Horrors! USDA moved a few bureaucrats out of D.C. to improve service

It was a dramatic scene. As Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue spoke to his employees at an all-hands meeting in D.C. last week, several of them stood up and turned their backs to Perdue in silent protest.

I’ve never seen a similar protest at a private company’s staff meeting, although a few of my co-workers were known to silently nod off. Since I had grown accustomed to regular paychecks, I feigned rapt attention while elbowing my sleepy comrades.

What hideous scandal provoked so many loyal public servants to publicly oppose their boss and disrupt America’s beloved agricultural bureaucracy? The $22 trillion national debt? Creeping fascism? The inclusion of kale in Caesar salads?

No, agriculture workers were mad that the secretary is moving a few of them nearer the agriculture they’re regulating.

Work with those you regulate? Eww

“Following a rigorous site selection process, the Kansas City Region provides a win win – maximizing our mission function by putting taxpayer savings into programmatic outputs and providing affordability, easy commutes, and extraordinary living for our employees,” Secretary Perdue said in a press release.

“The considerable taxpayer savings will allow us to be more efficient and improve our ability to retain more employees in the long run. We will be placing important USDA resources closer to many stakeholders, most of whom live and work far from Washington, D.C.”

Don’t get too excited about the money saved, taxpayers. Perdue is only moving 547 employees out of nearly 100,000 employed by the USDA, or about half of 1%.

Still, this minor relocation, utterly common among the private sector, provoked protest and internal demands to unionize the two small sub-agencies affected.

Just imagine, agricultural regulators might be forced to associate with farmers. Eww.

Most agencies should move out of D.C.

This is a tiny step in the right direction, but most of our federal agencies should be moved out of the Beltway. Leave the departments of State, Defense and Treasury in Washington; those are the only three outlined in the Constitution to begin with. If we aren’t going to consolidate or eliminate the other agencies, at least move them closer to their mission.

The Department of the Interior should be, well, in the interior. As an Arizonan, I’m biased, but relocate it to the Grand Canyon State. After all, the federal government already owns nearly 39% of our state. Gila Bend is nice this time of year.

Shouldn’t Housing and Urban Development focus on a city that needs some help? Downtown Detroit is a perfect fit.

The U.S. News and World Report lists Alabama as the worst state for education. Why doesn’t Betsy DeVos move her thousands of employees to Birmingham? Perhaps they could expand their impact by volunteering for a few hours to tutor in local schools.

Maybe they'd serve people better

Six of America’s wealthiest counties surround Washington, D.C. Not only would these moves save taxpayers millions, but they would alleviate income inequality by spreading the government’s borrowed wealth. Why should the perpetual economic boom be limited to our capital?

Better yet, it would help bureaucrats to better serve and understand those whom they are supposedly helping.

If the cabinet secretaries need to commute every few weeks to the White House or Capitol Hill, that’s easy enough to accommodate. Or they could avoid the hassle by video conferencing like the rest of us.

Relocate the Department of Labor to the Rust Belt, the Department of Energy to the oil fields of North Dakota, and the Department of Transportation to the intersection of Interstates 80 and 25 in Cheyenne, Wyo.

And if the president ever needs an energetic Secretary of Veterans Affairs, I’m willing to relocate to any of our fine military bases in Hawaii. I’m not about to turn my back on that move.

Jon Gabriel, a Mesa resident, is editor-in-chief of Ricochet.com and a contributor to The Republic and azcentral.com. Follow him on Twitter at @exjon.