Jack Crowe reports for National Review Online on a congressional proposal that could have a major impact on Washington, D.C.
The “Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy (HIRE) Act,” which is cosponsored by [Senator Josh Hawley and] Senator Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), would move 90 percent of the positions within ten executive agencies to economically distressed regions that have a stake in the work of those respective agencies.
Under the bill, the Department of Agriculture would be relocated to Hawley’s home state of Missouri while the Department of Education would move to Blackburn’s Tennessee, in order to disperse the economic benefits associated with relatively high-paying government jobs that currently accrue to just a few zip codes.
“Every year Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars fund federal agencies that are mainly located in the D.C. bubble. That’s a big part of the problem with Washington: they’re too removed from the rest of America. The Hire Act will move policymakers directly into the communities they serve, creating thousands of jobs for local communities and saving taxpayers billions of dollars along the way,” Hawley said in a statement.
The bill comes in the wake of Hawley’s online feud with Department of Agriculture research analyst Andrew Crane-Droesch, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday arguing that Perdue relocated his division, the Economic Research Service, to Kansas City. Mo. last year in order to undermine its staff because their research didn’t support the administration’s policy goals.
“I assume this is a parody, right? DC bureaucrats aren’t actually saying out loud that moving to Missouri is … punishment, are they? Because surely nobody could be that condescending & elitist,” Hawley wrote on Twitter in response to the op-ed.
