“D.C. and Maryland to sue President Trump, alleging breach of constitutional oath” (Washington Post) concerns a state and a quasi-state that apparently don’t like the Trumpenfuhrer or his family’s hotel.
My model of the U.S. President is that he or she doesn’t have that much power due to Congress controlling the purse strings. However, I’m wondering if a President could retaliate against a hate-filled state by moving federal employment out. Let’s take Maryland, for example. The Census Bureau has a massive office in Suitland, Maryland. This is apparently not the best neighborhood because one of my MIT alumni friends recently said “they put a big fence around the parking lot to cut down on carjackings.” He lives in Arlington, Virginia and would presumably be happier if the Census Bureau moved to Virginia, for example. The D.C. area is expensive and notorious for incompetent programmers. Why not move Census to a place where it is easier to hire good software developers, where the cost of living is lower so that the civil service salaries are more attractive, and perhaps where there is no state income tax so that employees will enjoy a boost in take-home pay?
Readers: Would it take an act of Congress for Trump to move a bunch of agencies? Or is this something that as the manager of the executive branch he can do as easily as negotiating a new lease on office space within the same state or city? Who has actually been to the Trump hotel in D.C.? What is it like?
Related:
- see Real World Divorce for how a move would affect the likely outcome of divorce, custody, and child support lawsuits for a federal employee (moving from Maryland to Nevada would be devastating to a typical plaintiff, for example, though statistically beneficial for the children)
- the book Code Warriors covers a proposed move by the National Security Agency out of Maryland and into Kentucky (Fort Knox, actually); at least in the mid-1950s this would have been done without Congressional approval (the military eventually decided against the move)
In principle, the Executive Branch can relocate agencies without Congressional action, yes.
In practice, there are at least two roadblocks I can think of that make it difficult and time-consuming to do so:
(1) Even if the President decides to relocate an agency, he has to get funding approved by Congress to actually do it in a practical sense. Funding for the agency, including any funds necessary to execute a relocation, has to be in the approved budget and appropriations. So if Congress doesn’t want an agency relocated, they can simply refuse to fund such an effort.
(2) The government cannot contract for leased office space (or buy buildings outright) anywhere near as easily as a private company can. There are *lots* of statutes and regulations governing this process, and even the regulations, which are technically written by the Executive Branch, can’t be changed just by executive order because the process by which they are written and changed is dictated by statute (i.e., by Congress). So even if there is approved funding to relocate an agency, it won’t happen quickly; it could easily take one or even two Presidential terms.
I think he could, say, move the IRS to Detroit as part of supporting the redevelopment effort there. And to thank voters of the great state of Michigan for helping him get elected (Detroit, itself, went for Hillary, but close enough!) With the money saved by having probably half the permanent staff resign, he could fill in with lower-cost midwesterners and pay for the move, as well, to Peter’s point, above.
Ray: You raise a good point. If you want to slim down the federal government, which Trump says that he wants to do, and you want to replace older workers with younger workers, which every employer wants to do, and you want to balance out the U.S. economy so that the Midwest isn’t given over to SSDI and OxyContin, it would seem that moves could be done without any extra budget because there would be a huge payroll savings from some workers quitting due to not wanting to live in the new location. Keep moving allowances minimal. Rent out the old office space at crazy high D.C. prices.
About 25 years ago, former WV Senator Robert Byrd got the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division (the FBI’s largest division) moved out of DC into a sprawling new campus off the Robert Byrd Highway in Clarksburg, WV.
Byrd brought a lot more federal pork to WV:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_named_after_Robert_Byrd
Ray: Your plan would work as long as the budget and appropriations that fund the IRS didn’t have requirements in them that would preclude it. Which most budgets and appropriations do. It’s not as simple as “spend whatever needs to be spent for the IRS to do its job”. There might be separate appropriations for personnel and facilities, for example, which would preclude redirecting money appropriated for salaries to pay for moving the facilities, at least not without Congressional approval of the new appropriations. (Note that this would still be true even if the required budget for salaries dropped due to people quitting.)
Are you sure about the restrictions you posit, Peter?
https://www.congress.gov/114/bills/hr5485/BILLS-114hr5485pcs.pdf
is a sample bill to fund the IRS. I don’t see anything in there that requires the agency to stay in a particular location. Congress authorizes them to spend money on “rent payments” but doesn’t say to which landlord or in which state (actually they probably already have offices in all 50 states; Congress doesn’t say what size each office must be in square footage or headcount). Why can’t they expand in Detroit and move some staff members to that beautiful lakeside location?
[Congress is pretty specific in the above-referenced bill regarding what the IRS can’t do, e.g., “None of the funds made available to the Internal Revenue Service by this or any other Act may be used to make a video unless the Service-Wide Video Editorial Board determines in advance that making the video is appropriate, taking into account the cost, topic, tone, and purpose of the video” (was the IRS running its own Hollywood studio prior to this?).]
It looks to me as though you’d need an act of Congress to FORCE an agency to move, but generally the executive branch seems free to spend money on rent and salaries as deemed “necessary” (as long as the total per agency doesn’t exceed Congressionally set limits).
philg: “Are you sure about the restrictions you posit, Peter?”
No, I was speculating, hoping that someone else would do the actual work of looking up the appropriations bill. 🙂
“I don’t see anything in there that requires the agency to stay in a particular location.”
No, but that’s not the point I was making in response to Ray.
You’ll notice that there are specific amounts appropriated to the IRS for “taxpayer services”, “enforcement”, and “operations support”. Only the latter, it seems to me, based on the language in the act, could be used to pay for relocating offices. It’s not clear where salaries are appropriated for IRS employees (other appropriations say “salaries and expenses” but that one doesn’t), so it’s not clear whether funds made available by reducing salaries could then be applied to office relocation expenses.
My guess would be that salaries for the personnel in each part of the IRS (taxpayer services, enforcement, and operations support) are included in the “expenses” appropriated for that part; if that’s correct, then the IRS could apply savings from reducing the workforce in operations support towards relocation expenses, but not savings from reducing the workforce in taxpayer services or enforcement (which I’m guessing is the majority of IRS employees). But I can’t tell from the language in the act.
(Also, of course, the IRS could just decide to shortchange other operations support functions in order to pay for relocating facilities; there don’t seem to be limitations on those funds within the general categories given other than small amounts required for certain items. That’s not what Ray was proposing, but given the statutory language it would seem to be possible.)
Members of Congress definitely care about where money is spent. Senators from either party are powerful people. Just because the President can legally do something doesn’t mean it would work politically.
Also – To a first approximation, a single link to an appropriations bill gives us zero percent of the applicable laws and regulations. I wouldn’t be surprised if moving a Federal agency to punish political adversaries is actually illegal and there are certainly scads of laws and regulations on how such decisions are made and implemented designed to mitigate the ability of the President to do so (because the IRS is there to provide services to the government not for use as a political hatchet by the President).
hate-filled? I guess hate is where you find it.
ZZAZZ: By “hate-filled” of course I meant only “filled with hatred of Donald Trump”. When they’re not suing King Donald I, I’m sure that the residents of Washington, D.C. are brimming over with love (well, except maybe when they’re killing each other at the 10th-highest rate in the U.S.; see http://wtop.com/local/2016/03/d-c-baltimore-city-among-top-murder-capitals-u-s/ ).
Neal: Moving Census wouldn’t be “to punish political adversaries”. Suppose that Census HQ were moved to Lawrence, Kansas. That would be so that it could be next to the geographical center of the Lower 48 and adjacent to the University of Kansas, a source of qualified workers available at lower cost than fighting for talent in the D.C. Metro area.
You say that an agency may be “there to provide services to the government”. Why would Census be unable to serve from a bureaucratic home in Kansas? Most user-visible FAA functions are handled from Oklahoma City (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administration for “The FAA is headquartered in Washington, D.C. as well as the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and its nine regional offices:”). I have never heard anyone, inside or outside the FAA, say “I wish the FAA would move all of those Oklahoma City jobs back to the D.C. area”.
The issue with moving any office of the gov’t (like the IRS or the census bureau) is the GSA controls the office space. So in order to move people the president would have to get GSA to allocate a lot of new office space for those people to move to. I suspect the $$ for GSA to do that would have to come from congress. So they would have to get involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Services_Administration
@philg: If the purpose of moving Census was really not “to punish political adversaries” then there is a reasonable probability that the agency would end up in a state which hated Trump. However, I should have clarified that I think the answer to your question is yes, Trump can move Federal agencies out of states which hate him. It’s just that the barriers to doing so are not insignificant. I don’t doubt Trump has the vindictiveness necessary to hatch such a plan, I very much doubt he has the skills necessary to pull it off at scale.
Neal,
Trump-hating states are on higher-valued shores where it is too expensive to locate governmental agencies. Even under Obama government contractor jobs were moving inland mid-west, in big part because there is a rate bump-up for governmental contractors (and employees) located on or near shore. So it is very unlikely that move to more affordable areas is the move to anti-Trump area. It also would make sense from infrastructure point of view.
@dean: There are plenty of affordable areas within Trump hating states, and expensive big cities offer compensating advantages (if they did not, the rural to urban migration which has occurred for most [all?] of U.S. history would not be continuing to this day). I do not agree that non-political analysis would make it “very unlikely” that Federal facilities would be cited in “anti-Trump” states.
Bill: Nothing can happen without the GSA allocating office space? As part of a five-year plan, for example? What if there were some vacant commercial office buildings available in a city such as Detroit? Why can’t a federal tenant move in if the GSA can agree on terms with the landlord? https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104480 says that fully half of federal employees are currently working in “leased properties” (the rest in government-owned buildings). The New York Times informs me that most of what Donald Trump does it illegal, but would it be a separate crime if he caused the ratio of leased space to move from 50/50 to 55/45?
Neal: Being in a big city, with an industry cluster, makes sense for a private employer. But government skills tend to be specialized. The FAA can’t hire people who already know about aircraft registration, regardless of where they might locate. Since they’ll have to train people in-house, Oklahoma City is as good as anywhere else. A lot of government jobs are like that. And even where the government does need skills that exist on the commercial market, I haven’t heard people say that they have difficulty recruiting. Los Alamos, NM is a remote location and yet it is fully staffed with scientists. The same can be said for Oak Ridge, Tennessee (see below). Houston was not a center of EECS or aeronautics before NASA set up shop there (thanks to President Johnson).
On Oak Ridge, from http://www.newsweek.com/hogs-hill-197542 :
During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt summoned the congressional leadership for a top-secret meeting on the need for an atomic bomb. All vowed to put aside petty concerns. Then Tennessee Sen. Kenneth McKellar, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, took his turn. ” Mr. President, I agree that the future of our civilization may depend on the success of this project, ” he bellowed. “Where in Tennessee are we going to build it? ” So Oak Ridge entered the annals of the atomic bomb.
Neal. it appears that most of large cities influx is due to foreign immigration. Large cities tend to bleed semi-assimilated population to rest of USA. And, I think that due to regulation, Trump-loving areas of Trump – hating states are getting depopulated. So yes, upstate NY would get a boost if government agency moved there but it would be in a Trump-loving to Trump – neutral area and looking at how infrastructure and communications projects failing there in comparison to Ohio or Wyoming. it is much harder logistically, and way more expensive to locate governmental agencies in upstate NY vs Wyoming. In addition, everyone in Rochester or Albany would have to be paid east coast pay rate.
@philg: It seems that housing costs in Springfield MA are comparable to those in Oklahoma City. There are areas within California where the housing costs are roughly comparable to those in Oklahoma City. The national labs were cited where they are for security purposes, not economy. The budget per staff member for LBNL is not all that much higher than the budget for Los Alamos.
>Since they’ll have to train people
>in-house, Oklahoma City is as
>good as anywhere else
The degree to which this is true varies by government function, and labor cost isn’t the only factor which goes into a siting decision.
If Trump wants to trim the workforce of a federal agency, relocating jobs to Springfield, MA would probably be effective! See http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/04/springfield_ranked_no_2_most_d.html for how “Springfield occupies the No. 2 spot on the list of the Northeast’s most dangerous cities,”
But I think most federal workers would be happier in Colorado (see http://time.com/4655836/health-happiness-well-being-states/ for example) than woven in among the crack houses of Springfield.
Also, remember that divorce lawsuit defendants are not very productive workers (and once they lose the lawsuit, they have a reduced incentive to achieve in their careers). So moving any federal agency to Massachusetts or California would be a bad idea because those states provide large financial incentives to the lower-earning spouse to file a lawsuit. (Federal workers get paid 2X what private workers earn so typically it would be the federal worker who was the higher-earning spouse.)
Compare http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Massachusetts and http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Oklahoma for example and tell us where you think a plaintiff would be more enthusiastic about making a trip down to the courthouse.
@dean: Immigrants account for about 1/3 of the influx.
If you take out Dallas, TX and such out of the equation that is home of Trump-hating states refugees and corporate headquarters transfers and recall that Silicon Valley influx is officially non-immigrant foreigners on H1B, foreign immigrants in real terms make larger portion of large cities growth. You do not suppose that Wall Street earth movers and shakers wannabees and Broadway famous wannabees surpass foreign immigration in NYC?
@dean: I went to the primary sources and did the calculations myself. Now, I’m not a demographer and I didn’t spend more than an hour on it, so take that for what it is. By my calculations, since 1970/1980, immigration accounts for about 1/3 of urban population growth (if you assume all immigrants moved to urban areas which is conservative). The rest is endogenous population growth and rural to urban migration (which surprised me).
Neal, I mostly rely on my observations. When I was in college last large manufacturing companies moved out of than my east coast location. There were plenty of smaller family manufacturing business, both high-tech and otherwise, owned by both immigrants and multi-generational Americans but their hiring of outside engineers was negligible. Every graduating engineer I knew from my college who was hired not by a financial firm or a public utility moved in-land, with partial exceptions for software industry. In recent years a few people I knew moved to Texas, from interior states I have ben working and living in. And look at cities and coastal real estate all propped by immigrants. I think that you need to recalculate starting late 1980-th, from Bush senior times. Prior time interval is not a good indicator of what has been happening lately.
Alabama first voted Republican in 1964. Kindly grandfather LBJ immediately arranged the closure of Brookley AFB in Mobile, which had just been modernized to support the Vietnam War. It took until 1969, but it cost Mobile 10% of its payroll employment.
So yes, it can be done, but not by somebody as ignorant of federal government as @realDonaldTrump.
the other Donald, and when did NASA moved to Alabama? And many other government contractors? I am genuinely curios since I used to work with someone there.