Should Agencies Leave Washington Behind?

In the Washington Post today, Alec MacGillis takes up the age-old issue of moving government out of Washington and distributing its functions around the country. For whatever reason, this proposal seems to rear its head every few years. (My own father-in-law made the case in USA Today five years ago.)

The interesting thing is that MacGillis doesn't get very far before acknowledging that "the federal government is less clustered on the Potomac than many think." He notes that 83 percent of the government's 1.9 million non-postal civilian employees work somewhere other than the D.C. metro area. But, he says, "Washington's share looks bigger if you don't include civilian military and Veterans Affairs workers, who are scattered at bases and hospitals across the country. Of the remaining federal employees, a quarter are in this region."

Two thoughts:

• Even using that calculation, you're still left with only 25 percent of the federal establishment on the Potomac.
• Isn't taking out Defense and VA employees kind of arbitrary? The only grounds for removing them seems to be that they're already geographically distributed. It's sort of like saying if you took out all the employees who actually manage or work at Wal-Mart stores out of the equation, a big percentage of the company's employees would work in Bentonville, Ark.

There's no question that agencies don't really need to be clustered in the Washington area any more. (It was a different story in the pre-Internet era.) And there are a couple of very good reasons to make sure government doesn't get any more concentrated in Washington than it already is:

• Too many federal employees in any one place is a substantial security risk.
• The transportation system in the Washington area can't accommodate the workforce that already lives here. Adding any more feds would be a nightmare.

To me, if you're starting new agencies or boosting the size of existing ones, it makes sense to think about headquartering them outside D.C. But moving agencies that already are well-established in the region, with highly educated and effective workforces, seems needlessly expensive and disruptive.

If you're convinced, though, that government needs to be more spread around, take heart: It's already happening. In the August issue of Government Executive, we'll look at just one example: the explosive growth of federal operations in Huntsville, Ala., which has benefited from the post-9/11 push to move defense and homeland security operations out of Washington.