Trump seeks to relocate 100,000 federal workers, doubling first-term plan

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to relocate tens of thousands of federal workers during the campaign.

It’s a familiar scenario for the former and future president. His first administration relocated several agencies and a significant number of federal employees from the Greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Trump, however, envisions a much broader overhaul of the federal workforce and is seeking to move more agencies and employees outside the Beltway than was possible during his first term.

IN Video for March 2023 On his campaign website, Trump said his administration plans to relocate tens of thousands of federal workers based in Washington, D.C.

“Up to 100,000 government jobs could be moved – and I mean immediately – from Washington to places filled with patriots who love America,” Trump said.

During his first term in office, the Department of the Interior moved the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management from the District of Columbia to Grand Junction, Colorado. The move affected thousands of BLM employees. More than 80% of employees affected by the BLM move, did not move.

Trump said that during his second term, his administration would continue to “relocate parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington swamp.”

Hundreds of thousands of federal employees based in DC, Maryland and Virginia, but 85% of the entire federal workforce lives and works outside the region.

In addition to relocating BLM headquarters, the Department of the Interior under the Trump administration has relocated and reassigned dozens of its top managers in June 2017.

Under the Biden administration, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland brought by BLM headquarters returned to Washington, but retained the Grand Junction building as “Headquarters of the West.”

In 2019, the Trump administration also moved the USDA’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, a decision that impacted hundreds of USDA employees.

Although the Trump administration billed for this move as a saving measureand to move personnel and resources closer to the clients they serve, approximately 40–60% of affected USDA employees left their agencies rather than relocate, and re-located ERS and NIFA. struggled to fill these vacancies.

PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former senior attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency, said agencies have more freedom to move career senior executive staff than do rank-and-file federal employees.

“They can move SES officers and their locations quite easily. So we can expect major changes to the SES program,” Whitehouse said.

According to Human Resources Departmentan agency may reassign career SES members “to any SES position within the agency for which he/she is qualified.”

However, agencies must provide 60 days advance notice to reassigned supervisors if they are being transferred off-site. Agencies also cannot move SES members during the first 120 days of a new leader’s tenure.

Federal government moves more than 29,000 employees annuallyand spends about $1.3 billion on it, according to the General Services Administration. The military also regularly relocates active-duty military personnel and their families. `

Heath Brown, an assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who specializes in presidential transitions, said other parts of the Trump administration’s policy agenda could take precedence over agency relocations and federal office closures, especially if those plans face resistance from Congress.

“I think if they spend a lot of time trying to close and move agencies, they will lose the window of opportunity to implement the kind of program they want,” Brown said.

In addition to moving some agency headquarters, Trump proposed closing the Department of Education during the campaign. During his first term, his administration also attempted to merge the Office of Personnel Management with the General Services Administration.

“It would take a huge amount of money to change the federal law that creates these agencies. Trying to turn them off requires the same amount of effort. Every new administration has limited time, limited staff, and the more they devote to trying to close agencies, the more time they take away from all their other priorities,” Brown said. “I can’t imagine that Congress wouldn’t want to weigh in.”

In addition to regaining the White House, Republicans regained control of the Senate. However, control of the House of Representatives remains unclear.

Political considerations aside, federal workers relocating for punitive reasons is not unprecedented.

Don Kettle, a professor of government and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed to a textbook created during the Nixon administration by presidential aide Fred Malek on how to pressure federal employees perceived to be disloyal to the administration. .

“You can move people to offices that you know are far from where their family prefers to live. You can assign them inconvenient working hours. You can change the nature of your work. You can change the nature of their supervision,” Kettle said.

Meanwhile, FBI employees who fell out of favor with former director J. Edgar Hoover often moved to field office in Butte, Montana.