The Trump administration has promised to move the headquarters of some agencies away from the Washington area. There’s even legislation proposing this called the Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement. Yep, the swamp act. My next guest says he’s skeptical this would help much or save money. You might not like his alternative, but its an idea that also has support. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin got more from the conservative Cato Institute, former economic committee staff member Chris Edwards.
Interview transcript:
Tom Temin And you have written that the idea itself, of moving agencies away, to bring it closer to the people is the way the administration has been proposing this is not such a good idea. And you’ve got a couple of reasons. What are they?
Chris Edwards Well the idea of moving workers out of Washington, I think that the genesis was that Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) notes that a lot of federal office buildings were empty. Then the Trump administration folks and Elon Musk said, hey, let’s move all the workers back to their office. But then there’s some Congress persons, then Senator Ernst who said, hey, even better, let’s move them out of Washington. I’m all for downsizing government, but I don’t think this plan will save taxpayers money.
Tom Temin And that’s not really downsizing. Just taking 500 people or a thousand people at headquarters and moving them to Wichita or something. It’s actually a net cost. And you have the same thousand people.
Chris Edwards That’s right. I think moving workers from the D.C. region out to places like Iowa and other places across the country, there would be a big logistics cost in moving all these folks. Then you could sell federal buildings, but you’d have to build or lease new federal buildings where the workers are going to be moving to. And then there’d be all the ongoing costs of all these federal agency decision makers were in places spread across the country. Well, they still have to come back to D.C. and meet with congressional staffers and go to fly in for congressional hearings and meet with White House people so It’ll be all these additional costs of lines and hotel costs for all these thousands of workers spread across the country to meet and discuss with other leaders in Washington, so I’m not sure it would save money in the long run.
Tom Temin And that idea of being close to Congress, because if you are in the policy and budgeting positions, that’s really where you need to do. That’s what headquarters does with operations often out away from Washington, closer to where they need to be, or sometimes in almost every county if it’s agriculture department.
Chris Edwards Yeah. That’s right. So there’s already a problem in the federal government that decision making is very slow because there’s excess layering the federal government. I think this would make federal decision making even slower if these agencies were spread even further apart and further from the real decision makers in Washington, which are members of Congress and their staffers and people in the White House. There’s also the issue of within DC, there’s a lot of knowledge sharing. There’s a federal expert on federal IT systems that can move between agencies now. There’s federal executives and managers move between agencies and can bring best practices across these agencies. So I think you would lose some of that if agencies were siloed across the country. So one of the Congress persons who favors some of this decentralization is Representative Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) who suggested we move USDA out to Iowa. But that was, in my view, it was silo. The agency would be separate from other decision makers, and I think it would strengthen the special interest power of the agricultural interest of the headquarters say, if the USDA was moved to Iowa, which would ultimately be good for federal taxpayers.
Tom Temin And from the standpoint of service to farmers for the various programs USDA has, they have all of these field offices, thousands of them, I believe, that are peopled with people that have communications and computer systems tying back to headquarters anyway.
Chris Edwards Well, that’s right, Tom. But I think this raises one of my other objections here is I think the focus ought to be here on downsizing. We do have a massive deficit problem where the government is running annual deficits of almost $2 trillion. I think we ought to focus on downsizing some of these programs, like farm subsidies, where most of these subsidies are going to wealthy farmers. The federal government spends $30 billion a year. And it has, as you pointed out, the USDA has hundreds of field offices across the countries to hand out these subsidies to farmers. So rather than moving more of the bureaucracy out of sight of Washington, I think we ought to downsize the programs that reduce these federal subsidies to farmers, for example, to begin with, and not just decentralize the subsidies.
Tom Temin We’re speaking with economist Chris Edwards. He studies fiscal affairs for the Cato Institute. And let’s get to the downsizing. President Trump promised to do that, and now we’ve seen this massive effort through trying to get people to resign early to close down USAID and so forth. And if one believes in a smaller government that does fewer things. Do you think this administration is going about it in the right way?
Chris Edwards Well, one metric to start off with here is that the federal government this year will spend $7 trillion. Only 400 billion of that will be the cost of the federal worker pay and benefits for the 2 million or so federal civilian workers. So while I’m absolutely in favor of thinning the bureaucracy, the Congress actually needs to defund the programs first. So I raise the issue of farm subsidies. To take a serious stab at finding efficiencies in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, let’s eliminate some of these excessive subsidy programs for farmers. Or I also, for example, favor the effort to downsize federal K-12 spending. But the trick there is not to thin the bureaucracy. You’ve got to eliminate the programs first and allow the states to take over K-12 education funding. So I think Congress needs to lead these downsizing efforts. There’s only so much the executive branch can do by itself.
Tom Temin Right, in those functions that people decide the government should do, you want them to do it right. And that takes a certain number of staff positions in general.
Chris Edwards Well, that’s right. Ultimately these programs, almost all of them are in statute. So you can fire the workers or induce them to resign as the Trump administration wants to do. But ultimately, the members of Congress who favor those programs, you want that spending. So while Trump, there may be some short term savings in the sort of scattershot approach he’s taking here. But in the long run, if you want to downsize the government, Congress has to act, or else the next president is just going to come in to office and replace all those workers if the programs aren’t repealed by statute.
Tom Temin Right. And let’s get to the topic of telework, and you’ve expressed the opinion that maybe it’s not such a great idea to force everyone back to the office five days a week.
Chris Edwards Well, Senator Joni Ernst has made a big thing to her credit about the fact that a lot of federal office buildings are partly or mainly empty since COVID because a lot of federal workers who have remote work ability these days, she wants and the Trump administration wants all these workers back into the office five days a week. I don’t think that’s the way to save money. I think the way to save money is allow federal workers to work remote if it’s reasonable for their jobs, and then sell all these extra office building or convert them, for example with local zoning or laws to residential. There’s a housing shortage in this country. Federal buildings take up a lot of space, let’s convert a lot of this extra federal office space into residential and into residential buildings. The federal government owns an unbelievable 300,000 buildings as you may know, Tom, across the country. It’s an extraordinary number of buildings. There surely is efficiencies here. And in the modern economy with remote work that we can find here by allowing workers where it’s reasonable to work at home and selling some of these extra federal office buildings.
Tom Temin And all of this we’ve been talking about is the result of executive orders, just like everything that the Biden administration did and on and on backwards, I think it really got its big start. There’s executive orders going back to the Eisenhower administration, but they’ve all had them. But the volume of them in the range into society, into government that they reach, seems to be accelerating like on a hockey stick curve. And that seems to be the withdrawal of Congress from so many of these important areas.
Chris Edwards I think that’s true. And I think it also it’s partly because the two parties have become further away in their basic ideologies. So if you look at the issue of the federal bureaucracy, Trump in his first term, passed a number of executive, signed a number of executive orders to make it easier to remove. Federal workers for poor performance and misconduct. Then Biden comes into office and repeals those two Trump executive orders. And now Trump has reissued those executive orders. So one of the issues here is that there’s just fundamental disagreement between the parties. I think Cato has issued a report on what executive orders we think Trump should repeal and should sign, and it is reasonable to do to make some act to take a lot of actions by executive order. So, for example, there is a big problem here. It is very difficult to remove poorly performing federal workers. And I think Trump’s executive order on that front is very reasonable. But then other major restructuring of agencies, program terminations, that sort of thing, of course, has to be changed by Congress through statute.
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