NSF getting kicked out of headquarters by HUD
45 comments
·June 25, 2025econ
I envision a tent city, tents to live, tents to work, executive party tents etc
mtalantikite
Years ago I read about how Norway was redistributing agencies out of Oslo and into other cities across the country. This felt like it made intuitive sense, as you'd maybe get to distribute jobs to other localities and break up the concentration of bureaucracy. I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same.
dogleash
> I haven't read about the outcomes, but I've always wondered what could happen if the DC area did the same.
If the central office has any say over the location someone works, you get the phenomenon where the population of less-desirable living locations get to suffer local employees that aren't good enough at their job to be given higher prioritization in choosing their station. And the organization looses good workers they can't accommodate.
firefax
People sometimes want less "desirable" locations because there's lower cost of living -- raising kids in a home with a yard vs a condo or apartment.
mtalantikite
As a remote worker since 2008, I agree, I don't want someone telling me I have to live in a place I wouldn't want to live for a job. But also, they're already dictating that people have to live in the DC area, which probably has a similar effect. I'm sure there are plenty of highly talented bureaucrats living in Chicago, or Nashville, or Boulder, or Houston, etc etc.
alphager
Germany has been doing it since 1949. It leads to stronger regional centers and dishes the capital effect. Germany has many larger cities all over the country.
France has been doing the opposite, leading to a concentration in and around Paris and few major cities outside of Ile de France.
Tepix
Most german agencies are in Berlin, there are a few that are (still) in Bonn, the former capital.
maratc
Germany has been doing it since the Middle Ages, when it was using the HRE moniker for itself.
postexitus
The UK is actively relocating many civil service roles from London to various locations across the UK as part of the "Places for Growth" initiative. DVLA is in Swansea, Planning in Bristol, Dept of Work and Pensions in Wrexham, - Great British Energy will be HQ'd in Aberdeen I believe.
njarboe
On the other hand keeping all of the federal workforce in D.C, instead of the states, reduces the political desire to prop up federal projects just for the local jobs. Much easier to reduce wasteful spending when you don't layoff people you want voting for you.
easton
I'd assume (?) this effect is minimized by so much of the workforce living outside the district (600k people live in the district, ~6 million in the DC/Maryland/Virginia statistical area).
The Maryland and Virginia sides have representation (which is very pro-government jobs, as they should be considering their constituency).
bilbo0s
The political desire to prop up federal projects for the local jobs is exactly the reason they want to do the moves. It's corruption all the way down.
The corruption isn't an unintended consequence of the moves. The ability to engage in the corruption is the entire point of the moves.
rafram
The Trump administration is doing the opposite of that — they've been aggressively closing regional branch offices and consolidating agencies in the DC area:
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/04/trump-a...
https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2025/04/trump-administration...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-hhs-close-regional-lega...
https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/press-rel...
If this NSF move is an indication that the White House now wants to distribute jobs more widely across the country, well, that's a real reversal of course from only a couple months ago.
Jtsummers
They've done both, and the purpose is the same. Moving office locations gets people to quit.
bachmeier
I'm not sure the current status, but during Trump I, they moved USDA research from Washington, DC to Kansas City.
xeromal
Doesn't seem like a bad place to move it to!
ceejayoz
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/02/963207129/usda-research-agenc...
> She says that more than half of agency employees decided to quit rather than uproot their families and move. Despite aggressive recruiting in Kansas City and making many new hires, both USDA research agencies are now roughly half the size they were before the move.
(As intended, of course.)
LeifCarrotson
It's not a bad place, but you'd have to move it there slowly if you wanted it to work. Establish a satellite campus, bring a few people there from the original HQ who want to move or will accept whatever incentives you can offer to move, hire locals where possible, work to build relationships like internships with UMKC programs or other local businesses and agencies, hire aggressively from people already in the surrounding area, and then over a period of a few years to a decade people looking to get an education and future job in this industry will realize there's opportunity in Kansas City, and you can start closing down the original location and building up the new one.
If you do this with no plan and no incentives in a matter of a year or less, it's going to decimate the whole agency.
micromacrofoot
except that no one wants to move from DC to Kansas City, it's essentially designed to get all your best employees to quit
bilbo0s
It's a horrible place to move it to.
If we make moves, Ok. How about this..
We move these agencies to get adversarial impulses going in service of cost control.
We move the USDA to the middle of New York City.
Urban Development to Tomah Wisconsin. (I'll settle for Nacogdoches Texas just to make sure the South gets some of these HQ's).
Department of the Interior should be moved to Miami Fl.
Department of Defense to Berkeley California.
And so on and so forth.
All should be legally obliged to hire only locals in civilian roles.
Having the USDA in Kansas City guarantees the tax payer gets robbed blind.
bilbo0s
Not familiar with how Norway works?
But I am familiar with the US. We have so much corruption that it's a virtual certainty any moves of the kind you postulate would be precipitated by a desire for more and easier access to corruption. We actually have a long history of doing this sort of thing in the US. Sometimes we get more corruption, but the service in question is objectively better off. (Some moves made by the military when the Berlin wall came down.) More often we get more corruption and the service in question is objectively worse off. (NASA being forced, via corruption, to build solid rocket boosters a long way away from where the boosters would be used. Thus necessitating the modularization of the boosters into transportable segments. "No problem! We'll just use O-Rings!")
Here's the thing. Whether the results were objectively better, or objectively worse, corruption increased. So the US, as a whole, deteriorates.
palmfacehn
There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.
If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
https://www.thoughtco.com/taxpayers-paid-for-shrimp-treadmil...
>The shrimp treadmill study cost taxpayers more than $3 million over a decade.
>The National Science Foundation, not Congress, approved the shrimp treadmill study funding.
ceejayoz
> characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research…
It's the best way of funding basic (i.e. not immediately profitable) research.
Stuff like $80k to study the bacteria in Yellowstone's hot springs… which brought us PCR. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/how-a-thermophil...
> How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?
They don't. That's why they have you submit a proposal.
> if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why to proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?
They don't. That study was targeted by opponents of it. (It's also an outright lie.)
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
"The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, 'and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context.'"
oldpersonintx2
[dead]
njarboe
So are the NSF employees going to share the building? The article doesn't say.
null
FirmwareBurner
Why the clickbait title? The article is called "HUD Plans to Move Operations From Washington to Virginia"
ceejayoz
The article's title is a bit like describing WWII as "many Germans resettling in Poland".
palmfacehn
[insert event], partisan politics and why we should all be outraged. Regardless of title, I'm not sure why the post is here at all.
null
suddenlybananas
Because the more relevant part to most people is the fact that the NSF is being kicked out. Scientific American reported on it this way.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-administrat...
oldpersonintx2
good! just demolish their old HQ in L'Enfant Plaza, all of which is a national embarrassment of cheap, demoralizing, poorly-rendered wannabe brutalism and shitty 80s dead-tech modern
https://archive.ph/eZg3g