaner newer trucks on the road). If the pencil pushers who sent steel production to elsewhere had their offices in Cleveland maybe we'd have less clean but more steel production domestically instead of offloading that tonnage of production to parts of the world where it's dirtier still, say nothing of the shipping to get it here (the last rebar I bought came from Oman).

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase To be fair, it also makes it incredibly difficult to import a truck made for any other market into America.

daffy_duck 8mo ago

[dead]

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago

> If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC If only we had like fifty sovereign governments spread out across our nation.

ninalanyon 8mo ago
When the federation was created was the concentration of power in the capital intended? Or was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent?
- naravara 8mo ago
  The entire point of the Constitution was to concentrate more power in the Federal Government because the structure we had under the Articles of Confederation was an unworkable mess.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > was it supposed to be mostly a coordinating organ leaving the states to be much more independent? I guess my functional question is why agriculture requires federal regulation to the tune of the USDA. (And I'm asking this genuinely. As a not farmer.)
  - kube-system 8mo ago
    $189 billion of USDA's $213 billion budget is the Food and Nutrition Service. They're administering SNAP, WIC, school lunch programs, etc. These jobs are policy, distributing money, coordination with state programs, etc. There's a different answer "why" to each of these programs' origin stories, but in general, they were a response to issues that previously existed and weren't being addressed. e.g. the school lunch program was created because we don't expect children to skip meals at school due to their parents inability to provide for them. And it was done nationally because many states failed to solve the issue themselves.

boelboel 8mo ago

Thousands of employees isn't even that much for USDA. There's also good reason to have headquarters of organisations close to headquarters of other organisations. It just lowers efficiency (which they might be after)

naravara 8mo ago

80% of the federal workforce is based outside of the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. The ones who are around the capital are the ones doing policy or back-office work that’d be the equivalent of a corporate HQ, and they have benefits from being concentrated in a region where there’s a lot of other Federal back office work because they can recruit from a talent pool of people who are experienced in the particular requirements of Federal work. It’s the same sort of agglomeration effects that drives finance to concentrate in NYC or the film industry to concentrate in LA. Taking the USDA as an example, it doesn’t literally operates farm. The vast majority of what it’s doing is functionally insurance and financial services. The stuff that needs direct interaction with farms like inspections or scientific research are done out of field offices. If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.

h2zizzle 8mo ago
Only if Trump gets his way. https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-barc/beltsville-agricultural-research-center/ https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-barc/b...
neutronicus 8mo ago
> If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC. The comparison is particularly galling when you consider how many of these DMV white-collar government employees are black.
- naravara 8mo ago
  Combat veterans as well since they get explicit preference in hiring.

h2zizzle 8mo ago

>It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games. DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot. Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.

lithobraking 8mo ago

The data [1] says that the gov is fairly spread out. According to the OPM site, 7.4% of USDA employees work in the DC area. California has more USDA employees (10.3%) than DC. Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016. [1] https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

kube-system 8mo ago

The small percentage of USDA employees that are in the DC area are mostly administering policy related things which absolutely make sense to be in that area.

muddi900 8mo ago

As other comments pointed out, the department is very much spread out. It can be confirmed via a simple google search. Why is such an egregious comment at the top?