Pearl River      It seems like it was from another time completely, but remember with me the extravaganza that Amazon manufactured in the competition between cities across the United States as locations for their second headquarters.  Cities went crazy.  Proposals of all kinds, deep with money and other incentives, went flying out of city halls and statehouses.  Mainly, it turned out to be a marketing and data collection coup for Amazon and something between a boon and bust for other cities.  New York was a winner who didn’t want it.  The DC area became one of the winners along with subsidiary cities like Nashville, but come the pandemic and the retreat from the office work, it’s unclear how much was really built, or given the tech layoffs everywhere, how many workers were added to these cities.

Now, there’s another office relocation sweepstakes, but I don’t see cities lining up like the last time yet, so I want to hurry up and get a bid in for consideration.  I know it’s hard to keep up with the barrage of Trump stuff flooding out of the White House these days, so you may have missed this.  Trump has asked the various agencies to give the White House proposals and plans for where and how they could relocate operations and personnel to cheaper rent and locations around the country than the Washington, DC area, and to do so by April.  Admittedly, this is a typical lady and the tiger Trump proposition.  He’s an East Coast guy who likes property markets and golf courses along the Amtrak line.  His real motive is to force moves in order to reduce staff counts and weaken the federal bureaucracy in the DC area, where he carries huge chips on his shoulder.

Opportunity knocks, though, and we need to answer the door.  The distribution of federal worker concentration looks like this:

More than 80% of the federal workforce lives outside of the Washington, D.C., metro area. About 454,000 federal employees work in the district, Maryland and Virginia. California and Texas have a large concentration of federal employees, about 147,500 and 130,000, respectively, according to the Pew Research Center.

Working on the back of our envelope, let’s say he wants to put 300,000 workers in motion.  There’s hardly any cheaper states and cities than those in the middle South, like Little Rock, Jackson, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and the like.  The fact that we are a deep-red MAGA-flag flying lot has to be an advantage in this competition, and even if that was a liability on the Amazon headquarters race back when.  Dropping 100,000 new workers each in the Little Rock and Jackson area and along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge area would be a huge boon.  The weather is good, and news from the White House is that climate is no longer something we need to worry our little heads about.  Housing is cheaper. The tea is sweet.  The food is fried.  It’ll be heaven for these federal malcontents that are a burr in the Trump saddle.

Of course, there might be a couple of things that the President hasn’t considered.  Sure, there’ will be some hardliners that won’t move, but the ones who do move might not be grinning from ear to ear.  Of course, the President is convinced that all of these deep staters are bleeding heart liberals.  Adding a bunch of them to red states, like Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, might have the unintended consequence of turning these red spaces to pink or purple, maybe even blue.

Bring ‘em home here, we need them.  The welcome mat is down.  Get those moving vans lined up.  We’re ready for those liberal federal workers to bring their deep state stuff to our states.