Let's grow DOGE into MOGE
Dare Swing State Democrats to oppose moving cabinet departments - and their jobs - to their home states
We haven’t heard much about DOGE lately. That means it’s a good time for DOGE to broaden to MOGE, which Congress, not the White House, will have to do.
DOGE, which became both a noun and a verb, stands for Department of Government Efficiency and it’s served a vital role in shaking up the bureaucracy and adding an element of fear, which is a key component of accountability. MOGE would mean something even bigger: Moving Operations of Government Elsewhere.
Back in 1995, when Republicans took over Congress for the first time in 40 years, there was a brief but serious effort to close four federal departments. President Donald Trump has picked up the torch of that lost cause, though he’ll have a hard time doing it without statutory help from Congress. Short of closing cabinet agencies, the next best thing is moving cabinet agencies entirely out of Washington.
Like DOGE, MOGE can have a positive budget impact, by getting hordes of bureaucrats out of one of the country’s most expensive locales for living expenses and into affordable cities in the hinterland.
The median home price in metropolitan Washington this year is $631,000. For the neighborhoods desired by top bureaucrats, in suburban Arlington, Virginia, it’s $825,000. Given that housing is the biggest line item in most family budgets, we can get all the bureaucracy we can handle for cheaper salaries over the long run, if we move much of government out of the Beltway.
Democrats historically have opposed this kind of thing. In 2019, then-Sen. Cory Gardner persuaded Trump to move the Bureau of Land Management – which is not even a full cabinet agency – to Grand Junction, Colorado. Less than two years later, after Joe Biden won in 2020, Democrats moved most of the office back to The Swamp.
Even though it did not stick, that move should give Republicans a roadmap for moving full cabinet agencies out of Washington. Gardner got his fellow Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) and the Centennial State’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, to go along with the move of BLM. Polis rightly saw it as a jobs and economic development play: “We are thrilled to welcome the Bureau of Land Management and their employees to the great state of Colorado," he said.
To get a statute to move Cabinet agencies, Republicans would need 60 votes to overcome a certain Democratic Senate filibuster; if they get all 53 Republicans, they need help from seven Democrats. Gardner showed the way: make it parochial.
Getting any DC Democrat to vote with the GOP even once is hard, but offering a pile of home state jobs – government workers, no less, who typically lean Democrat – is quite a sweetener. The logical targets are swing state Democrats, who have a steady little voice in the back of their mind urging them to cross party lines a bit.
Take the pair of Nevada Democrats, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV). Trump just won their state in 2024, and they’ve got a Republican governor now. They know demographic trends are making the Silver State more Republican-red every day. Offer them the Department of the Interior.
Eighty percent of the land area in Nevada is owned by the federal government, much of it overseen by DOI. How could Rosen & Cortez-Masto vote against moving Interior to Las Vegas? Housing in Sin City is 41 percent cheaper than in DC’s bedroom of Arlington. Cha-ching.
The new Democratic Senator from Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, has already ruffled feathers inside her party for backing a Trump tariff or two. Why not dangle the U.S. Department of Transportation to the Motor City to get her vote? You can buy three houses in Detroit for the price of one in Arlington. Revitalization is a religion in southeast Michigan, so Slotkin’s colleague, retiring Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), might play, too.
Milwaukee has long been a crucible of America’s labor movement and Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) squeaked by in 2024 while Trump was winning Wisconsin. Baldwin ran TV ads saying she can work with Trump; let’s give her a shot to prove it by offering the Department of Labor to Brew City.
If she balks, we could dangle DOL and many of its 17,000 employees to Pittsburgh to get the vote of Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), who just watched Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) upset his seatmate, former Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA). The United Steelworkers Union is overjoyed about Trump’s new deal to keep US Steel headquartered in the Keystone State and it’d surely cheer a DOL move, giving Fetterman ample cover.
The Department of Homeland Security, and, with it, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, could go to Arizona. Border politics matters more than anything there, and Democratic Senators Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) both struggle to get distance from their liberal party on the subject. Putting the entire border under the control of Arizonans ought to help them both. If we plop DHS down in Yuma, Arizona, a city actually on the Mexican border, its relocated DC-based staff would get out of their U-Haul vans to find the median Yuma home costs just $338,500, with sunshine all year.
Next door New Mexico, with two Democratic Senators Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich, is a logical place for a re-located Department of Energy. Home to the national laboratories at Sandia and Los Alamos, two of the most important installations under DOE’s purview, the state is also our second-biggest oil and gas producing state, and a burgeoning market for utility-scale solar. With a housing market that’s half the price of Washington’s – and cuisine that’s twice as good – Albuquerque has appeal.
That’s 10 potential Democratic Senators who could be self-interested in moving five cabinet departments out of DC and bringing the bacon back home. Package all the moves up into one bill and cut one big, beautiful deal.
When Gardner and Trump moved BLM out of Washington, the hue and cry from the Left was that the bureaucrats should not be expected to pick up and move their lives to the provinces. The Washington Post whined that 87 percent of BLM’s pencil-pushers quit or retired rather than go to live among the ranchers, loggers, and wildcatters they regulated. So be it; turnover is how you’d save taxpayers money sooner, and it might change the applicant pool for the better, skewing it toward subject-matter expertise.
It’s hard to argue we can’t find managers who grasp nuclear energy already living at Los Alamos, or transportation engineers happy to call Detroit home - especially if we dare the Democratic Senators who covet those exact voters to defend them.
Let’s get MOGE-ing
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