How and how not to move government jobs out of Washington

The Washington, D.C., area is already rich and overcrowded, and with the arrival of Amazon.com's second headquarters it's about to get thousands more high-paying jobs. Lots of other metropolitan areas, especially in the middle of the country, are less rich and less crowded. So why not move some good government jobs out of Washington?

Cult Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang is all for it. From his campaign website: "Federal agencies that aren't directly tied to general government activities (e.g., the NIH) should be relocated to different areas throughout the country to provide a boost to local economies and tie the rest of the country to the federal government." Vox.com's Matthew Yglesias made the same argument in a much-discussed 2016 opinion piece that clearly inspired Yang, given that both recommend that the first agency to move should be the National Institutes of Health, to Cleveland.

Moving federal agencies out of Washington also has been endorsed by renowned urbanist Richard Florida, proposed in legislation by conservative Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio and to some extent put into effect in past decades by the late Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

So why is the U.S. Department of Agriculture getting so much blowback over the decision to move its Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture from Washington to Kansas City? (The Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management is also moving its headquarters to Colorado, but that involves fewer jobs and has occasioned less protest.)

Clearly, some of it has to do with the way the Trump administration has handled things. For example:

• Employees were given only 30 days to decide whether to move or lose their jobs, with the USDA reversing earlier commitments to give them several months.

• The USDA claimed that the move would save $300 million over 15 years, but an independent analysis concluded that it would actually increase costs by $83 million to $182 million over that period.

• White House Office of Management and Budget Director and Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney has crowed that the real goal of the move was to spur people to quit and thus "streamline government."

On the face of it, moving the USDA agencies to Kansas City seems like a good match. The ERS gathers data and publishes reports on crops and other agriculture-related topics, and the National Institute of Agriculture makes research grants. Kansas City is a big, vibrant metropolitan area with lots of well-educated people that's close to major farming regions and land-grant universities with good agricultural-science departments. It also has a median house price of $227,000, according to the National Association of Realtors, compared with $456,500 for the D.C. area. There are surely lots of talented agricultural economists and grant-making experts who would not find living in Kansas City to be an unbearable hardship, though their spouses and partners do have more good jobs to choose from in the D.C. area, which is one of the factors that has helped concentrate good jobs in a limited number of metropolitan areas in recent decades.