Gehrke: Moving a big piece of the Interior Department to Utah isn’t a terrible idea, but don’t expect it to change how the lands are managed

First, with 70,000 employees spread across 2,400 offices throughout the country, the Interior Department is already remarkably dispersed. And that’s as it should be. After all, you can’t manage hundreds of millions of acres of national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges, waterways and public lands without having literal boots on the ground. How many jobs are we talking about? The BLM, which is the largest agency within Interior, has just 312 employees based in Washington. And a lot of them are there not because of some plot for centralized control, but because it makes sense for them to be there. That includes senior-level political appointees and high-level career employees. It includes all the staff who interact with Congress, the top-level attorneys responsible for the department’s legal work, or those who coordinate with other D.C.-based departments. They aren’t going anywhere and, let’s be honest, the big decisions — whether to create or destroy national monuments, whether to rewrite grazing or oil and gas drilling rules, whether to push for tar sands development or drill in wildlife refuges — are all decisions that will still be made in Washington, either by the department, the White House or Congress. The remainder of Interior employees who can relocate likely won’t be moving any time soon. Zinke sent an email to staff recently that assured them that nobody would be forced to move and nobody would be laid off as a result of the reorganization. That likely means an evolution over years, not a revolution in months. Zinke is proposing to create 12 regional offices that roughly follow state boundaries. But his plan would mean that the same office in charge of the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park would be responsible for the Rio Grande in west Texas, but the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area would be split between two regions. Likewise, the Navajo Nation would be split between two offices when it comes to educational and health programs provided through the Bureau of Indian Affairs — the New Mexico and Utah side in one region, the Arizona side of the nation in another. That’s just not right...MORE

... let’s be honest, the big decisions — whether to create or destroy national monuments, whether to rewrite grazing or oil and gas drilling rules, whether to push for tar sands development or drill in wildlife refuges — are all decisions that will still be made in Washington, either by the department, the White House or Congress.

Very similar to the point I made:
 

Currently 94 percent of BLM employees are stationed in the field. I fail to see how moving the remaining 6 percent will result in any substantive change.

Think back to the Obama administration. If the headquarters of the BLM and the USFWS had been located in Colo. or Utah, what real difference would this have made? Would the administration of grazing permits, the implementation of NEPA, or the preferred alternatives in land use plans have been different? Would the number of endangered species listed have been different? Or the number and size of critical habitat designations?

If these agencies had been headquartered in the West, would their Congressional testimony, on behalf of the Obama administration, in favor of additional wilderness areas and other restrictive designations have been different?

Would Obama have designated fewer National Monuments?

I think not.