Washington De - Centralized
Let us distribute most offices of the federal government across all fifty states.
The push for statehood for Washington, D.C. is a naked power grab by Democrats who hope to pick up two free Senate seats. Alas, the House bill to do this is nearly sure to die on the floor of that same Senate. At which point we will find out whether Democrats care enough about the alleged disenfranchisement of D.C. residents to propose something more palatable, for instance:
transferring large portions of D.C. to Maryland; or
“trading” D.C. statehood for the creation of a new “red” state of similar population, like the proposed state of Jefferson.
I suspect Democrats will not care enough to do either of these things: better to keep D.C. residents in their vast stable of perpetual victims.
Whatever the case may be, the whole issue has focused a share of our national attention on our national Capitol. I think it is worth it to ask ourselves why that Capitol exists — at least in its present form. In an age of virtually speed-of-light communication, why are so many of the offices of the federal government concentrated in one small geographical area?
Would it not be better to de-centralize the federal government, geographically? Why can’t the headquarters of the Department of Labor be in Minneapolis, instead of on Minnesota Avenue in Washington, D.C.? Why can’t the Department of Energy be headquartered in Dallas, the Department of the Interior in Denver, and so on and so forth? We have the technology to allow these bureaucrats to continue to have meetings with other bureaucrats and our elected representatives from a distance. Why not use it?
Why does the Congress have to physically meet at the Capitol building, anymore? Senators and Representatives can now remain in their home states, among their constituents. This should mean less travel to support their continuous fundraising and campaigning, giving them more time to spend on the actual business of legislating.
I submit to you that there are no longer any really good reasons to keep all of these offices in Washington D.C. Even the really good argument against D.C. statehood from Federalist No. 43 — that this is “too great a public pledge to be left in the hands of a single State” — does not apply, if we are distributing federal offices among the fifty states. (Of course, there would be balancing considerations.)
There are definitely very good reasons not to keep all of these offices in Washington D.C.
First and foremost: the age of near-light-speed communications is also an age of weapons of mass destruction: a single city can be utterly destroyed in the blink of an eye. For fifty years our military command-and-control has been distributed so that it can continue to operate if Washington D.C. is erased by a nuclear weapon. Why not distribute the non-military aspects of the federal government as well? Wouldn’t that minimize the disruption of any nightmare scenario in which a WMD falls into the hand of a terrorist group? Better yet, if terrorists or rogue state actors know that they cannot fell Goliath with one lucky hit, they will be less likely even to try such a thing.
An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) — whether produced by a low-yield, high altitude fission bomb or by a coronal mass ejection — is still problematic because it disrupts much of the technology that supports the nearly-light-speed communications. But this is not a unique disadvantage: i.e. it’s at least as much of a problem under our present arrangement.
Similarly we now are aware of a few kinds of natural catastrophes that could destroy or massively disrupt the Capitol. A mega-tsunami is probably the most likely of these where Washington D.C. is concerned. It’s “astronomically” unlikely that the city will be hit by an asteroid large enough to doom the city but not so large as to doom the country. Still, why take the chance?
If the Congress did not physically meet at the Capitol, then there would be literally nothing to fear from invasions of that building, like the one that we saw on January 6th. A domestic terror group could only threaten the representatives of a single state by taking over any given building.
If congresspersons legislated from their home state they would be more accessible to, hence more accountable to, the people and interests that they represent. Lobbyists could still catch them on a Zoom call, but if they wanted to wine and dine them they would have to fly all over creation. What’s not to like?
De-centralizing D.C. would be no small task. The enterprise of moving all of these offices would be almost as large as the task of coming to agreement on where to move them. But this, combined with some serious work on hardening our critical communications infrastructure against EMP, would make the United States impregnable. We would be like a Death Star but without a thermal exhaust port big enough to fly an X-Wing through. And even the clubby “inside the beltway” mentality might slip just a little.