Why Not Move The Government?

By Michael Kinsley

Boris Yeltsin and friends seem to be losing their enthusiasm for Minsk. When the leaders of the three Slavic republics announced the replacement of the Soviet Union by a Commonwealth of Independent States on Dec. 8, they declared that the Commonwealth's seat of government would be Minsk. Minsk? Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, is 400 miles southwest of Moscow. It was a way of signaling the break between the old union and the new Commonwealth.

But now the Commonwealth itself seems to be faltering, and talk of moving the central functions of government to Minsk is dying out. Perhaps disagreements among the various republics are proving too great for any form of union. Perhaps Minsk was just a tactical bluff all along. Or perhaps someone has looked at a map, thought about Chekhov's three sisters yearning for Moscow, and decided that life in Minsk is too high a price to pay for a rhetorical flourish.

Here in the U.S., meanwhile, the project of moving the government a few hundred miles to the southwest proceeds apace, under the supervision of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. In 1989 Byrd gave up the Senate majority leadership to become chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He made no bones about why: his intention was to direct federal spending toward West Virginia. A billion dollars in five years was his goal, and he made it in half that time.

Apart from the usual highways and parks, Byrd has taken a special interest in transplanting pieces of federal agencies from metropolitan Washington to his home state. Among the departments of government that have offered up various limbs and organs for sacrifice are the FBI division of fingerprinting, the CIA and the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt, Internal Revenue Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Even the Coast Guard has moved its national computer operation to Byrd's landlocked state.

Strangely, Byrd's little experiment in de-Washingtonization has become the focus of outrage among the very people who are otherwise most critical of Washington and its ways. To these critics, it is the very symbol of congressional arrogance of power, isolation from reality, contempt for the voters, and so on, and demonstrates the need for term limits if not lynching. Bob Byrd, formerly thought to be at worst a courtly, fiddle-playing gasbag, is portrayed as a voracious monster of the pork barrel.

To be sure, Byrd's motive is to help his state. And there is something less than perfect about a political system that decides where to locate the FBI's division of fingerprinting based on the vagaries of the congressional seniority system. (Whether term limits would cure this defect is another question. Although Byrd has been in the Senate for 33 years, he has only been Appropriations chairman for three). But, perhaps by coincidence, West Virginia is -- from an anti-Washington perspective -- probably the ideal place for the Federal Government to seep away to. Economically and culturally, if not geographically, it's about as far away from Washington as anyplace else in the country.

Consider the good-government advantages of (let's call it) the Byrd Migration. First there is the Minsk effect. What better way to symbolize an end to the old ways and commitment to reform than physically moving the government? What better way to break up old bureaucracies than to uproot and transplant them, files and all?

Second, spreading the government around a bit ought to reduce that self- feeding and self-regarding Beltway culture that Washington-phobes claim to dislike so much. Of course there is a good deal of hypocrisy in this anti- Washington chatter. Much of it comes from politicians and journalists who have spent most of their adult lives in Washington and wouldn't care to live anywhere else. They are not rushing to West Virginia themselves, except for the occasional quaint rustic weekend. But they can take comfort that public servants at the Bureau of the Public Debt, at least, have escaped the perils of inside-the-Beltway insularity.

Third, is Senator Byrd's raw spread-the-wealth philosophy completely illegitimate? The Federal Government and government-related private enterprises have made metropolitan Washington one of the richest areas of the country. By contrast, West Virginia is the second poorest state, after Mississippi. The entire country's taxes support the government. Why shouldn't more of the country get a piece of it? As private businesses are discovering, the electronic revolution is making it less and less necessary for work to be centralized at headquarters. There's no reason the government shouldn't take more advantage of this trend as well.

Maryland Congresswoman Constance Morella claims she is "afraid to go to sleep at night for fear of waking up and finding another agency has been moved to West Virginia." D.C.'s elected shadow senator, Jesse Jackson, says the migration "smacks of racism." That is merely Jackson's way of saying he doesn't like it. It's true the affected federal employees suffer the trauma of either uprooting their families or losing their jobs. But the same trauma is faced by employees of the many businesses enticed into the Washington area, often with the energetic help of these same members of Congress.

It is hardly enough, though, to expel a few thousand mid-level bureaucrats from the alleged Eden inside the Washington Beltway. Really purging the Washington culture enough to satisfy its noisiest critics will require a mass exodus on the order of what the Khmer Rouge instituted when they took over Phnom Penh in 1975. Until the very members of the TIME Washington bureau itself are traipsing south along I-95, their word processors strapped to their backs, the nation cannot rest easy. But America's would-be Khmer Rouge should give Senator Byrd more credit for showing the way.