The Trump Administration Is Kicking the National Science Foundation out of Its Offices with No Place to Go

Now this is perhaps a whole new level of the governmental booby-hatch, unlocked for the first time by this administration. One federal agency’s evicting another. From The New York Times:

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced on Wednesday that it was moving its headquarters out of Washington and into a building in Alexandria, Virginia, already occupied by the National Science Foundation, with no clear plan in place for the foundation’s employees. It is the first major shift of a federal agency’s operations out of the capital under President Trump’s plans to relocate parts of the government. But once the housing agency moves in, the science foundation will need to move out. Union representatives for the foundation’s employees said that more than 1,833 people with the agency work in the building, and that they did not know where those employees would go.

I’m no efficiency expert, but I think it’d be tough running, say, the NIH—the NSF’s medical counterpart—out of a food truck on the Mall or out of a fruit stand on the back roads of Maryland.

The complete lack of respect for any agency that supports science is not surprising. If you haven’t caught RFK Jr. being eviscerated by Rep. Kim Schrier yet, gaze in awe and understand that the contempt the administration feels for science is now matched by the contempt held by Congress for the burlesque of a government under which we presently live. Something is going to give very soon, perhaps when the administration announces that the Department of the Interior will be moving to Jackson County, Missouri, because it is more interior than Washington, D.C., is.