President-elect Donald Trump vowed to relocate tens of thousands of federal employees on the campaign trail.
It’s a familiar playbook for the former and future president. His first administration relocated several agencies and a significant number of federal employees out of the greater Washington, D.C. metro area.
Trump, however, is envisioning a much larger realignment of the federal workforce, and seeks to move more agencies and employees beyond the Beltway than was possible during his first term.
In a March 2023 video on his campaign website, Trump said his administration plans to relocate tens of thousands of federal employees based in the Washington, D.C. area.
“As many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out — and I mean immediately out — of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America,” Trump said.
During his first term in office, the Interior Department relocated the D.C.-based headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management to Grand Junction, Colorado — a move that impacted thousands of BLM employees. More than 80% of employees impacted by the BLM relocation didn’t move.
Trump said that in a second term, his administration would continue to “move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracy to new locations outside the Washington Swamp.”
Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are based in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, but 85% of the total federal workforce lives and works outside the region.
In addition to relocating BLM’s headquarters, the Interior Department under the Trump administration relocated and reassigned dozens of its senior executives in June 2017.
Under the Biden administration, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland brought BLM’s main headquarters back to D.C but kept the Grand Junction building as a “Western headquarters.”
The Trump administration in 2019 also relocated the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture — a decision that impacted hundreds of USDA employees.
While the Trump administration billed the move as a cost-saving measure, and to move staff and resources closer to the customers they serve, about 40-to-60% of impacted USDA employees left their agencies rather than relocate, and newly relocated ERS and NIFA struggled to fill those vacancies.
PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse, a former senior attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency, said agencies have more freedom to relocate members of the career Senior Executive Service, compared to rank-and-file federal employees.
“They can move SES employees and their locations quite easily. And so, we might expect to see some massive realignments in the SES program,” Whitehouse said.
According to the Office of Personnel Management, an agency can reassign career SES members “to any SES position in the agency for which he/she is qualified.”
However, agencies must give a 60-day advanced notice to reassigned career executives, if they are being moved outside their commuting area. Agencies also cannot relocate SES members within the first 120 days of a new leader’s tenure.
The federal government moves more than 29,000 employees each year, and spends about $1.3 billion to do so, according to data from the General Services Administration. The military also routinely relocates active-duty service members and their families. `
Heath Brown, an associate professor of public policy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, who specializes in presidential transitions, said other parts of the Trump administration’s policy agenda may take priority over relocating agencies and shutting down federal office space — especially if those plans encounter resistance from Congress.
“I think if they spend a lot of time trying to shut down agencies and relocate agencies, they’re going to lose the window of opportunity to enact the agenda that they want,” Brown said.
In addition to moving some agency headquarters, Trump on the campaign trail proposed shutting down the Education Department. During his first term, his administration also attempted to merge the Office of Personnel Management with the General Services Administration.
“It takes an enormous amount to change federal law that establishes these agencies. It takes an equal amount of effort to try to shut them down. Every incoming administration has limited time, a limited staff, and the more they dedicate to trying to shut agencies down, the more time they take away from all their other priorities,” Brown said. “I can’t imagine Congress is going to not want to weigh in.”
In addition to taking back the White House, Republicans have regained control of the Senate. Control of the House, however, remains unclear.
Aside from policy reasons, it’s not unprecedented for federal employees to face relocation for punitive reasons.
Don Kettl, professor of public management and public policy at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed to a playbook created under the Nixon administration by Fred Malek, an assistant to the president, on how to pressure federal employees believed to be disloyal to the administration.
“You can transfer people to offices that you know are far away from where their family prefers to live. You can assign them to work hours that are uncomfortable. You can change the nature of their work. You can change the nature of their supervision,” Kettl said.
Meanwhile, FBI employees who had fallen out of favor with former Director J. Edgar Hoover were often relocated to a field office in Butte, Montana.
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