TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012092/0120640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 64

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-Washington
ization 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.