So it turns out that Mick Mulvaney may have had an ulterior motive when he sought to move employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to offices outside of Washington, D.C.
Speaking at an event in his home state of South Carolina on Friday night, Mulvaney said that moving employees of the federal government out of Washington, D.C., is a “wonderful way” to “drain the swamp” because those employees will likely quit rather than move.
Mulvaney said during his speech that he tried to do with when he was at the CFPB, and relocate the agency’s headquarters to Cleveland, but legislation barred him from doing that. Nonetheless, there was still a report that the CFPB was considering relocating some employees from Washington, D.C. to a satellite office in Dallas. At the time, reducing expenses was cited as the reason why the employees would be moved, but after his remarks on Friday, it could be that Mulvaney had a different motive.
The Department of Agriculture moved two offices to Kansas City, and Mulvaney said that a majority of the workers quit rather than be relocated.
“Guess what happened? More than half the people quit. Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker. I know that because a lot of them work for me, and I’ve tried. You can’t do it.
“By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out to the real part of the country, and they quit.
“What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time,” concluded, adding, “even that was difficult to do.”
