From CNN: “Employees turn their back on Agriculture secretary over being relocated to Kansas City”
Apparently one thing that they learned at the USDA is that one should try to avoid living in an agricultural region of the U.S.!
(Kansas is awesome for general aviation enthusiasts. A $200,000 (used) Piper Malibu with the extended tanks STC can reach anywhere in the Lower 48 nonstop from Kansas.)
Related:
- before agreeing to any move across state lines, a wise American will check the respective family law regimes that apply: Missouri versus D.C., Maryland, or Virginia. (Child support profits are more likely to be capped in Missouri compared to the winner-take-all jurisdictions in the D.C. metro area; a Missouri court is also more likely to award 50/50 parenting time to children, thus resulting in a huge reduction in child support cashflow if both parents work)
- before picking a house in the Kansas City area, it would also be worth checking Kansas family law, which is dramatically different than Missouri’s (i.e., the definitions of “justice” and “best interest of a child” are completely different on either side of the state line)
Hmm… let me develop on this idea: the fine people of DOJ should be sent to jail, right?
The U.S. prison-industrial complex is everywhere! All DOJ employees actually do live near the factories of justice and incarceration. If they’re in D.C. they’re close to Baltimore, one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S.: https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/travel/experience/america/2018/10/17/25-most-dangerous-cities-america/1669467002/
By some measures D.C. itself is one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S.: https://patch.com/district-columbia/washingtondc/dc-americas-16th-most-dangerous-city
(These stats raise the question of why folks from Central America are applying for asylum in the U.S. based on rates of violent crime back in Honduras or Guatemala. We have cities within the U.S. that are far more dangerous statistically than a rural village in Central America.)
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/01/gun-violence-us-cities-compared-deadliest-nations-world/4412/ compares U.S. cities to various countries from which people seek asylum. As of 2013, New Orleans was far more violent than any Central American country except Honduras (but Honduras today is much safer than back in 2012; see https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-honduras-violence-20181214-story.html )
And I thought New Orleans was much like Venice since 2005. I mean, peaceful and touristy.
Government agriculture bureaucrats object to living anywhere near a farm
Most likely the objection is to having their lives disrupted, packing up, selling the house, moving to a place not of their choosing, etc. Federal employees in Kansas City would be object to being relocated to Washington for the exact same reason.
Let’s extend it to the armed forces. Half of the bureaucrats in the Pentagon should be relocated to Syria or somewhere similar so that they can be near war.
Surely there have to be farms not far from DC. When Washingtonians buy milk for their corn flakes, it’s not likely that it comes from cows 1,000 miles away. Kansas City, on the other hand, is probably surrounded by suburban sprawl, like most American cities.
The mission of the U.S. military is defense, hence the “Department of Defense.” So our warriors need to stay here in the heartland and prevent assaults or intrusions across the northern or southern border. I hope that you wouldn’t suggest that our military’s job is to go halfway across the planet and start wars!
(I guess you could argue that the military folks should then be near our borders, but we are informed by the NYT that our borders are completely under control and nobody unauthorized is getting across.)
The mission of the U.S. military is defense, hence the “Department of Defense.” So our warriors need to stay here in the heartland and prevent assaults or intrusions across the northern or southern border.
The people issuing the commands to the soldiers, sailors, etc. appear to disagree with you regarding the mission.
we are informed by the NYT that our borders are completely under control and nobody unauthorized is getting across
Do you have an nytimes.com link for that?
Finally, we’re left with the question of “If some of the desk generals at the Pentagon were ordered to relocate to Texas, would they turn their backs on the more senior officer giving the order and then complain to CNN about the injustice of being moved by the military?”
There’s nothing wrong with relocating employees elsewhere. The Department of Defense has moved tens of thousands all over the country as part of Base Realignment and Closure.
These fine people will wind up getting other jobs in the DC area either as a lateral reassignment or maybe even a promotion.
When I lived in the DC area as a federal employee, my boss told me he had gone through a reduction in force one time at the Department of Transportation. He told me it was the best thing that ever happened to him. Wound up getting promoted into a much better job.
So change is what you make it. You can turn your back on the opportunity it presents or you can embrace it and use it to move forward in life
Lots of hypotheticals here based on the flippant DoD comparison by Vince, but the obvious comparison is to the private sector, where having your company move its headquarters is not uncommon and just as frustrating but can’t be accused of being a political ploy, though it’s often for the even worse reason of just aligning to the (new?) CEO’s (new?) hometown.
The US people would be well served by assigning every federal agency headquarters to a random struggling US city of sufficient size, instead of trying to cram them all into a single parcel of land on one coastal extreme. Spread out those guaranteed jobs to regions that could use economic stimulus.