A once vaunted institution joins the choir invisible.
by Gordon Morse
News of the demise of the Federal Executive Institute in Charlottesville arrived on Monday and unexpectedly. What happened there? What sins were committed?”
According to the executive order signed by President Trump, “bureaucratic leadership over the past half-century has led to Federal policies that enlarge and entrench the Washington, D.C., managerial class, a development that has not benefited the American family. The Federal Executive Institute should therefore be eliminated to refocus Government on serving taxpayers, competence, and dedication to our Constitution, rather than serving the Federal bureaucracy.”
Those are different thoughts welded together to make a point that makes little sense, but welcome to 2025. It doesn’t take much for a federal agency to run afoul of the new mentality. Maybe someone at the Cato Institute called and the FEI hung up the phone on them? That alone would probably do it.
The Federal Executive Institute has sat on a rise above Route 29, just north of Barracks Road Shopping Center, since the Johnson Administration. Its white arches frame the entrance to what, in 1951, was first opened as the Thomas Jefferson Inn and, as a result, there’s a pool.
Pools were important as my brother and I were growing up. No hotels without a pool. Period.
I knew that road in the 1950s well because it carried us to Amherst and our grandparents. Headed south (there was no bypass then), you would see the hotel – there were fewer trees then – to the right up the slope. The shopping center arrived later and all that land, as I recall, sat within Albemarle County. It would be annexed into Charlottesville in the 1960s.
(more…)
