Let's move a bunch of government services to the Midwest

The post-industrial Midwest is far from the poorest region of the country. To find the worst economic conditions in the United States, one generally has to look toward Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta region, the Rio Grande Valley, and a bunch of Native American counties in the Southwest and Great Plains. What the Midwest's recent economic struggles bring, however, is not just large-scale political salience but a certain kind of fixability.

The poorest places in the United States have been poor for a long time and lack the basic infrastructure of well-being. But that's not the case in the Midwest, where cities thrived two generations ago and where there's a huge amount of infrastructure. Midwestern states have prestigious public university systems, airports large enough to serve as major hubs, and cities whose cultural heritage includes major sports teams, acclaimed museums, symphonies, theaters, and other amenities of big-city living.

But industrial decline has left these cities overbuilt, with shrinking populations struggling to support legacy infrastructure, and infrastructural decline tends to only cause further regional decline.

At the same time, America's major coastal cities are overcrowded. They suffer from an endemic housing shortage, massive traffic congestion and a deep-seated political conservatism that prevents them from making the kind of regulatory changes that would allow them to build the new housing and infrastructure they need. Excess population that cannot be absorbed by the coasts tends to bounce back to growth-friendly Sunbelt cities that must rebuild what Milwaukee, Detroit and Cleveland already have in terms of infrastructure and amenities.

A logical approach would be for the federal government to take the lead in rebalancing America's distribution of population and resources by carefully considering whether so much federal activity should be concentrated in Washington, DC and its suburbs. Moving agencies from the DC area to the Midwest would obviously cause some short-term disruptions. But in the long run, the workers of the transferred agencies would enjoy cheaper housing, shorter commutes, and a higher standard of living, while Midwestern communities would see their population and tax base stabilize and gain new opportunities to develop complementary industries.

Many members of the government do not need to be in DC

There is a compelling underlying logic to the idea of ​​a capital city that centralizes government functions in one place so that agency leaders can consult with Congress and staff can coordinate across agencies. The Treasury Department is adjacent to the White House, and there is literally a secure tunnel between the buildings so that the president and his team can take advantage of the Treasury Department's significant institutional knowledge and expertise when making economic policy. Foreign diplomats are sent here to Washington, so America's domestic workforce of foreign service officers must also be based here.

But many important things that government does are not political in this way.

The National Institutes of HealthFor example, it employs a staff of about 20,000 people—a disproportionately well-educated group of technical experts—in suburban Bethesda, Maryland. They play a critical role of scientific and public interest, but are not involved in day-to-day politics. NIH's work could easily be done from Cleveland, where 20,000 highly educated, tax-paying workers would be welcome. Their presence would create secondary jobs in industries such as restaurants, education and home improvement. And an infusion of skilled workers alongside the metro area's existing health and education resources would help create the region's largest biomedical research sector.

In general, looking at what agencies are already That they don't bother to be in downtown Washington is a decent indication that the agencies' core mission is deeply unhelped by proximity to the centers of political power.

• Nearly 3,000 people work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
• The Social Security Administration's main office is located in Woodlawn, Maryland, outside of Baltimore.
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' 4,000 employees are also located in Woodlawn.
• The US Patent and Trademark Office already has a satellite office in Detroit, but maintains its main headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.
• The US Geological Survey has several thousand people working in Reston, Virginia.
• The National Weather Service has 5,000 employees and is headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland.

These and other agencies left D.C. years ago in search of more affordable real estate — a recognition that their mission does not require routine physical proximity to elected officials. Maintaining this type of agency close DC was, apparently, more convenient for existing staff who were spared the need to drastically relocate or find a new job elsewhere. But given the growing tensions of regional inequality in the United States, it would make sense for Congress to insist on taking a broader view of the national interest. Many of these agencies have technical or scientific missions whose highly skilled workforce would be a huge asset to cities with proud heritages currently suffering from brain drain and population loss.

Some DC power centers are supposed to be independent

Another block of services we should consider relocating are those where close coordination with elected officials is expressly contrary to their mandate.

The alphabet soup of independent committee-style regulatory bodies — SEC, CFTC, FTC, FEC, FCC, FAA — fits here. But so do the big DC players like the Federal Reserve Board and the FBI (which is moving to the suburbs anyway). The heads of these agencies interact with Congress more often than technical agencies, so devolution may be more trouble than it's worth. But at the same time, these are arms of the executive branch that by law are supposed to operate independently of the White House. Symbolically manifesting this independence by having the work done out of Detroit rather than DC could have some merit.

Each of these regulatory agencies is surrounded by a swarm of highly paid lawyers, economists and lobbyists who make a career out of influencing their decisions. Right now, these people all live in the DC metro area, where they drive up the cost of already expensive housing. Their spending would do far more good in Detroit, Milwaukee or Cincinnati, creating secondary jobs and boosting a larger regional economy.

Greater Washington will overcome it

Of course, pulling tens of thousands of federal jobs out of the DC area will, in the short term, impose some pain on the local economy here. But a crucial element of the decentralization hypothesis is that it is not purely zero transfer. The DC area of ​​2016 has become big enough, rich enough, specialized enough, and expensive enough that the marginal dollar of federal spending does little real good.

five years ago, Congress approved the pledge agreement, which imposed large spending cuts and then exempted major entitlement programs from those cuts, leading to severe cuts in the kind of federal programs whose dollars tend to stay local. At the time, D.C. officials were concerned that this would hurt the regional economy.

But we recovered quickly. The DC region's current major economic difficulties do not stem from a lack of high-quality jobs for highly skilled workers. Instead, we struggle with affordable housing, a creaking subway system, congested roads, and a consequent lack of upward mobility for the region's less skilled workers.

If even a sizable number of well-paying federal jobs were to disappear, it would slightly halt the overall upward trend in regional housing costs. If the politicians from Maryland and Virginia could get Congress to drop some money into much-needed upgrades to our mass transit system to compensate for lost jobs, it would be a win-win.

In the long run, we should think more broadly

Obviously, the federal government has a unique ability to alter the concentration of economic activity in the DC area. But the general problem of good-paying jobs being too concentrated in expensive coastal metropolitan areas that don't particularly want to build new housing — even as existing housing infrastructure is lost in the population-losing Midwest — isn't limited to DC.

My job all these years has focused heavily on the idea of ​​trying to get Silicon Valley, Greater Boston and New York and its suburbs to agree to build more. This remains a good idea in any scenario. But it's also absurd for a great nation to leave its long-term economic trajectory so completely hostage to the whims of the Palo Alto planning commission and a motley assortment of New York City councils and zoning snob groups on Long Island.

Congress is not going to pass a law telling Google to move to Toledo.

But if Donald Trump is going to invest the time and energy into creating a single mid-sized company to keep a small manufacturing facility open in Indianapolis, he should take a moment to think better. I'm not sure what it would take to convince a tech giant or three to decamp from Silicon Valley — where the local political system doesn't seem to want them — to more hospitable pastures near the Great Lakes. But it would at least be worth trying to find out.