David Fontana is the Samuel Tyler Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University School of Law. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

(CNN) Decentralizing the operations of the federal government by spreading its officials more widely around the country has always been a good idea in principle. But the way the Trump administration is trying to do it is badly flawed.

This is the case with the recent decision by the Trump administration to move employees from two Department of Agriculture research agencies in Washington DC to Kansas City. From the beginning, it seemed like Republican efforts to decentralize federal officials were not building on past decentralizing efforts to make government better. Instead, decentralizing seemed to be part of a new attempt to weaken the federal government.

David Fontana

This could be inferred from the fact that some of the earliest Republican proposals featured the absurd idea of moving 90% of federal agency employees within five years . The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy labeled the specific decision to move officials from the Department of Agriculture to Kansas City as simply a "back-door" attempt to remove staff, several of whom are hostile to the Trump Administration's agenda on climate change and related issues.

The administration is also forcing large numbers of officials to move on short notice or lose their jobs -- a choice that could lead to a brain drain, not to mention low morale among government employees. The absurdity of this approach could be seen in the staff members who turned their backs on Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue when he talked to them about his decisions. Perdue could have asked or enticed valued employees to move, rather than commanding them to do so right away. He could have simply replaced outgoing employees -- as they left of their own volition -- in Washington with new ones in Kansas City, rather than trying to get anyone to leave.

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Ensuring that important federal officials are separated among places has always been an important part of safeguarding our democracy. The tragedy of the Kansas City relocation is that the Trump administration is corrupting this foundational constitutional principle by using it for inappropriate ends.