Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced in August that he wanted to move the Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture out of Washington to places where the type of scholarship they rely on is centered. Now the department is considering proposals submitted by interested parties to host the headquarters for those subagencies.
You might assume that such a move would be regarded as a common-sense exercise in sound administrative and academic practice. But you would be wrong — at least in the eyes of the client organizations that seek funding from these mini-bureaucracies. Their protests came promptly and loudly after Perdue’s announcement.