Necktie: Endangered Species?

My colleague Matt Yglesias at The Atlantic has a post today on a subject near and dear to my heart: neckties. The jumping-off point is a Mark Kleiman blog post on a move by the European Commission to ban tie-wearing by its bureaucrats in the summer. Apparently, the idea is that without ties, men will be able to tolerate warmer offices, cutting down on air conditioning use. I'm not sure I buy that logic, but anything that contributes to cutting back on the regular use of silk strangulation devices is OK by me.

Yglesias remarks that Washington remains "one of the most formal of American cities at this point." But one of his commenters says that's only true "if you are stuck in politics or law down here. You don't see people walking around NIH, NSF, and Goddard wearing suits and ties."

That's actually been my sense of federal workplaces in general for awhile. But obviously you, Fedblog readers, would know better than me. Is the tie going the way of the dinosaur, at least in the summer?