A hallmark of President Donald Trump’s second term is that he’s not just promoting his own policies — he’s looking to shake up the American power structure from top to bottom.
Step by step, he is undermining or destroying the left’s decades-old program to achieve total dominance of government and politics through its control of money and institutions.
That’s what Trump is up to with his plan to move much of the federal bureaucracy out of the Washington, DC, area and into the rest of the country.
In doing so, he’s infuriating federal bureaucrats leading cushy lives in DC and its suburbs, close to the centers of power — and close to the various contractors and lobby groups that can be expected to offer them well-padded post-retirement jobs.
And, as with the other things Trump is doing, this effort is both good politics and good for the country, regardless of the bureaucrats’ howls.
“Agencies,” Trump wrote in an April executive order, “must be where the people are.”
Thus, the administration is moving much of the Department of Agriculture out to farming areas.
About 2,600 out of 4,600 DC-based employees will be relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah; Fort Collins, Colo.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Kansas City, Mo., and Raleigh, NC, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced last week.
“This administration [isn’t] interested in supporting staff or even really in the jobs we do,” one underling whined to Politico.
“They are concentrating power and want fewer witnesses to what they are doing,” another charged.
This is great news for the Republican Party, because the accumulation of federal employees in and around our nation’s capital has turned the District of Columbia and its surrounding counties into a one-party state for the Democrats.
That has pulled the entire state of Virginia into the Democratic orbit, simply because of the many federal employees and hangers-on voting in its northern counties.
Sending them elsewhere will break up that power center, dispersing their votes in state and local elections while letting some air out of the DC bubble.
When Trump moved some USDA workers to Kansas City in his first term, it triggered a “mass exodus” from the department.
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Many federal agriculture specialists apparently concluded that quitting their jobs was preferable to living in America.
This move is bigger, and if it triggers more departures it will help Trump slash federal payrolls that much faster.
If not, though, bureaucrats in their new locations will presumably show more sensitivity to farmers, and shed some of their poisonous inside-the-beltway mentality.
The Agriculture Department is just the start: Last week an angry mass letter from National Science Foundation employees railed against the NSF’s impending move from Alexandria, Va., to an unknown new location.
Overall, Trump wants to move 100,000 federal workers from various agencies out of the DC area.
That will do much to solve one of the most widespread complaints about the federal government: It’s run by people who live in a bubble.
Surrounded by upper-middle-class (and richer) professionals, federal workers share similar backgrounds and similar values — including an ugly sense of superiority over those know-nothing rubes out in flyover country.
Except, you know, those flyover people do understand things that folks in the bubble don’t.
Farmers in Kansas know more about farming than DC bureaucrats do, and small-business owners in North Carolina or Nevada know more about their industries than do the bureaucrats at the EPA or the Labor Department.
And I suspect that bureaucrats living side by side with those they regulate in North Carolina, or Nevada, or Kansas — sending their kids to local schools, shopping in local markets, eating in local restaurants — won’t feel as insulated or superior.
And that will benefit us all.
One of the problems with America’s ruling class — beyond its corruption, narrow-mindedness and sheer general incompetence — is its disconnect from, and even contempt for, ordinary Americans.
Columnist James Taranto calls it “oikophobia,” a Greek term meaning fear or hatred of one’s own countrymen.
Breaking down the insularity is likely to ease that.
Consider, too, a federal government with agencies scattered all across the nation is harder to influence.
A lobbyist can’t just take an Uber from one agency office to another when they’re in different time zones, or invite people from multiple offices to the same cocktail party.
Dispersing their targets makes life more difficult for the special interests, which can only be a plus.
Skyrocketing federal spending and unimpressive federal performance is all the proof we need that concentrating the bureaucracy in one metropolitan area hasn’t done much for the rest of us.
Let’s try another approach: Make them live in the country they want to govern.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
