The Department of Government Efficiency has yet to begin its most important task: fulfilling Donald Trump’s promise to move 100,000 federal employees out of Washington, DC.

This would build on the president’s first-term efforts to relocate agencies. While the savings could be enormous, the biggest benefit would be restoring much-needed ideological balance to the vast federal bureaucracy.

It’s further to the left than the most liberal parts of the country and hostile to policies that don’t reflect its bias.

Making the administrative state more representative of America would make it more accountable to the American people and the president we elect.

Virtually everyone knows the federal government leans left, but in a new study, I show just how liberal it really is.

I looked at roughly 25 years’ of federal employee data — ranging from the Clinton administration to President Trump’s first term — matched with a national voter database.

While the relatively small number of presidential appointees generally reflect the political affiliation of the sitting president in both Republican and Democratic administrations, those appointees don’t carry out the day-to-day workings of government.

That duty falls to the career Senior Executive Service — the thousands of assistant secretaries, deputy counsels and program directors who oversee federal regulation and determine whether their agencies follow the orders of the president.

Among these senior bureaucrats, Democrats have a 30-point advantage over Republicans — a number that has barely budged in at least three decades.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 55 points — 72% versus 15% — while Health and Human Services has a 63-19% imbalance.

Within other welfare agencies, like the section of the Department of Agriculture that oversees food stamps, Democrats have a 59-point advantage. That’s twice as liberal as Agriculture overall.

The closer you get to the nation’s capital, the more liberal the bureaucracy gets.

Within the metro DC area, Democrats maintain a partisan advantage within agencies of 39 points. By contrast, among senior bureaucrats outside of DC, the Democratic advantage is a mere two points.

Only three congressional districts in America lean further to the left. Not even socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont or socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s district are as liberal as the DC bureaucracy.

To be sure, hiring Democrats is perfectly acceptable.

But the leftist domination of federal agencies increases the likelihood that bureaucrats refuse to follow the orders of a democratically elected Republican president and his legally appointed political nominees.

Bureaucratic resistance to Donald Trump was legion and legendary in his first administration. A Napolitan Institute survey in January found that 46% of federal managers are still willing to ignore the president’s orders — not because those orders are illegal, but simply because they don’t agree.

Another 9% aren’t sure what they’d do, but given the groupthink that surrounds them, it’s reasonable to conclude they’d side with the resistance. The Trump administration has already identified dozens of senior officials who it alleges have tried to thwart the president’s directives.

But when a Democrat president is in power, the bureaucracy acts much quicker and with greater fidelity to the dictates of the man in the Oval Office. No wonder: They agree with him and hear few if any voices to the contrary.

The federal bureaucracy should follow the directives of every president, regardless of party. The best way to make that happen is to make bureaucrats reflect the rest of the country — i.e., ideologically diverse.

Achieving that vision requires moving much of the federal government out of DC, where agencies are more likely to hire from a different and more nationally representative talent pool.

President Trump has already proved it’s possible to move agencies, and that such moves have benefits.

In 2019, the president announced the Bureau of Land Management headquarters would move from DC to Colorado — e.g., a location closer to the land that BLM actually manages. Nearly 90% of DC-based employees subsequently quit.

Not only did that save the government money, but it allowed the bureau to hire new workers in a purple state — workers who are less likely to reflect the ideological biases of the DC swamp. Biden moved the bureau back to DC in 2021.

This time around, and with the power of DOGE, the administration shouldn’t just move the Bureau of Land Management. It should move even bigger agencies out of the nation’s capital and into the nation itself.

We’re talking Health and Human Services in Cleveland, Ohio; Housing and Urban Development in Charlotte, North Carolina; Labor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and so on.

If these moves are made, agencies would be much more likely to hire a mix of local Republicans and Democrats alike. They’d find it more difficult to resist a president — of either party — because they’d reflect America and no longer reinforce each other’s ideological impulses.

Moving those 100,000 workers out of Washington, DC, can’t happen soon enough.

Hayden Dublois is data and analytics director at the Foundation for Government Accountability.