There may be no better way to undermine Donald Trump reemerging deregulatory legacy—or the promise and euphoria of the new advisory DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency)—than for misguided Republicans to succeed at proposals to relocate D.C. agencies to new homes far outside the Beltway.
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The last step can’t be first, and transplanting “swamp” vegetation takes for granted the legitimacy of dozens of misbegotten administrative state bodies, and often overstresses mere efficiency on their part.
Trump tasked DOGE—headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—with delivering ideas by the July 4, 2026 quarter-millennial milestone to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
Everything about that mandate is right, but special caution is warranted around that “restructure” component. In his first term, Trump’s Executive Order 13,781 on executive branch reorganization yielded a glossy report but didn’t permanently axe much.
For years, the Governmental Accountabilty Office (GAO) has highlighted hundreds of billions in waste, fraud, abuse and “improper payments.” We even already know which existing regulatory oversight laws are being ignored. So there’s no need for DOGE to knock down walls rather than simply walk through an open door on the initial action items.
Cutting excess and enforcing compliance alone won’t restore the federal government to its proper constitutional scale. This is why the “dismantling” and “slashing”’ steps are essential. Today’s excessive government is sustained more by supposedly “proper” expenditures than by the improper payments the GAO itemizes.
Abolition, Not Reform
Some believe dismantling involves divvying up agencies across the nation. Superficially, that appeals to those frustrated by the concentration of federal power in the capital, but Trump and DOGE should be on guard.
The private sector, along with state and local governments, can handle most responsibilities without a federal office lurking about. The right approach is extensive mobilization to abolish cabinet departments, agencies, programs and budgets, keeping only those essential to constitutionally enumerated tasks.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) has long advocated ending the Department of Education, a stance Trump supports. The Clinton-era GOP regularly discussed eliminating this Carter-era creation, along with the Departments of Commerce and Energy. More recently some Republicans proposed abolishing the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) and its “security theater.” Yet talk of such eliminations has faded, as has talk of repealing Obamacare.
“You Knew Damn Well I Was A Snake”
Teleporting or cloning federal agencies to flyover country while pretending the beltway headquarters and lobbing/contractor class will disappear is naive. This is a classic snake or scorpion proposal, to borrow at bit of Trump phrasing, one making the rounds for years. Arguably the worst offender of the bunch, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), already has ten satellite offices nationwide.
President Trump should reject advice to pursue a policy to spread swamp things across the country. Trump’s campaign website promised to continue the effort to “move parts of the federal bureaucracy outside of the Washington Swamp, just like President Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado.” That sentiment was repeated at Trump’s rallies. But the federal government already owns over a third of the state’s land, and much of the West. Returning federal lands or privatizing them—not building new offices—is the right approach.
Trump, legislators, DOGE should also be mindful that federal grants-in-aid to states already topped $750 billion back in 2019, as last reported by the Congressional Research Service. These funds should remain with states to manage their own affairs, with federal budgets correspondingly reduced. This administration’s chance to restore federalism is rare and shouldn’t be squandered on more federal-local fusion.
Seeding Progressive Institutions Isn’t “Swamp Draining”
Alongside terminating alphabet-agency presence and restoring state power, a conservative policy of personnel cuts and hiring freezes in D.C. shouldn’t contradict itself by initiating fresh federal hiring in the states. Nor should policy imply that the Heartland needs this suspect form of federal “rescue.”
Under the Biden administration, federal agency activity has been anything but normal. Biden’s pursuit of extreme progressive policies through top-down whole-of-government initiatives in climate, equity and other economic and social engineering campaigns mean that even going so far as to end an agency or program does not necessarily eliminate the underlying policy. Trump will dismantle those pursuits to the extent he can with executive power of course. But still, this is the worst time to sow these alien seeds of bureaucracy nationwide. Ideologues will propagate as readily outside the beltway as within, if not more so. A recent poll even revealed that over half of federal workers would be willing to regulate against voter preferences; they would welcome such new latitude.
Republicans and oversight hearings will not control these new bureaucracies any more than they control those within D.C.. Legislators and reform committees like DOGE should also recognize how Biden has aligned local officials with progressive agendas, and cleverly undermined the natural alliance between small business and local/state governments for red tape relief by substituting funded mandates for unfunded ones. Don’t hand these kids more matches.
Along the way, Biden routinely taunted as “socialists” those Republicans who opposed his Inflation Reduction Act while celebrating its local-district economic impacts. Republicans could deny direct involvement then, but they won’t have that deniability if the spread of federal agencies nationwide continues unchecked.
Federal Jobs Aren’t True Economic Drivers
Historically, conservatives have criticized expansive federal agencies and bureaucracies and jobs programs as taxpayer-funded drains rather than as true sources of job creation and economic prosperity. But the tendency with the seeding project is to envision federal jobs as lifelines to rural and economically distressed regions. One bill in the 117th Congress, for example, was specifically dubbed the HIRE Act, for “Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy.” You name the objective, progressives will always win this spending game, not limited government.
No conservative should advocate government redistribution as an economic growth strategy in this manner. Taxpayer-funded, make-work federal jobs at newly erected offices create a new special interest class rather than create new wealth. Transferring agencies will lock regions into a dependency on federal employment on the one hand, and make it impossible to shrink the federal government footprint on the other.
Also, the notion that such pseudo-decentralization would primarily benefit current residents of local economies is highly suspect. Relocated agencies would gobble federal funds and alter local dynamics by hiring not local residents, but likely the same college-educated big government and consulting class that make D.C.’s suburbs some of the wealthiest in the nation.
I recognize that this argument—that a locality would prosper at the expense of others without an agency—may not sway GOP proponents, which underscores the “snake” nature of this proposal.
Here’s hoping Mr. Trump will instruct advisors to ditch the talk of spreading agencies around, of streamlining that which the federal government ought not be doing at all. Scattering bureaucracy merely replicates the very problems conservatives claim to combat, while fantasizing that D.C. headquarters would disappear.
Instead, Trump’s plan should focus on abolishing departments and agencies, eliminating subsidies, grants-in-aid, public-private partnerships, and other unnecessary aid. Routine audits and program inventories are essential, especially given that the GAO recently reported again that we don’t even know how many programs exist.
These actions are essential to reduce both spending and regulation. Improving agencies’ efficiency at tasks they shouldn’t be doing—whether inside or outside the Beltway—must not inadvertently define Trump’s legacy. The swamp can be drained. But “Swamp 2.0” that spreads bureaucracy will make it impossible.
To borrow the term from Argentinian leader Javier Milei, this is a time for “Afuera!” not fertilizer.
For more: “A Republican Proposal to Feed the Country to the Swamp,” Wall Street Journal, 2019