In recent weeks, President Trump has been ratcheting up a cunning tactic for consolidating political power: the relocation of parts of the federal government. Far subtler than defying court orders or renditioning people to foreign prisons, it is nonetheless an alarming development — and all the more shameful because it corrupts what could have been a valuable government reform.
In the earliest moments of his last presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised to “shatter the deep state” by moving as many as 100,000 government positions out of Washington “to places filled with patriots who love America.” In February, the administration began making good on that promise by calling on agencies to submit plans by April 14 for moving offices away from the D.C. area, purportedly to reduce costs. A day after the deadline, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to help carry out those plans by removing longstanding restrictions on federal office locations. All the while, Mr. Trump’s appointees at organizations like the F.B.I. and the Department of Agriculture have been informing employees of their intent to disperse them across the country.
Federal officials who are unable to immediately relocate their families hundreds or thousands of miles away will face termination, paving the way for their replacement by Trump loyalists.
A bitter irony of such a destructive project is that government decentralization is a good idea. But politically motivated relocations will not improve the government or make it more responsive to its citizens; they will merely hollow out its functions and replace what’s left with a sprawling network of loyalists. There’s a better way.
In a country of 340 million people scattered across nearly four million square miles, executive power should not be concentrated within a single metropolitan area. Although 85 percent of federal workers are stationed around the country, the officials making the most important decisions still do so largely from Washington. In this sense, the picture of U.S. executive authority is not so different from how it appeared in 1800, when collaboration was limited by the speed of the fastest horse and buggy.
When the leadership of any organization is separated from the people it is meant to serve, both lose out. Leaders often have a better sense of what different people want, and care more about helping them get it, when they live across the street from them rather than across the country. (Even Starbucks is attuned to local signals, rolling out its pumpkin spice latte based on the arrival of fall in different places.) By the same token, residents care more about organizations they can reach with a walk or a drive rather than a flight. Imagine how much harder it would be for DOGE to destroy the executive branch if more people knew someone working for it.
Distributed organizations also benefit from distributed expertise. If you want access to specialized knowledge in both finance and tech, for example, it only makes sense to have some employees based in New York City and others in Silicon Valley.
What would a constructive vision of a decentralized federal government look like — one designed to foster genuine connection with the public and to ensure that its varied interests are better represented? At first, it would involve delegating more authority to executive officials already stationed across the country. From there, leaders might explore the possibility of relocating some D.C.-based officials, as Mr. Trump has suggested — but with respect and care, taking time to figure out which federal workers might actually be open to moving and where they should be located to complement work already being done in Washington. Most top officials would continue to reside in Washington. A legislative affairs official who acts as a bridge between Congress and the Department of Justice, for example, needs to be on Capitol Hill to do the best job. But a director at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who regulates coastal erosion might be more effective if immersed in the coastal regions and communities that erosion affects.
If this sounds like an exotic experiment, consider that decentralized leadership has already proven itself a successful model in many large organizations — private companies, yes, but increasingly governments, too. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, for instance, operates hours away from the top executive and legislative officials in Berlin, which helps safeguard judicial independence. South Africa distributes power by separating its three governmental branches across different metropolitan areas. On a smaller scale, the Pentagon operates a Silicon Valley office to enhance collaboration between the military and the tech sector.
Up until now, few people in Washington have been willing to consider a more decentralized federal government. Some members of Congress in recent years did show serious interest in the idea — notably Representative Ro Khanna on the left and former Representative Tim Ryan in the middle — but they were always the exception. Democrats, for the most part, did not consider it a priority, often equating a good government with one heavily concentrated in Washington, while thoughtful Republican leaders on this issue never emerged.
The result is that a good idea was left in the hands of Donald Trump and his allies, who are seemingly transforming a promising medicine for healing the executive branch into a poison to destroy it. In 2019, after Mr. Trump announced the relocation of two Department of Agriculture offices, his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, lamented how hard it was to remove civil servants and described relocations as a “wonderful way” to accomplish “what we haven’t been able to do for a long time,” celebrating that when civil servants were told they would have to move to “the real part of the country,” many quit. Though Mr. Mulvaney claimed that the relocations were intended to “streamline” the two offices, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees said that they were designed to weed out dedicated civil servants “and silence the parts of the agencies’ research that the administration views as inconvenient.”
A few weeks earlier, the administration announced the relocation of the Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colo. Bureau officials were given 30 days to move from Washington or face termination, resulting in more than 87 percent resigning or retiring. The new offices opened in the same building as the oil and gas companies that the officials were tasked with regulating.
To some degree, the relative quiet with which the administration’s relocation efforts have been met is understandable: Detailed plans are not expected to be made public, and calling on this Republican-controlled Congress to exercise oversight can seem futile.
But one surefire way of losing a fight is to forfeit it in advance. Drawing attention to the Trump administration’s evident efforts is crucial, but opponents must also reframe the issue. The goal should be to rescue the good idea of decentralization from the Trump administration’s destructive vision. Americans deserve a federal government next door — not because we need to move it away from evil people in Washington, but because we should share it with the talented people around the country who already are or eventually could work for it.
David Fontana is the Samuel Tyler Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University School of Law.
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