(The Center Square) – A congressman from north Texas has filed a bill to relocate U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s headquarters from Washington, DC, to Texas.
U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a former Collin County judge who was elected to Texas’ Third Congressional district in 2022, filed the bill on the first day he was sworn into office on Jan. 3.
HR 195 would direct the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to relocate CBP’s headquarters to Texas. It was referred to the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security.
When announcing the bill, Self said, “Why is the CBP, the agency responsible for securing the border, 2,000 MILES away from the border? A: No good reason!” Relocating CBP’s headquarters to Texas “will be cost-effective and critical to bringing President Trump’s fight to the border.”
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to be his DHS Secretary. If the measure passes and Noem is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she would be tasked with overseeing the move.
Noem was among the first to work with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security mission Operation Lone Star, sending troops and resources to help secure Texas’ border and is familiar with law enforcement operations in Texas. She and Trump also both have the support of Abbott.
Relocating CBP’s headquarters would be part of a larger scale effort under a Trump plan to relocate thousands of federal employees out of the Washington, D.C. metro area.
In a March 2023 campaign video, Trump explained his federal employee relocation plan and plan to fire “rogue bureaucrats” to ensure they “are held accountable to the American people.”
“As many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out – and I mean immediately out – of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America,” he said.
The plan includes overhauling federal departments and agencies, “firing all of the corrupt actors in our National Security and Intelligence apparatus.”
It also includes reforming the FISA courts, “ensuring that corruption is rooted out” and creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission “to declassify and publish all documents on Deep State spying, censorship, and abuses of power.”
It also involves making every Inspector General’s Office independent from the departments they oversee and creating an independent auditing system to monitor intelligence agencies “to ensure that they are not spying on our citizens or running disinformation campaigns against the American people.”
His plan also includes banning federal bureaucrats from taking jobs at the companies they previously regulate, like within the pharmaceutical industry.
Removing corrupt or poor-performing federal workers has been found to be time consuming and cumbersome, he argues. “Firing underperforming employees takes a year or longer, and is often completely impossible,” he says. The campaign cites a study that found that federal employees were fired at a rate of less than one in 1,000 per year over a 10-year period analyzed.
In his first term, Trump relocated the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado. However, more than 80% of BLM employees didn’t move, Federal News Network reported. The Biden administration also moved its headquarters and key staff back to Washington, DC.
In 2019, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced the majority of the agency’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture employees would be relocated to the Kansas City area. Roughly 40% to 60% chose to instead leave their jobs and ERS and NIFA struggled to fill vacancies, Federal News Network reported.
Trump’s plan also includes supporting a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress. On Tuesday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, filed a resolution to begin that process.