The data [1] says that the gov is fairly spread out. According to the OPM site, 7.4% of USDA employees work in the DC area. California has more USDA employees (10.3%) than DC.

Including all agencies, _87%_ of all federal employees work outside DC. Additionally, the percentage of DC workers seems to be going down over time, at least according to their data going back to 2016.

[1] https://data.opm.gov/explore-data/analytics/location

I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs.

If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.

For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.

>It’s becoming The Capitol from Hunger Games.

DMV residents deserve jobs. The USDA provided valuable high school internships to many of my peers, and we did not go to the most well-funded school. Rural, low-population states already get tons of pork, and contend with much lower cost-of-living and housing prices, to boot.

Ragebait, and I'm starting to realize that your account exists largely for this reason. I wish there were a way to block users on HN.

The small percentage of USDA employees that are in the DC area are mostly administering policy related things which absolutely make sense to be in that area.

Thousands of employees isn't even that much for USDA. There's also good reason to have headquarters of organisations close to headquarters of other organisations. It just lowers efficiency (which they might be after)

> If we have a $7 trillion national government, we should spread out the jobs instead of concentrating them in DC

If only we had like fifty sovereign governments spread out across our nation.

80% of the federal workforce is based outside of the DC/Maryland/Virginia area.

The ones who are around the capital are the ones doing policy or back-office work that’d be the equivalent of a corporate HQ, and they have benefits from being concentrated in a region where there’s a lot of other Federal back office work because they can recruit from a talent pool of people who are experienced in the particular requirements of Federal work. It’s the same sort of agglomeration effects that drives finance to concentrate in NYC or the film industry to concentrate in LA.

Taking the USDA as an example, it doesn’t literally operates farm. The vast majority of what it’s doing is functionally insurance and financial services. The stuff that needs direct interaction with farms like inspections or scientific research are done out of field offices.

If America has an equivalent of The Capitol from Hunger Games where a bunch of absurdly wealthy and out of touch elites pull the strings on how the rest of the country lives for their own benefit, I’d submit Wall Street or Silicon Valley before I posit DC.

So true, dispersing agencies would also help with housing availability and cost of living concerns. No question that the USDA should be in someplace like Iowa or Nebraska

The last thing some legislators and lobbyists who've cooked up a law that will make their benefactors rich at the expense of some other random industry is to have the enforcement bureaucracy in charge of actually doing it pushing back because it's nonsensical.

Imagine if the EPA was located in Detroit. I bet we wouldn't have 450k mandated warranties on heavy truck emissions components (which serves what purpose beyond front loading that cost into the purchase, the last thing you want if you want these cleaner newer trucks on the road).

If the pencil pushers who sent steel production to elsewhere had their offices in Cleveland maybe we'd have less clean but more steel production domestically instead of offloading that tonnage of production to parts of the world where it's dirtier still, say nothing of the shipping to get it here (the last rebar I bought came from Oman).

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