NSF getting kicked out of headquarters by HUD
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> She says that more than half of agency employees decided to quit rather than uproot their families and move. Despite aggressive recruiting in Kansas City and making many new hires, both USDA research agencies are now roughly half the size they were before the move.
(As intended, of course.)
If we make moves, Ok. How about this..
We move these agencies to get adversarial impulses going in service of cost control.
We move the USDA to the middle of New York City.
Urban Development to Tomah Wisconsin. (I'll settle for Nacogdoches Texas just to make sure the South gets some of these HQ's).
Department of the Interior should be moved to Miami Fl.
Department of Defense to Berkeley California.
And so on and so forth.
All should be legally obliged to hire only locals in civilian roles.
Having the USDA in Kansas City guarantees the tax payer gets robbed blind.
Virginia and Maryland have plenty of farms.
A quick look on Google Maps shows one within ~10 miles.
But, ultimately, the USDA isn't there to farm.
Exactly why it shouldn't be there.
No adversarial environment. Corruption flourishes where there is no adversarial environment.
If you do this with no plan and no incentives in a matter of a year or less, it's going to decimate the whole agency.
The people who would rather be within the beltway than do the job are exactly the ones I'd be suspect of.
The ones that grudgingly move are the ones who can't.
The people who will get the shaft here are the career bureaucrats who see themselves jumping to another agency as they can either make that way harder for themselves by moving or quit because they are already located in the best place for their intended career track.
Given the choice I know exactly who I'd rather have staffing the agency.
Replace USDA with 18F or (pre Doge) USDS and the insanity of your agreement is laid bare for even the most uncritical reader to identify. Of course such agencies would be better off (from a hiring perspective) in SF or some other tech city than they would in DC (of course their customers are in DC so that kind of complicates things).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F
"In 2024, 18F consisted of approximately 91 distributed employees working remotely across the United States."
They wouldn't have wanted to all relocate to KC either.
71% of their budget goes to stuff like the food stamp program, interacting with tens of thousands of schools and state/local governments and whatnot.
The talent pool for bureaucrats (and researchers, and statisticians, etc.) is fundamentally more important.
(And let's not pretend there's no agriculture on the East Coast.)
Forget the point, you don't even have a leg to stand on.
I'm not saying it's not the best. I'm hedging against people like you making low effort comments that contribute nothing to the discussion like that by saying it might not be the best but it's better than DC
The USDA move was so bad that they lost a significant number of employees and were still working with significantly less experience years later. This is outrageously expensive and disruptive to any company or agency.
Not to mention the fact that about 5 years later the administration is making massive additional cuts to the agency after relocating and rehiring for it. It's just churn for nothing.
The corruption isn't an unintended consequence of the moves. The ability to engage in the corruption is the entire point of the moves.
The Maryland and Virginia sides have representation (which is very pro-government jobs, as they should be considering their constituency).
But I am familiar with the US. We have so much corruption that it's a virtual certainty any moves of the kind you postulate would be precipitated by a desire for more and easier access to corruption. We actually have a long history of doing this sort of thing in the US. Sometimes we get more corruption, but the service in question is objectively better off. (Some moves made by the military when the Berlin wall came down.) More often we get more corruption and the service in question is objectively worse off. (NASA being forced, via corruption, to build solid rocket boosters a long way away from where the boosters would be used. Thus necessitating the modularization of the boosters into transportable segments. "No problem! We'll just use O-Rings!")
Here's the thing. Whether the results were objectively better, or objectively worse, corruption increased. So the US, as a whole, deteriorates.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmil...
>The shrimp treadmill study cost taxpayers more than $3 million over a decade.
>The National Science Foundation, not Congress, approved the shrimp treadmill study funding.
It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.
Stuff like $80k to study the bacteria in Yellowstone's hot springs… which brought us PCR. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil...
> How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.
> if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.)
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
"The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"
Proposals which are identified as either worthy of funding or rejected.
If anything NPR's selective reporting is misleading. Obviously the overall cost would be much higher than the materials cost of $1k. More over, the treadmill wouldn't exist without the study itself. I don't have a problem with a source like having an NPR editorial or ideological agenda, but the way they twist things is highly misleading. If their case is good, it deserves a better supporting argument.
>It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.
It isn't difficult to imagine a world where a fisheries association or another large seafood concern voluntarily funded a relevant university study. Whether this would include treadmills for prawns, I cannot say.
Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.
However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.
>"It's the best way of funding..."
If the central office has any say over the location someone works, you get the phenomenon where the population of less-desirable living locations get to suffer local employees that aren't good enough at their job to be given higher prioritization in choosing their station. And the organization looses good workers they can't accommodate.
France has been doing the opposite, leading to a concentration in and around Paris and few major cities outside of Ile de France.
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-a...
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-lega...
https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-rel...
If this NSF move is an indication that the White House now wants to distribute jobs more widely across the country, well, that's a real reversal of course from only a couple months ago.
From foxnews: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hud-becomes-first-major-cab...
"The Robert C. Weaver Building is a vacant and run-down monument to waste with half a billion dollars in overdue maintenance," Ernst said, calling it a "cross between a ghost town and a horror show."
Investments to-date in the Weaver building totaled $90 million over the past 15 years, including plaza, roof and façade repairs.
Mold and asbestos containment have plagued the building, which also has only about half of its elevators in working operation.
I live in NOVA. The economies around here are addicted to government spending. As a federal taxpayer I think they should move many federal agencies to other states. USDA to KC was a start. Agriculture to Iowa, DOEnergy to Texas, NASA to Florida, Interior to Colorado for starters
The DC area doesn't have a right to these overpaid jobs.
That said, I've no deep concern with HUD moving. The larger story here is the NSF's displacement; coupled with the grant revocations and the proposed slashing of their budget, this seems more a story of "they want to get rid of NSF" than "they want to move HUD".
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administrat...