“The Washington octopus,” by James Piereson (original) (raw)

Editors’ note: “Democracy in America: a symposium” examines the status of popular sovereignty in the United States today, nearly two centuries after the seminal work of the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. Other participants include Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, Daniel J. Mahoney & Glenn Ellmers.

The District of Columbia, the capital city and seat of government for the United States, contains a population of roughly 700,000 in a condensed area of sixty square miles. That population has remained steady over the post-war decades as the reach of the capital city has expanded outward into adjacent counties in Maryland and Virginia. The population of the metropolitan region has swollen to more than six million residents and has been growing by double-digit percentages in nearly every decade of the post-war era, fueled by federal spending and employment. Most employees in the district work for the federal government, as do large numbers in the greater metropolitan region.

allowfullscreen=”allowfullscreen”>

Washington has long been the principal beneficiary of federal spending: the federal government, through countless programs enacted by Congress, sends trillions of dollars yearly to individuals and institutions across the country (and to foreign countries, too), but those funds are laundered through Washington before being sent out. The “house” first takes its share before anyone else sees a cent. Washington is a company town, and its business is government.

For this reason, there are hundreds of federal agencies in Washington and the surrounding counties, so many in fact that no one even bothers to count them, and at least as many, or more, nongovernmental operations situated there for the purpose of influencing national policy or the disposition of federal funds, or winning a contract, subsidy, or tax preference from federal officials. Perhaps for this reason also, the capital is controlled from top to bottom by the Democratic Party: upwards of 90 percent of D.C. voters in recent presidential elections cast ballots for Democratic candidates. No Republican has been elected mayor (or has bothered running for the office) since Congress authorized home rule for the district in 1973. Citizens might be forgiven if, when they encounter civil servants in the capital, they see Democrats instead. Adjacent counties, Montgomery in Maryland and Fairfax in Virginia, are now reliably Democratic jurisdictions, too. The outward expansion of government in recent decades has given Democrats the votes to take effective control of those state governments as well.

Washington is a company town, and its business is government.

According to the theory of representative government, as embodied in the U.S. Constitution, voters across the nation, through their elected representatives, should control and give direction to the government in Washington. For most of the nation’s history, that has been the case. Through the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century, too, Washington operated more or less “out of sight and out of mind” for most Americans. State and local jurisdictions handled most governmental activities as the country expanded westward, and business enterprises shaped a similarly expanding economic landscape. During that era, the federal government ran a post office and customs operation and, save for periods of war, not much else.

That flow of influence has been reversed in recent decades by the growth of the federal government, and the vast expansion of its fiscal, regulatory, and financial powers. The capital city increasingly directs the voters rather than being controlled by them. After all, government operates continuously, with influential decisions made on a day-to-day basis, while voters show up at the polls episodically every two or four years. The range and scale of operations in the capital are now so vast that voters can have little hope of controlling or even understanding them. Notwithstanding its alliance with the Democrats, the capital has developed into a kind of political party in its own right.

Voters across the country appear to have a rough sense of the degree to which influence has been concentrated in the capital, often in opposition to their wishes or interests. Donald Trump’s supporters, gathered at his rallies, called upon him to “drain the swamp,” a reference to the widespread corruption they saw taking place in Washington. It did not take long after Trump’s election in 2016 for several government agencies, including the fbi, cia, and Department of Justice, to come forward with a campaign to drive him from office, or distract him with so many investigations as to make it difficult for him to address the concerns that animated his voters. This was the “deep state,” as he and his supporters called it, another layer of influence burrowed inside the government, operating through clandestine avenues to discredit threats to what they regarded as the national interest. It appeared that though the voters selected Trump, the capital party was determined to spit him out.

These metaphors of the “swamp” and the “deep state,” while generally accurate, do not fully capture the degree of influence the nation’s capital exercises over the politics of the nation and the operation of other institutions. Through the new powers it has seized in recent decades, the federal government extends its reach into every institution in the country, including schools and colleges, private associations, state and local governments, business enterprises, and—because of its influence over the schools—even into families and family life. This has happened largely without authorization from voters, or from their representatives in Congress. This is the “Washington octopus,” its tentacles reaching into every area of national life, with support from federal officials, advocacy groups, and the press, but without any effective control or oversight that might be exercised by voters, representatives, or the two political parties.

The federal government extends its reach into every institution in the country.

The mature development of the Washington octopus is relatively recent, dating back to the rise of the national-security establishment in the 1950s and the raft of domestic legislation approved during the 1960s. Other factors have accelerated its rise: the federal income tax, combined with the post-war expansion of the economy, provided resources to the government on a scale unthinkable until recent times, while the role of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency permits it to borrow almost without limit. These factors have come together to give the capital leverage over the national system that stands in stark contrast to the relatively passive role it played during most of the nation’s history. Many like to speak about “threats to democracy,” most of which turn out upon inspection to be nothing of the sort, but the Washington octopus in fact poses a genuine threat to representative government under the Constitution.

Everyone who has seen the musical Hamilton knows that the nation’s capital was moved to the present site in the District of Columbia due to a dinner-table bargain in 1790 between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Hamilton needed Jefferson’s support in Congress to win approval for the federal assumption of Revolutionary War debts; in return, Jefferson wanted Hamilton’s support to move the capital from New York City to a location nearer to the population and geographical center of the country, later mapped out by President Washington in a district between Maryland and Virginia.

The Constitution authorized Congress to establish a separate federal district as the seat of government because, as James Madison wrote in Federalist 43, the framers understood the problems that would arise if the federal government had to operate under the jurisdiction of a particular state. Such problems, in fact, had already occurred. A few years earlier, in 1783, members of the Continental Congress in session in Philadelphia had to flee to New Jersey when a band of disgruntled soldiers descended upon Independence Hall, while authorities in Pennsylvania refused to send assistance. That episode reminded delegates to the Constitutional Convention that the federal government had to be granted exclusive authority over the seat of government.

But Jefferson had another reason for moving the capital out of New York, then the most populous city in the new republic and a major commercial center as well. He, along with everyone else at the time, was aware that a conflict between “country” and “court” parties was a feature of British politics throughout the eighteenth century and a key background factor in the American Revolution and Constitutional Convention. In that conflict, the “court” party organized itself around the politics of the capital city, fueled by high taxes, government debt, patronage, and foreign wars, while the “country” party was a loose coalition of Tories and radical Whigs that formed in the 1720s and 1730s in opposition to Robert Walpole’s ministry and to what they called the “corrupt” politics of the capital.

The issues dividing “court” and “country” parties in England arose out of a financial revolution that unfolded in the early decades of the eighteenth century. During the hundred-year period from the 1680s through the American Revolution, Britain fought an almost continuous sequence of wars, mostly against France. To address those conflicts, Britain built up a formidable navy, along with an army to fight those wars abroad, though at a significant cost in debt. The debt was successfully managed by the Bank of England, created in the 1690s, which found that it could issue long-term bonds at modest interest rates to cover those costs. The costs were covered by taxes assessed against landed property, or so claimed leaders of the country party.

Through this process, Britain created the first “fiscal-military state,” funded by long-term debt. From the standpoint of the country party, this revolution provided the government new sources of patronage and gave bankers and bondholders great influence in the capital, and perhaps also an interest in promoting further foreign adventures. Publishing pamphlets under the name of “Cato,” radical Whigs and others attached to the country party outlined their opposition to that fiscal revolution and to its political offspring, including standing armies, foreign entanglements, government debt, high taxes, and the accumulation of executive power. London was a hotbed of corruption, they wrote, organized around patronage, debt, and the buying and selling of influence.

While they had little impact in England, the opposition pamphlets were widely read and circulated throughout the American colonies in the decade leading up to the revolution, providing revolutionary leaders with a ready-made case against British policies. The Americans believed from reading the pamphlets that Britain’s plan to tax the colonists arose from the corrupt politics of the capital, and from pressures from various sources to increase the public revenue. British leaders, entangled in their web of corruption, were prepared to trample upon the traditional rights of the colonists, including the powers of the colonial legislatures, to make those policies stick. As Bernard Bailyn wrote in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), “More than any single group of writers they shaped the mind of the revolutionary generation.”

Concerns about corruption in the capital were also factors behind the rise of national political parties in the 1790s. When Jefferson and his allies took note of Hamilton’s program to create a national bank in the capital to broker the buying and selling of public debt, they had no difficulty in concluding that he meant to create a British-style state in America, propped up by patronage, debt, a standing army, and wide-ranging executive powers. Hamilton, they said, was “another Walpole.” Americans (they thought) had fought a revolution and ratified a constitution to prevent a corrupt capital from taking root in the new republic. The solution, as Jefferson and Madison formulated it, was to create a new political party to organize public opinion in the states against the corruption taking root in the capital. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, organized with Madison’s assistance, unseated Hamilton’s party in the election of 1800 and dominated national politics from that time until the slavery crisis emerged in the 1850s. As things turned out, Hamilton’s program was mostly neutered by Jefferson’s party and his maneuvering the capital to a then-uninhabited site halfway between Boston and Charleston.

For most of the nation’s history, until well into the twentieth century, the District of Columbia was an inhospitable swamp with relatively few permanent residents and a minimal federal establishment. Pigs and cows roamed the streets; it was interspersed with mosquito-infested marshes; summer heat and humidity were unbearable; slavery was widespread until it was outlawed in 1862.

James Sterling Young, in The Washington Community: 1800–1828 (1966), described the political history of the new capital in the age of Jefferson and Jackson. The federal government had few real duties: nearly all government functions were still in the hands of state and local jurisdictions. In 1802, the executive branch in Washington had all of 132 employees, most of them working for the Treasury Department (collecting taxes) or the Post Office. The State Department, including the Patent Office, had ten employees. The attorney general’s office had one employee (the attorney general) who had but one client: the President of the United States. The Supreme Court operated with one law clerk. The president had no staff. By 1829 the federal establishment had grown somewhat, but (according to Young) the federal district was still a place that did not register for most of the country.

In that book, Young described the capital in that era as a “vast construction site,” marked by unfinished buildings, with work proceeding on an episodic basis:

Two unfinished stark white citadels [the Capitol and the Executive Mansion] towered above the terrain on opposite shores of a dismal swamp, more like ruins amid the fallen fragments . . . . Where monuments had been planned, brush piles moldered and rubbish heaps accumulated.

Members of Congress lived in sparse boarding houses built near the Capitol and formed voting coalitions based upon these housing arrangements. Fortunately, congressional sessions were brief: representatives and senators did not remain in the capital any longer than necessary. A large proportion, half of them at least, resigned or quit after two years, often to take positions in state governments. Their aversion was not to public service, but to the primitive federal capital of the time.

When British troops marched on Washington in 1812, they were surprised to find that there was not much in the way of a government there, and not much to burn, aside from the Capitol, the White House, and a few other public buildings. President Madison had fled; Congress was not in session; there were few commercial enterprises of note. British troops stayed for four days, then departed. This was not London, or Paris, or any other capital they had seen or heard of.

Those who thought the federal capital might become “the vital center” of national life, or perhaps the “Rome of the New World,” were soon disappointed when it failed to attract new residents and commercial enterprises. When President Washington staged a public auction of new land in the proposed capital, only a handful of lots were sold out of the ten thousand offered. The population of the capital was eight thousand when it opened for business in 1800, but some projected that it might grow into a city of 160,000 people within a few decades. In fact, the district’s population in 1820 was just 23,000. The capital did not reach that anticipated population until 1870.

If Jefferson’s aim was to prevent the American government from developing along British lines, and to prevent the federal district from occupying a central role in the political life of the republic, then there can be little doubt that he succeeded, to judge by the early history of the federal capital. Jefferson’s outlook was not out of character with the constitutional order he had helped to establish. The Constitution itself was ambivalent about government powers, at once authorizing them but then rendering them difficult to gather and use. As with the Constitution, so with the capital: it was valuable a seat of government, but so located as to keep it from becoming a genuine locus of national power.

The political upheavals of the Civil War and World War I did not permanently transform the capital into the vital center of national political life. The Civil War, wrote Constance McLaughlin Green in her history of the capital, brought confusion and chaos to the city, and overturned establish patterns of civic life, discrediting some formerly reputable families and creating openings for new leaders to emerge. But the capital city continued on afterwards much as before, generally neglected both by Congress and the nation at large. World War I, according to Green, brought new residents to the capital in search of wartime employment, including large numbers of African Americans moving from Southern states. Still, through the 1920s, federal-government expenditures amounted to no more than 2 percent of gdp, roughly the same as in the age of Jefferson and Jackson one hundred years earlier.

The capital city as we know it today took shape in response to three large developments in the mid-twentieth century. First, the New Deal, as a response to the Great Depression, began a process by which the capital became the nerve center for the national economy as the federal government encouraged the creation of labor unions, raised taxes, and formed new agencies to regulate the stock market, agricultural production, industrial prices, and other areas of economic life. Second, World War II, followed by the Cold War, transformed Washington into the hub for America’s national-security state, with scores of new departments, including the intelligence agencies, thousands of new employees working for the Department of Defense, and many companies seeking defense contracts and advocacy groups seeking influence over the disposition of federal funds. Third, the Great Society programs, passed into law in the mid-1960s, added new domestic programs to compete with defense for shares of the federal budget, and through these programs extended the reach of the federal government into other major institutions in American society, including state and local governments, schools and colleges, business enterprises, and even charities, which prior to the 1960s prided themselves on their independence from government.

It was undoubtedly the Great Society, with its array of new spending programs, including especially Medicare, Medicaid, and federal assistance to schools and colleges, that transformed Washington into an octopus with tentacles reaching into other important institutions. A key element in this transformation was the adoption in the 1960s of the principle that any organization that received funds from the federal government had to abide by federal regulations in all of its activities, even though federal funds might represent but a small fraction of its budget. This meant that if a university received funds to support its physics department, then it was required to follow federal regulations in all of its schools and departments.

This principle was embedded into Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin in any institution receiving federal financial assistance. Since, by virtue of other Great Society legislation, every organization in the country was eligible to receive federal aid, the principle had near-universal application to institutions across the country. It was a large factor in bringing down racially discriminatory laws across the South: hospitals and schools in those states sought access to Medicare and educational grants and could not receive them unless they complied with the Civil Rights Act. The educational amendments of 1972—or Title IX of those amendments—established the same principle as applied to sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal aid. The requirement was subsequently applied to federal assistance in other areas, from transportation to the environment to health care.

Laws may be congressional in origin, but they are now mostly administrative or bureaucratic in content.

Those new programs spawned a host of advocacy groups in Washington that worked with journalists, congressional committees, and executive agencies to protect expenditures and expand the reach of the programs. The advocacy groups were funded by charitable foundations and wealthy individuals, and sometimes by government itself, which sent money to groups to press Congress to increase spending and expand regulations, in a cumulative process of expansion. Those groups, working in league with friends and allies in the agencies, the Washington press corps, and congressional staffs, urged bureaucrats to expand their mandates by adopting ever more aggressive regulations.

What is “discrimination” under the Civil Rights Act? What is the definition of “clean air” or “pollution” under the Clean Air Act? How do we define “sex discrimination” under Title IX—indeed, how do we define “sex” or “gender”? How do we define “ballot access” under the Voting Rights Act? What is the definition of “transparency” under the mandate of the Securities Exchange Commission (sec)? The laws as passed by Congress do not answer these questions in any detail. As a consequence, civil servants have latitude to define those terms, and to issue regulations that follow from them, with little oversight from Congress. Laws may be congressional in origin, but they are now mostly administrative or bureaucratic in content.

There are numerous examples of this kind of bureaucratic imperialism, as some have called it. Consider the following: The Social Security Act of 1935 created an entitlement for welfare but limited eligibility to “widows and orphans.” But it was gradually expanded through the 1950s and 1960s to include any person with a dependent child. Due to this expansion, Congress eventually reformed the welfare system via legislation in 1996.

The affirmative-action regime developed almost entirely by regulation as officials in civil-rights agencies in the government expanded the definition of “discrimination” to include any practice that led to differential outcomes between whites and blacks. Institutions receiving federal aid were required to abide by these evolving definitions, until the Supreme Court decided last year that the use of racial classifications in college admissions violates the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Voting Rights Act (1965) was passed to allow ballot access to black citizens in the South, but the courts, in league with the Department of Justice, expanded the definition to cover other electoral areas, including the drawing of boundaries for congressional and legislative districts.

The Environmental Protection Agency (epa) has sought to regulate carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act to mitigate “climate change,” though such authority was never written into the act.

The sec, under authority granted in the 1930s to promote transparency in stock markets, proposes to require public companies to disclose climate-related risks of their businesses as a condition for participation in exchanges like nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange.

The Department of Education recently issued regulations that turn the definition of gender into a subjective matter, allowing individuals in federally assisted institutions to self-identify as males, females, or some other category, notwithstanding biological criteria.

The Great Society programs and their progeny gradually erased the unofficial barriers that previously existed between public and private activities, and between the powers of the federal government and the discretionary privileges of private institutions. “The personal is political, and the political is personal,” shouted the rebels of the 1960s, a slogan they eventually managed to turn into reality by this unanticipated route.

The federal government is able to exercise this influence because of the vast fiscal powers it has accumulated in the post-war era, along with its capacity to borrow unlimited sums to finance annual deficits. The current federal budget for 2023–24 is roughly $6.9 trillion, or close to one-quarter of the nation’s gdp and substantially more than will be spent this year by all state and local governments combined. It is little wonder, in view of this level of spending, that institutions of all kinds look to the federal government for financial assistance.

State and local governments, once proudly independent, have been transformed by this development into agents of federal policies. The state of California, with a budget of 234billionin2023,received234 billion in 2023, received 234billionin2023,received153 billion in federal funds, or one-third of its total budget; Texas received 58billion,or41percentofitsbudgetinfederalfunds;NewYork,58 billion, or 41 percent of its budget in federal funds; New York, 58billion,or41percentofitsbudgetinfederalfunds;NewYork,85 billion, or 39 percent of its budget. Major cities also received significant sums from the federal budget. Chicago, for example, received 4.6billioninfederalfundsin2023,or28percentofitsbudget.ThecityofDetroitreceived4.6 billion in federal funds in 2023, or 28 percent of its budget. The city of Detroit received 4.6billioninfederalfundsin2023,or28percentofitsbudget.ThecityofDetroitreceived826 million in federal aid through the American Rescue Plan Act, earmarked for covid relief. Much of this funding is sent to these jurisdictions through Medicaid and federal transportation and education programs. Given the reliance of state and local governments on federal funding, one is entitled to wonder what is left of the federal system as laid out in the Constitution.

The federal government also hands out large sums to colleges and universities under various pieces of legislation passed by Congress over the years, beginning with the Higher Education Act of 1965. College and university leaders prize their independence from outside forces, but they too have been drawn into the orbit of federal financial and political influence. Over a five-year period from 2018 through 2022, for example, Stanford University received 7billioninfederalfunds,muchofitforresearchorstudentassistance,despitetheschool’scurrentendowmentof7 billion in federal funds, much of it for research or student assistance, despite the school’s current endowment of 7billioninfederalfunds,muchofitforresearchorstudentassistance,despitetheschool’scurrentendowmentof36 billion. Harvard and Yale received more than 11billioneachduringthisperiod,despitehavingcurrentendowmentsof11 billion each during this period, despite having current endowments of 11billioneachduringthisperiod,despitehavingcurrentendowmentsof50 billion and 40billion,respectively.Overthefive−yearperiod,theeightIvyLeagueuniversities,plusStanford,receivedatotalof40 billion, respectively. Over the five-year period, the eight Ivy League universities, plus Stanford, received a total of 40billion,respectively.Overthefive−yearperiod,theeightIvyLeagueuniversities,plusStanford,receivedatotalof30 billion in federal assistance. They were not alone. Other schools received large sums, as did numerous charity groups, advocacy organizations, and research centers, thereby giving the federal government a large role in shaping the activities of these organizations.

It might be said, in defense of this system, that it should not arouse real fears because federal bureaucrats think more or less like other citizens across the country and would never consider regulations that are outside the mainstream of public opinion. But this is not true—and everyone knows it. For one thing, nearly all civil servants in and around the capital are attached to the Democratic Party, which represents just half the national population, at most.

Jennifer Bachner and Benjamin Ginsburg, political scientists at Johns Hopkins University, published in 2016 the results of a survey they conducted to gather the opinions of civil servants and other members of the Washington policy community. Their book, What Washington Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Run the Government and Their Misconceptions about the American People, demonstrates that administrators and bureaucrats who run the government have little in common with the citizens they are supposed to serve (more than 70 percent have graduate degrees, compared to 10 percent of American adults; most are Democrats; and they earn far higher salaries than private-sector employees) and do not think they should heed popular views when it comes to implementing policies or crafting regulations. The authors report, for example, that in connection with a range of domestic issues, 80 percent or more of civil servants think it is proper to disregard public opinion when implementing policies or writing regulations.

Many expressed contempt for the views of citizens, claiming that the public knows little about the issues addressed by the policy community in Washington. The authors concluded on the basis of their survey that official Washington lives in a “bubble” of its own creation, where policymakers converse with one another but rarely with outsiders who might hold different views. “We found,” they wrote,

that much of official and quasi-official Washington is content to think that ordinary Americans, and even the politicians whom they send to Congress, are uninformed and misguided and that policy makers generally should ignore them.

They acknowledge that the situation is relatively new, evolving from the policy innovations of the 1960s, and that it represents a challenge to assumptions about democracy, representative government, and rule by “the people.”

Scott Rasmussen, the famed pollster, has been conducting surveys of the “1 percent” for the purpose of comparing their views to those of the other 99 percent of Americans. These “Elites” are those who hold at least one graduate degree, live in or near large cities, and earn more than $150,000 per year—a definition that would fit most federal employees working in or near the capital. Their views, as documented in these surveys, are wildly out of touch with those of most Americans—yet they have great influence over policy, journalism, higher education, and other institutions that shape national politics. It is not too much to suggest that the “Elite” are largely responsible for the cultural upheavals of recent decades and for continuing the culture war that continues to bedevil national life.

In this group, 73 percent identify as Democrats, 67 percent are between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-four, and 70 percent trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Nearly 80 percent of the elite groups would impose restrictions on the private use of gas and electricity; 70 percent would ban gas-powered vehicles and stoves; 55 percent would ban nonessential air travel; 53 percent favor a ban on private air-conditioning, in the interests of slowing down climate change. More than 80 percent approved of President Biden’s job performance versus 44 percent of the public at large. On a more alarming note, roughly 40 percent of these elites said they would rather cheat than lose an election, compared to just 7 percent of other adults surveyed.

These are the views of the policy community in the capital that shape the rules and regulations that Americans must follow. It is alarming to consider that those views are so far out of step with those of most Americans, but even more alarming to consider that, for the most part, the people who inhabit the capital and make the rules do not bother to hide their contempt for the citizens they are supposed to serve.

It will be difficult to cut the tentacles of the Washington octopus, or even to neutralize them to some degree. The influence of the capital over other institutions is deeply embedded in budgets, policies, and established practices. Most important institutions in American society depend to some degree upon financial support from the federal government. It is hard to see how that support will be withdrawn, absent a national bankruptcy of some kind, which might be a cure, but one far worse than the disease.

The Supreme Court has taken some significant steps in this direction, and may be poised to take more in the years ahead. For example, in a series of cases in recent years, the court has ruled that when federal administrative agencies issue regulations on important national issues, they must rely upon clear congressional authorization, rather than upon the kind of vague language that appears in many public laws. The court has used the “major questions doctrine” to strike down broad regulations issued by the irs, the epa, the fda, and several other agencies. Most importantly, in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), the court rejected the epa’s claim that it had authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide in the interests of climate change. Earlier this year, the court ruled, in striking down the so-called Chevron Doctrine, that the federal courts will no longer defer to agency interpretations of federal statutes, as they have done in the past. In the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University (2023), the court disallowed the use of racial classifications in college admissions, thereby neutering a practice that the government (in league with advocacy groups) has used to influence employment decisions made by institutions receiving federal funds. These are important steps in the right direction: the court, by issuing these rulings, understands that administrative agencies in the capital have seized powers never authorized by Congress or the Constitution.

President Trump offered some hope when he proposed to move some government agencies to new locations outside Washington, D.C. He raised a good point: Why should the Department of the Interior be located in Washington when it might better carry out its functions in Montana, Idaho, Utah, or the Dakotas? For that matter, why are the fbi or the Department of Commerce located in Washington when they might better be located in Kansas City, Wichita, Dallas, or any number of other cities? There are government agencies located outside of the capital. The nation’s space center is based in Houston; the cdc is located in Atlanta. Yet when Trump proposed to move some D.C. agencies, bureaucrats loudly protested—after all, they are comfortable in Washington where they operate at a far remove from the people they serve. But they need not have worried: Democrats, once in power, reversed Trump’s initiatives, for obvious partisan reasons. But it is a strategy that Trump can and should renew if he is once again elected to the presidency.

If all else fails, then there is the alternative (admittedly remote) of relocating the capital to another city nearer the geographical and population centers of the country. That would disable the Washington octopus, at least for a while: it would take years for the bureaucrats and advocacy groups to recreate their networks of influence in another capital. It is not a far-fetched idea. After all, it was accomplished once before, with surprising success, while “the room where it happened” has now been memorialized in a popular Broadway show.