So many ideas have gushed forth from the incoming Trump administration. One of the most intriguing, from Indiana’s point of view, is the de-Washington-ization of federal employment. The concept is easy to understand.
1. Washington is over-crowded, congested and chaotic.
2. The nation’s capital should be the nerve center of the country for policy and public access.
access.
3. Many government jobs involve important tasks that can be performed outside the District of Columbia (DC) and beyond the Metropolitan Area.
4. Many governmental tasks could be moved elsewhere without a loss, and perhaps a gain, in efficiency.
5. Numerous places in the nation are in need of good paying, significant jobs.
Many federal civilian jobs are not reported by the Congressional Research Service. Most legislative and judicial workers and those of the Postal Service are excluded. Also excluded are the FBI, the DEA, and many other agencies where personnel are transferred on an as-needed or confidential basis, often connected to national security.
What we do learn from this source is: the District had 162,000 federal civilian employees, Virginia 144,000 and Maryland 143,000. By contrast, Indiana had 25,000 and West Virginia 17,000.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an interesting case in point. Headquartered in Gaithersburg (MD), in suburban Washington, NIST has an association with several thousand academic researchers at or near major universities in College Park and Rockville (MD). Other major activities are in Boulder, Colorado and Charleston, South Carolina.
What’s missing at Indiana, Notre Dame, Rose Hulman, Ball State and Purdue?
If we follow the money rather than the people, we find wages and salaries for federal civilian workers, as a percent of all workers, have declined in the past 20 years (2003 to 2023). They have declined from 33% to 28% in DC while growing in MD, VA, and WV.
In DC, growth of other, non-federal activities may account for the decline in the share of wages and salaries paid to federal civilian workers. The reasons for these shifts beyond the District may be the increased importance of the work being done or a continuation of decentralization.
The question Hoosiers must ask is, “Will our newly elected and reelected state officers press to share in the Trump desire to see federal agencies more broadly distributed across the nation?”
Indiana has been obsessed with luring private investment. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC) spent millions to locate firms here, but can you recall any effort to bring significant federal jobs here? Cities and counties forego future millions in tax revenues from private firms, but seem to have no efforts aimed at public employment.
Long ago, former Congressman Lee Hamilton envisioned the Ohio River basin as a coordinated economic entity. Madison and Hanover College are ideally located to host such a project. What has Indiana done about that?