Josh Hawley’s populist virtue signaling

His latest effort, teaming up with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, is the “Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy Act. Their bill would relocate most federal agencies from Washington, D.C., to more rural parts of the country. It is intended to bring government jobs outside of the Washington area.

“The HIRE Act will move policymakers directly into the communities they serve, creating thousands of jobs for local communities and saving taxpayers billions of dollars along the way,” Hawley said. His partner in crime, Blackburn, echoed this sentiment, saying, “This legislation would enable Americans across the country to have greater access to good jobs.”

But wait: When did it become conservative to view government as the best way to create jobs and uplift the economy? It’s certainly a far cry from Ronald Reagan’s infamous comment that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.'” Evidently, Hawley and Blackburn have discarded the GOP’s lip-service to small government and instead just want to use the government to benefit red states — in particular, their own.

A paragraph buried further down in the various news reports covering their bill reveals the legislators’ true motivations. As National Review reported, “Under the bill, the Department of Agriculture would be relocated to Hawley’s home state of Missouri while the Department of Education would move to Blackburn’s Tennessee.”

Ah, this makes much more sense now.

Hawley and Blackburn aren’t really that concerned with boosting the economy, saving money, or draining D.C.’s bloated bureaucracy — they just want to redirect pork back to their states. I’d respect their efforts more if they were transparent about their true ambitions.

While their bill might play well with voters back home who like the idea of landing a cushy government job at taxpayer expense, it has no chance of ever becoming law. The senators know this — their bill is basically just a populist virtue signal. It offers a convenient way to show off their contempt for Washing,ton and signal their support for red states at the expense of the cosmopolitan elite, despite the fact that it won’t actually accomplish anything.

Of course, it’s worth noting that moving some agencies outside of D.C. isn’t itself a bad idea. In fact, there are a lot of federal government jobs outside the D.C. area already. And as Hawley and Blackburn point out, agency operating costs would likely go down by a great deal if more workers were relocated to less expensive areas, saving taxpayers money.

But it’s naive to think we’re really going to move most agencies out of Washington, and the authenticity of their efforts is belied by the blatant attempt to shovel taxpayer dollars into their home districts.

A truly conservative position would be to abolish the Department of Education, which educates no one and has no constitutional mandate — not to relocate it to your state so that your constituents can cash in on its waste. And if Hawley and Blackburn want to create jobs and lift up red-state economies, they should look to small government solutions, such as occupational licensing reform, tax reform to attract investment, and deregulation of small business and entrepreneurship.

Sorry, Sen. Hawley, but cashing in on government bureaucracy does not become acceptably conservative just because you do it to benefit red states. Government waste comes at the expense of the country, and a true conservative senator would realize that.