> 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.
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.
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.
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).
Nitpick all you want. My point stands. USDA draws heavily on the ag sector talent pool so it should be where that talent pool is. Maybe that's not KC, maybe some other city in middle america is better. But KC is still way better than DC.
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.
> 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.)