Interior to move one-fifth of Bureau of Land Management’s D.C. staff out west as part of larger reorganization push

By Juliet Eilperin and Lisa Rein

The Trump administration plans to relocate more than a fifth of the Bureau of Land Management’s D.C. workforce to west of the Rockies, part of its broader push to shift power away from Washington and shrink the size of the federal government. The proposal to move nearly 80 employees from a key Interior Department agency comes as Trump officials are forcibly reassigning career officials and upending operations across the federal government. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue finalized plans this summer to move about 550 jobs at two of his department’s scientific agencies from the nation’s capital to the greater Kansas City region. The White House is trying to abolish the Office of Personnel Management, the government’s human resources agency, and has threatened to furlough as many as 150 employees if Congress blocks it. But opponents argue that abrupt decisions to relocate or reassign federal workers have not been justified by sufficient analysis, can disrupt families’ lives and has already cost the government valuable expertise. “If I wanted to dismantle an agency, this would be in my playbook,” said Steve Ellis, who retired as BLM’s deputy director in 2016 after nearly four decades in government service. In a phone interview Monday, he said that transferring so many employees out of Washington could complicate the agency’s relationship with Capitol Hill, budget officials and other federal entities. Many of the 77 BLM employees slated for a job transfer will move to Grand Junction, Colo., according to two federal officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision has not been formally announced. But some of the affected workers — who include some top officials, Senior Executive Service staffers and low-level managers — will move to other cities in the West. Interior officials have been eyeing a possible move for BLM, which manages more than 10 percent of the nation’s land, for more than two years. A handful of Western states, such as Colorado and Utah, have sought to recruit the agency. The bureau has about 9,260 employees, of which roughly 350 work in Washington. It remains unclear whether Congress, which has yet to be formally briefed on the proposed changes, would have to explicitly authorize the shift in personnel. The move is expected to cost at least $4 million, according to one federal official...MORE

There is one bit of solid, positive news for the West in this article:

The move comes as Bernhardt has tapped William Perry Pendley, former president of the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, as a top policy adviser at BLM.

The rest is mainly window dressing, a feel-good change for some Republicans in the West. The same ones who have refused to make any changes in the laws that are so damaging to the people and resources of the West.

Shockingly, the BLM has actually grown under Trump:

Interior’s total workforce shrank by a little more than 1 percent between January 2016 and September 2018, according to federal records. BLM’s staffing grew 3 percent during that period, however.

Here is wishing Perry the best, and putting him on notice we are expecting significant change in a positive direction.