BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
“Had the FBI decided to stay in its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue we would have been happy for them to be here but (that) the federal site did not produce property taxes and most FBI employees were not taxpaying city residents…overall this is hugely positive.”
Washington DC Mayor Vincent Gray, expressing his satisfaction that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is being moved out of the nation’s capital.
The FBI is currently located in a 40-year-old colorless monstrosity right in the heart of Washington, on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol. The building is a monument to waste and inefficiency. It is named after–and stands as an embarrassing testament to the reign of the mastermind behind the Bureau–Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose craftiness at domestic spying would have made the National Security Agency blush.
The Government plans to build a new FBI headquarters in either Maryland or Virginia, and that is apparently just fine with the Mayor.
In fact, it makes sense for the Government to move the FBI. Washington, DC is gridlocked by more than politics. Traffic is terrible, taxes are high, schools are mediocre, and getting simple city services like a driver’s license can make a grown man cry.
The Mayor and City Council have enough problems patronizing and placating DC’s 648,000 residents. They seem to have little interest in putting up with 400,000 daily commuters from neighboring states and an even larger number of tourists, tradesmen, and carpetbaggers who visit the city regularly.
The District of Columbia Government has tried for 50 years to mold the city into one of the once-admired “planned communities” of the 50s and 60s, with landscaped boulevards and doggie parks, where homeowners paint their front door the same shade of colonial gray, where residents walk everywhere and compost their garbage.
And for 50 years the city fathers have failed, miserably.
Their experiment in social engineering, particularly the campaign to force residents to abandon their cars and climb onto buses, trains, trollies, and bicycles, or just walk, is a monument to good intentions gone bad. Social engineering seldom works in America. But thanks to the city’s unrepentant dedication to this Marxist-Leninist pathology, DC has made the record books with the worst traffic congestion and some of the worst urban pollution in America, just the polar opposite of the intent.
Needless to say, many of us spend a lot of time in the car as a result, sitting in traffic, waiting on the half-filled bus stopped up ahead, and warily watching the bicyclist going the wrong way balancing a cup of coffee on his knee, or the pedestrian, eyes wide, ready to spring out into traffic for a jay-walking adventure across K Street. It leaves plenty of time to ponder why so much of the Federal Government is still housed in Washington, DC.
The book Founding Brothers recounts how several of our founding fathers decided over dinner one night in 1790 to locate the capital on land along the Potomac in exchange for a deal to pay off the states’ revolutionary war debt. But to be fair to them, the founders could not have envisioned at the time just how big our Government bureaucracy would grow or how insulated and isolated from the rest of the country their humble little hamlet on the Potomac would become. Well, maybe Thomas Jefferson could, but I digress.
For many years, the government was so small the Supreme Court met in the Capitol where the entire Library of Congress was housed. For a time well into the 19th Century, the entire government bureaucracy was located in one building next to the White House.
Washington is and always will be the seat of government and our national open-air museum. The White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court, Arlington Cemetery, the Washington Monument, and memorials to Lincoln and Jefferson, they are Washington, DC. They are the reflecting pool of our heritage, our history, and our unique version of democratic rule that the tourists flock here to see and feel and learn more about.
But tourists don’t come here to gaze up at the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Aviation Administration, or the Office of Rural Development; not even the Department of Housing and Urban Development or the Department of Education.
So why keep all of these huge bureaucracies in a city whose leaders are ambivalent about them being here anyway [it is interesting that these very liberal progressives want less government, not more, in their backyard]. Why not move Federal agencies to areas where living conditions would be better and the expense to taxpayers would be far less?
More than 200,000 people work for the Federal government in a city that is no more like middle America than Moscow. DC has a citizenry, an economy, a culture, and a lifestyle vastly different from the rest of America. Washington is an incessant, incestuous, insidious, impenetrable, impudent, and impervious political world that revolves around itself. People who work here soon lose touch with the rest of the country, if ever they had that touch at all. It’s not their fault; it just is.
So, leave the Cabinet secretaries and their presidentially-appointed assistants and deputy assistants, and assistant deputy assistants in Washington to testify before Congress and try to wrestle control of their departments from the Office of Management and Budget. But move the rest of their agencies to a better environment in a more real America.
The several thousand Interior Department workers here could be relocated to the actual interior of the country. How novel is that? They could go to someplace like Olathe, Kansas. It’s a nice town. I’ve been there. It’s close to the Kansas City airport, at the gateway to the Great Plaines. Or how about Odgen, Utah, an easy commute from Salt Lake City and close to some of the most beautiful national parks in the country?
According to one website, there are 6,000 employees at the US Department of Agriculture in Washington. How many of them have ever seen a hog confinement or sat in the cab of a John Deere pulling a chisel plow? How many have walked a cornfield on a 1,000-acre spread along the Mississippi or rode a pick up truck across a sprawling cattle ranch in South Dakota. The USDA should be relocated to Sioux Falls, SD, or Des Moines, IA, or Columbus, MO.
Much of the Department of Transportation could find a nice home in Minneapolis, MN, Louisville, KY, Nashville, TN, or Indianapolis, IN. They have fine highways, good airports, and trains still passing through.
The Department of Education could function just as well in Scranton, PA or Medford, OR. The Federal Trade Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Securities and Exchange Commission don’t need to be in Washington to regulate our lives. I’ll bet regulators would think with a much clearer head, breathing cleaner air in Tampa, FL or Albuquerque, NM. And they may improve their outlook by socializing after work with someone who just sold a 3-bedroom duplex, or just finished the shift at an auto manufacturing plant or spent the day working in a community clinic, instead of other lawyers and bureaucrats in agencies just like theirs, complaining about the same problems and coming up with the same solutions.
Congress should instruct the General Services Administration, which deals with such matters, to determine what other departments and agencies need to be rehoused, reorganized, or relocated in some fashion just as they’ve done for the FBI.
Congress should instruct the GSA to determine the feasibility of getting those government agencies away from Washington, get them out of here. Move them close or move them far. Move them across the Alleghenies, to the mighty Mississippi, to amber waves of grain in Kansas or the purple mountains majesty in Colorado, from the mountains, to the deserts, all the way to oceans white with foam…Oh, God Bless America!
It’s well worth thinking about it and fortunately, in Washington, there’s time to do it, sitting in traffic, waiting, wondering, imagining all the possibilities.
Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.