If the president resigned tomorrow, his government would hardly notice. The federal government today is administered by a combination of career civil servants at the agencies and their counterparts within the sprawling White House bureaucracy. Our executive branch runs on autopilot.

That’s why, in all likelihood, President Joe Biden was telling the truth when he said he found out about the indictment of former President Donald Trump on the news. That reality is actually far worse for Republicans: Biden didn’t have to lift a finger to indict Trump because the administrative state did it for him. The DOJ and FBI, like most other executive agencies, have become independent of the president.

As a solution to this problem, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) recently proposed moving the FBI headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Huntsville, Alabama. The idea is that in moving it to a red state, the FBI will be freed from the corrupting influence of Washington, and a sizable amount of bureau employees will quit.

While this may make for a good campaign sound bite, it does nothing to make the FBI more accountable. Unless you’re going to eliminate the bureau and start from scratch, there is no shortcut to reforming the FBI. The only way to fix it is through aggressive management by the president and his attorney general.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) correctly identified the problem when he said that Republican presidents have wrongfully accepted the canard that the DOJ and FBI are independent. There’s no legal basis for this independence, but the permanent bureaucrats who work there have propagated this myth because it shields them from accountability. Indeed, moving the FBI’s leadership further away from the president’s supervision would give them the autonomy they crave.

Instead of moving the FBI out of sight and out of mind, the next Republican president should take a more active role in managing it. That means replacing its top officials with new leadership and appointing an attorney general who treats the FBI as subordinate. The attorney general himself should regularly visit the FBI headquarters to review what they’re working on. Trump put it best when he said this week that he prefers the FBI be close to the DOJ because then you can “walk across the street.”

As vice president, Dick Cheney visited the CIA and Defense Department so often that he had his own office setup at each agency. Cheney understood that the only way to ensure the administration’s priorities were being executed was through hands-on management. You can’t do this if the agencies you want to manage are scattered throughout the country.

Besides contributing to their sense of independence, moving the FBI headquarters to Alabama would spread the corruption of Washington instead of eradicating it at its root. The 5,500 bureau employees stationed at headquarters, along with the contractors who work with them, would be transplanted. Granted, some of the bureaucrats would quit. However, without fixing the FBI’s underlying issues, new hires will be assimilated into the existing culture of the bureaucracy. In the same way that liberal universities create Democratic enclaves in red states, the FBI will have more of an effect on its new location than the location will have on the FBI.

There are tried and true methods to fire civil servants and rein in rogue agencies. President Ronald Reagan fired over 100,000 bureaucrats using reduction in force exercises. In Trump’s final year, he signed an executive order to strip policymaking bureaucrats of their civil service protections. We need not settle for the timid, nonconfrontational approach of moving agencies around in hopes the bureaucrats will quit.

We ought to take a page out of King Louis XIV’s book. When the French king’s authority was being challenged by the nobility, he forced the nobles to live with him at his palace in Versailles. By moving them under his close supervision, Louis prevented the aristocracy from building independent power bases in their own lands. He kept his throne for 72 years. That same principle can be applied to our government. The next president needs to keep his friends close and his bureaucrats closer.

James Bacon is the former director of operations for presidential personnel in the Trump White House.