DRAIN THE SWAMP Act’s Government Relocation Edict Could Have Dire Consequences for Conservatives
Why would 24 conservative Republican senators recently vote for a $200 billion Social Security bonus for the already rich retirement accounts of government employees — who, as civil servants, did not pay into Social Security during the time of their government employment?
The 24 voted to repeal a 40-year-old legal provision that did not allow bureaucrats with rich government pensions earned while exempt from Social Security payroll taxes to collect Social Security benefits after they retired by paying taxes for only 10 years into a private sector job.
Why did senators support a giveaway to government employees? Because rich pensions with this restriction existed for all federal employees until the 1980s, for employees of 25 states, and scores of local governments. And the recipients vote. Those getting this windfall give financial, union, or moral support to the senators who represent them. So, they expected their representatives to vote for their interests; and they did.
How do I know? I was Ronald Reagan’s first director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management when he signed that restriction, and I still follow such bureaucratic happenings. One congressman back then actually admitted to me he feared government voters even in his very rural district with few government employees.
Why is this important when the giveaway is already law? There is an idea gathering speed among conservatives that could make things even worse. That well-meaning proposal would send top bureaucrats and their agencies out of the Washington area with the hope that mixing with real Americans will make them think like the rest of the country. But what it will actually do is give top bureaucrats direct access to lobby their local congressmen as a local neighbor rather than a Washington bureaucrat.
As the pension vote demonstrates, the congressmen will listen. While I welcome the new administration’s openness to civil service reform and cost controls, I am concerned about the unintended consequences of this proposal.
The first Trump administration did send a few jobs from D.C. to the states. But results were very limited. In theory, spending would be reduced since federal government pay is partially based on the local private salaries which are high in Washington and lower in rural areas. But studies find that in fact few federal employees actually moved. They simply took other jobs in Washington. The Trump administration planned to move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters and its nearly 600 jobs to the small city of Grand Junction, Colorado in 2019. But apparently, only three job slots moved.
The Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture were to move 700 jobs to Kansas City, but few job positions moved there. The Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters were to move to Colorado since 97 percent of its other 10,000 employees were already in the West. The move was planned to involve about 300 top positions but was delayed, and President Biden’s Interior secretary reversed the plan. A second-term plan aims at moving 100,000 jobs and relocating entire agencies from D.C. to save $1.4 billion a year in payroll costs.
The reality is that there are only 60,000 military civilians and 140,000 domestic federal workers concentrated in and around the nation’s capital, out of a total workforce of 2 million or so. This means 1.8 million are already living outside Washington, which may explain much of their success in lobbying Congress.
Republican legislation would send nearly a third of Washington federal employees out of the D.C. metropolitan area. The bill is titled the “Decentralizing and Reorganizing Agency Infrastructure Nation-wide To Harness Efficient Services, Workforce Administration, and Management Practices Act” (or D.R.A.I.N. T.H.E. S.W.A.M.P.). It argues that “Federal employees don’t want to work in Washington, so why should taxpayers be footing the bill? By relocating at least 30 percent of the federal workforce, we will save billions and improve service for veterans, small businesses, and all Americans.”
The legislation requires non-defense agencies to “promote geographic diversity, including consideration of rural markets” when relocating employees from the D.C. area and to “ensure adequate staffing throughout the regions of the Administration, to promote in-person customer service.” The bill correctly stressed that locality pay is higher in the D.C. area and that moving people would save taxpayer money. And there are already examples of federal employees fraudulently receiving higher locality pay for the Washington, D.C. area despite living full-time in Florida.
It is not clear how many employees would be transferred to small-population states, but if a sizeable number moved, it could hinder the ability of Republicans to be elected in those states since most federal employees are Democrats. Moreover, cutting “employees” is a small part of the problem. There are two million employees but about 20 million contractors and grantees. That is where the big money is spent on employment in today’s administrative state.
Your author lives in Maryland together with many federal employees and even more contractors. Many are nice people and are often critical of how government works — but they want more government and more spending. Over my lifetime, as national government spending increased dramatically, Maryland’s Republican House delegation declined from winning four of eight congressional district seats down to only one today. More government employees and contractors have produced more Democrats.
Maryland is pretty much lost politically today for the GOP, but I am sure Democrats would be quietly pleased to have their excess Washington employees sent to small red states to reproduce the Maryland experience and have Republicans reap the consequences.
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Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles.
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