Move federal agencies to red states

There’s a better way to own the libs.

I’m visiting my wife’s family in Alabama, a trip that takes us on a tour through the state’s largest cities. I’ve done this enough times now to offer one confident assessment: Huntsville is Alabama’s best city.

I can say nice things about Mobile and Birmingham, but Huntsville has a level of energy usually reserved for much larger cities. I was downtown Saturday and saw sidewalks bustling with pedestrians going to coffee shops and bakeries; Big Springs International Park so full of people you’d think it was a slice of New York’s Central Park; and a wonderful children’s museum packed with kids, including mine.

Huntsville isn’t just busy. It’s clean, well maintained and thoughtfully designed. It feels like a nice place to spend time.

The federal government built Huntsville

Photo by Kae Anderson on Unsplash

I’ve been noticing Huntsville’s vibrancy for years. I finally got curious about it Sunday, as we were eating dinner in one of Montgomery’s high-end areas, which nonetheless had plenty of vacant lots and high weeds. Something clearly sets Huntsville apart from its peer cities. What is it?

The unequivocal answer is the federal government.¹

Huntsville became what it is today out of sheer luck. Here’s how it happened:

• The U.S. Army established Redstone Arsenal for chemical weapons production in the 1940s.

• The Army relocated Wernher von Braun (a Nazi Party member, for what it’s worth) and his team of German rocket scientists to Huntsville in the 1950s.

• The Marshall Space Flight Center opened at Redstone Arsenal in 1960, just before the Apollo program launched.

• These developments led to the creation of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and an expansion of Alabama A&M.

The government has been flooding Huntsville with money and jobs ever since. A paper by Christopher M. Young sums up the improbable trajectory:

In North America, the defense industry would come to supersede Big Ag, with missiles replacing cotton as its chief unit of economic output. The late 1940s still saw cotton fields come up to within a few blocks of Huntsville’s main street; by the late 1950s, “King cotton had retreated before long rows of housing projects and factories.” By decade’s end, the space industry would also join the Huntsville community with the dedication of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960. Huntsville had become Rocket City, USA.

Huntsville is a federal juggernaut

The rocket is a perfect symbol for Huntsville.

The city has a federal workforce of more than 17,000 people, the most in Alabama by far. That includes many highly skilled workers who are doing jobs in science and technology.

The benefits go way beyond the employees themselves. Federal operations have turned Huntsville into a microcosm of the Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia region, with a base of contractors and downstream effects that touch every facet of the economy.

Consider:

• Huntsville isn’t the fastest-growing city in Alabama — but Athens, one of its suburbs, is.

• In Madison County, which includes Huntsville, GDP grew 14.5% from 2015 to 2020, second in the state to Baldwin County (17%), a tourism hotspot that includes Gulf Shores.

• Huntsville is Alabama’s most educated city, with about 46.2% of residents holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 28% for the state.

Huntsville is not just a great place to live; it’s also an economic engine for Alabama.

Make Wichita the next Huntsville

The Trump administration is fighting the courts to obliterate large swaths of the federal government. But, since Trump’s project of destroying the so-called deep state relies solely on executive action, there’s a strong chance it will either fail or succeed just long enough for a Democratic president to rebuild the bureaucracy later on.

There’s a better way to own the libs. Don’t just dismantle the federal government. Take pieces of it away from D.C., Maryland and Virginia and move them to red states.

The Trump administration has floated this possibility and Republicans, including Sen. Jim Banks, have expressed support for the idea. But I suspect Banks et al. are just trolling and will be content to watch the government burn without leaving a lasting legacy for their efforts.

That would be a missed opportunity. A much better and more politically advantageous troll would be for Trump to follow through and redistribute wealth from the East Coast to Republican-voting areas.

Trump could, for example, move at least a portion of the Federal Aviation Administration to Wichita, Kansas, a conservative city with an existing aerospace ecosystem. The FAA has about 45,000 employees. Moving even a couple thousand of them to Wichita could make a huge difference for the economy.

Let’s make Wichita the next Huntsville!

This isn’t quite apples to apples, since Huntsville’s capitalization on a world war and space race seems like a one-time deal. But there is a surplus of federal agencies clustered in and around D.C. Trump has the power to move those agencies, as well as their jobs, to smaller red-state cities where people could see tangible benefits before he is out of office.

This approach would even enable Trump to functionally (and legally!) fire a lot of people. Many federal workers would not leave D.C. and move to Wichita. They would quit, and the government could just replace them.

As many people have noted, a mass purge of federal workers will not result in substantial budget cuts, even if allowed by the courts. It is merely an ideological exercise.

To the extent that Trump and Republicans want to hurt liberals and help conservatives, they should take the power of the federal government and use it to supercharge red-state economies at the expense of one of America’s bluest regions.

Americans don’t remember leaders who break things. They remember builders.

Thank you for reading this edition of What I Did On Spring Break.

1. Yes, I’m researching the history of Huntsville while on vacation. I’m a joy to travel with!