Editorial: Bringing the government to the people

The head of the U.S. Department of the Interior is said to be toying with the idea of moving the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management out to the part of the country where the land it manages is.Secretary Ryan Zinke, along with a couple of members of Congress from Colorado, are brainstorming a plan to move the BLM HQ and its 500-some staff members out to, say, Salt Lake City, or maybe Denver. The idea, and it is reasonable enough, is that the vast majority of the 247 million acres of public land the agency is responsible for is in the West. West of the Mississippi. West of the Rockies. So are most of the agency’s nearly 9,000 other employees. So the managers should be out here, too. With modern communication technology, there is not the need there was 200 years ago to have all the executive agencies in close physical proximity to one another and to Congress. So why not spread the power? There are both opportunities and pitfalls to any of these scenarios...more