Location, Location, Location: How the Trump Administration Moves Agencies to Dismantle Public Power

The latest kleptocratic actions by the Trump administration from the week of May 4, 2026

American Kleptocracy and Friends of USAID

May 06, 2026

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down…We want to put them in trauma.
- Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Budget and Management and author of Project 2025 (ProPublica, October 2024)

One of the tools used by kleptocrats to eliminate resistance or limits to their authority is the dismantling of the public sector. It simply makes it easier to help yourself to public and private goods if the institutions designed to serve public interests are not in the way. In previous posts, we have highlighted how Inspectors General have been removed, making it harder for watchdogs and whistleblowers to call out corruption. Last year, the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and massive reduction of the Department of Education served the administration’s political objectives of transforming our foreign assistance practices for transactional ends and eliminating educational opportunities for minority, underserved, and vulnerable populations.

These were just the beginning of the administration’s drive to weaken the vast array of federal agencies that serve the public, the law, and Congress. Most are headquartered in or around Washington, DC. Trump has promised to “demolish the deep state” within the federal agencies that might resist his agenda, and he is now using relocation to do so.

Relocating Federal Agencies to Weaken the Professional Civil Service

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, corruption plagued the United States. Among the worst of this corruption was the handing out of “prebends,” or giving jobs as favors for those who helped the victor. This spoils system meant government workers’ paychecks were given out on the basis of loyalty over competence. To counter this, the United States evolved to create civil service exams, regularize hiring processes, and ensure merit-based protections. This greatly increased the professionalism and quality of the public service.

Now, the Trump administration wishes to hollow out those protections. So far, it has destroyed the independence of the board that hears employee disputes, turned many high-level professional positions into essentially political appointments, and attacked federal workers’ ability to unionize.

These attacks aren’t enough, though. Now, the plan is to inconvenience enough of our professional, nonpartisan federal workers so that they can be replaced with loyalists.

It’s a three part process:

1) Pressure enough people to quit so you can break an agency.

2) Hire for new vacancies.

3) Create a new loyalty test to make sure these new hires are sufficiently deferential to the president’s agenda.

In the first Trump term, the experiment began with the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). This 2019 relocation led to more than half the staff leaving. As explained by Mick Mulvaney, then Head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB):

Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker. I know that because a lot of them work for me. And I’ve tried. And you can’t do it. But simply saying to the people, you know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven and move you out into the real part of the country, and they quit. What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis of the relocation of the ERS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) from DC to the Kansas City region found that productivity at both agencies suffered significantly.

In Trump’s second term, the experiment expanded. In February 2025, agencies were told to create detailed plans for reductions, which would need to be completed in just two weeks.

Since then, additional relocations have been announced, including:

USDA: Much of the workforce of the USDA will be relocated to regional offices in Colorado, North Carolina, Kansas, Missouri, and Utah. The USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service will transfer two-thirds of its headquarters staff from Washington, DC to Georgia, Iowa, or other locations. And in a final twist, the ERS and NIFA will be relocated to Kansas City again—the Biden administration had reversed Trump’s decision to move the office, which Trump is now reinstating.
Forest Service: This agency is moving its headquarters from DC to Utah and shuttering research offices.
US Space Command: The administration has ordered the US Space Command to move from Colorado to Alabama.
Small Business Administration: The SBA is removing regional offices from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York City, and Seattle.
Army Corps of Engineers: The Army Corps of Engineers’ New York District and North Atlantic Division is relocating from New York City to New Jersey. In this case, the government is pursuing an expedited timeline, initiating the request for lease proposals in March and slating the move-in to take place in August. Working across the aisle, members of the New York congressional delegation have asked the administration to address concerns regarding the timeline and disruption to ongoing projects. They are still awaiting a response.

On a personal level, each of these relocations means hundreds of home sales, less time with families, and uprooting communities. On a larger scale, this could mean losing some of the most knowledgeable and talented people in the country—and with them, the confidence that they work of all of us, not just the president.

How Current Actions are Opening the Door to More Waste and Abuse

The attempts to weaken the professional public service are not the only issue. The real estate itself is valuable. And that puts our collective public property at risk.

The federal government, like any organization, needs to be able to buy and sell property. But because it is the government and represents all of us, we need to take special care to make sure these sales aren’t being done in a way that opens the door to corruption. In kleptocracies, “asset stripping“ is a common technique, where oligarchs take productive (or unproductive) collective property and resell it to the well-connected at basement bargain rates.

The Trump administration’s decision to relocate federal agencies poses several risks.

Weakened oversight: In parallel with its push for a dramatic increase in relocations, the Trump administration has weakened the agency charged with management and oversight of the sale of buildings. The GSA’s Public Buildings Service oversees about 8,500 owned and leased government properties. Yet over the course of 2025, the division staff dropped from more than 5,600 employees to approximately 3,100.
Silencing worker voices: In 2025, Trump ended collective bargaining rights for 84% of the unionized federal workforce. Agency relocations further subvert and undermine union protections. Although the Federal Labor Relations Authority has repeatedly held that agencies have a duty to bargain over procedures for carrying out relocations and to make appropriate arrangements for adversely affected employees, the GAO report analyzing the ERS and NIFA moves found that employees were not consulted.
Facilitating the sales of public land: Relocations can compromise the capacity of federal agencies to carry out their mandates and enforce regulations. As we documented recently, relocating the headquarters of the US Forest Service under the guise of restructuring could open the door to selling off public lands.
Partisan retribution: In some cases, the strategy and selection for relocations has been used to punish liberal-leaning states and gain partisan advantage. The SBA move, for example, was touted by Administrator Kelly Loeffler as an opportunity to relocate out of “sanctuary cities.” Similarly, Trump stated that moving the US Space Command was retribution for Colorado’s mail-in ballot policy.
Weakened accounting: The relocation announcements have lacked specifics in terms of the total real costs, including rent and remodeling, as well as staff and productivity loss. During the ERS and NIFA moves, the USDA had set up an evidence-based process for relocations, but chose not to follow it. The Trump administration also refused to publicly release a full third-party cost-benefit analysis, though Democrats in Congress have proposed legislation that relocation plans include a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis.
Allowing below-market sales: The lack of full information, including market-based comparisons, leaves the administration open to criticism. For instance, when the administration moved staff from the GSA regional office to share space with another agency in DC, it sold the 900,000 square foot GSA regional office building for $24 million (or $25 per square foot), which is well below its market value. Last year, the 200,000 square foot US Courthouse in Portland, Oregon was sold to Portland real estate firm SKB for just $1.8 million (about $9 a square foot), which is significantly lower than recent sales prices ranging from $29 to $102 a square foot in that neighborhood.
Overspending on acquisitions: In contrast, money is no object when it comes to the administration’s purchases of detention centers for immigrants. In Atlanta, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent $200 million to purchase two vacant industrial warehouses. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the most recent public assessments from tax authorities put the value of both properties at a fraction of the price paid by DHS. In Salt Lake City, the administration paid almost 50% more than the property appeared to be worth: it was assessed at $97 million, and the government paid more than $145 million.

Weak accountability and out-of-the-ordinary procedures have already opened the door to waste. They also open up the door to abuse and potential favoritism.

More than Office Space

These relocations are about far more than office space. By compromising the quality of services and the talent pool that has sustained them, relocations of federal agencies are a thinly disguised effort to remake our government in a way that compromises our public services and the rule of law.

Weekly Wins

Senators Unanimously Vote to Ban Prediction Markets at Work

The Senate notched a rare bipartisan ethics win this week: in a unanimous voice vote, senators approved a new rules change banning members, officers, and staff from betting on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi, effective immediately. The move came after reporting that traders had made hundreds of thousands of dollars by correctly wagering on tightly held US military actions in Iran and Venezuela, raising obvious red flags about insider trading and the monetization of classified information. Parallel legislation is now aiming to extend similar restrictions across the federal government and to shut down markets that invite betting on war and political assassinations.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?

Location, Location, Location: How the Trump Administration Moves Agencies to Dismantle Public Power

The latest kleptocratic actions by the Trump administration from the week of May 4, 2026

Relocating Federal Agencies to Weaken the Professional Civil Service

How Current Actions are Opening the Door to More Waste and Abuse

More than Office Space

Weekly Wins

Senators Unanimously Vote to Ban Prediction Markets at Work

More Links, More Kleptocracy

Build a Protection Racket

Bribes and influence peddling

Cronyism and favoritism

Extorting the private sector

Sending a signal from the top

Decentralized violence and surveillance

Get Rid of Independent Checks on Power

Executive power grabs

Centralizing executive authority

Targeting civil society and subnational government

Scientific integrity and academic freedom

Drive Division

Driving social division

Control the Media and Suppress Free Speech

Censorship and retaliatory litigation

Turning regulators into weapons for political retaliation

Data protection, stewardship, and privacy

Coordinate with Kleptocrats Abroad

Aligning with kleptocrats on the international stage

Manipulate Elections

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?