\u201cWashington [D.C] is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
You may think that statement was tweeted by a disgruntled D.C. commuter amid the crush of cherry blossom peepers in late March and early April. Rather, it\u2019s a quote from the 1850s popularly attributed to Horace Greeley<\/a>, a former Congressman and newspaper editor<\/a> for the New York Tribune<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, he urged a westward expansion of Americans outside of and away from D.C., which was originally built on 100 square miles (259 square kilometers) on swampy land given up by both Maryland and Virginia, at roughly the geographic center of the nation at the time (The center today is about 20 miles north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1791, an amendment to the Resident Act forbade the \u201cerection of the public buildings otherwise than on the Maryland side of the river Potomac,\u201d where the White House, the Capitol and most federal buildings now stand. <\/b>Before the Civil War, Congress gave Arlington, where the Pentagon is located today, back to Virginia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, D.C. is still the undisputed seat of the federal government, home to more than 50<\/a> government buildings, though suggestions to relocate all or part of the capital as the nation expanded westward didn\u2019t end with Greeley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than 150 years since \u201cManifest Destiny\u2019 made metro dispersion popular, a controlled diaspora of federal offices has been pitched by politicians over the decades to move workers at agencies including the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture to states out west. The Interior\u2019s Bureau of Land Management briefly moved to Colorado<\/a> in 2020 before it was pulled back to D.C. by Secretary Deb Haaland a year later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Republican senators, seeking to decentralize the federal government and \u201cdrain the swamp,\u201d introduced legislation during the Trump administration in 2019 to relocate 90% of the workforce at 10 federal agencies.<\/p>\n\n\n\t