Why Not Move The Government?

Boris Yeltsin and friends seem to be losing their enthusiasm for Minsk. When the leaders of the three Slavic republics announced the replacement of the Soviet Union by a Commonwealth of Independent States on Dec. 8, they declared that the Commonwealth's seat of government would be Minsk. Minsk? Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, is 400 miles southwest of Moscow. It was a way of signaling the break between the old union and the new Commonwealth.

But now the Commonwealth itself seems to be faltering, and talk of moving the central functions of government to Minsk is dying out. Perhaps disagreements among the various republics are proving too great for any form of union. Perhaps Minsk was just a tactical bluff all along. Or perhaps someone has looked at a map, thought about Chekhov's three sisters yearning for Moscow, and decided that life in Minsk is too high a price to pay for a rhetorical flourish.

Here in the U.S., meanwhile, the project of moving the government a few hundred miles to the southwest proceeds apace, under the supervision of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia. In 1989 Byrd gave up the Senate majority leadership to become chairman of the Appropriations Committee. He made no bones about why: his intention was to direct federal spending toward West Virginia. A billion dollars in five years was his goal, and he made it in half that time.

Apart from the usual highways and parks, Byrd has taken a special interest in transplanting pieces of federal agencies from metropolitan Washington to his home state. Among the departments of government that have offered up various limbs and organs for sacrifice are the FBI division of fingerprinting, the CIA and the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt, Internal Revenue Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Even the Coast Guard has moved its national computer operation to Byrd's landlocked state.

Strangely, Byrd's little experiment in de-Washingtonization has become the focus of outrage among the very people who are otherwise most critical of Washington and its ways. To these critics, it is the very symbol of congressional arrogance of power, isolation from reality, contempt for the voters, and so on, and demonstrates the need for term limits if not lynching. Bob Byrd, formerly thought to be at worst a courtly, fiddle-playing gasbag, is portrayed as a voracious monster of the pork barrel.

To be sure, Byrd's motive is to help his state. And there is something less than perfect about a political system that decides where to locate the FBI's division of fingerprinting based on the vagaries of the congressional seniority system. (Whether term limits would cure this defect is another question. Although Byrd has been in the Senate for 33 years, he has only been Appropriations chairman for three). But, perhaps by coincidence, West Virginia is -- from an anti-Washington perspective -- probably the ideal place for the Federal Government to seep away to. Economically and culturally, if not geographically, it's about as far away from Washington as anyplace else in the country.