[mtalantikite]

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.

[dogleash]

> 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]

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]

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]

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.

[Tepix]

Most german agencies are in Berlin, there are a few that are (still) in Bonn, the former capital.

[maratc]

Germany has been doing it since the Middle Ages, when it was using the HRE moniker for itself.

[postexitus]

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.

[njarboe]

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.

[easton]

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]

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]

Giving more states a reason to be invested in the continued existence of the federal bureaucracy is a bad thing?

[iamtheworstdev]

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

[rafram]

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-a...

https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration...

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-lega...

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]

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

[bilbo0s]

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]

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-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]

> 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-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-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.'"

[palmfacehn]

>They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.

Proposals which are identified as either worthy of funding or rejected.

If anything NPR's selective reporting is misleading. Obviously the overall cost would be much higher than the materials cost of $1k. More over, the treadmill wouldn't exist without the study itself. I don't have a problem with a source like having an NPR editorial or ideological agenda, but the way they twist things is highly misleading. If their case is good, it deserves a better supporting argument.

>It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.

It isn't difficult to imagine a world where a fisheries association or another large seafood concern voluntarily funded a relevant university study. Whether this would include treadmills for prawns, I cannot say.

Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.

However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.

>"It's the best way of funding..."

[bachmeier]

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

[xeromal]

Doesn't seem like a bad place to move it to!

[ceejayoz]

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.)

[LeifCarrotson]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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).

[bilbo0s]

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]

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.

[ceejayoz]

> 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]

closer to farms than DC

Exactly why it shouldn't be there.

No adversarial environment. Corruption flourishes where there is no adversarial environment.

[98codes]

Too far from the beach.