BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning wrote in an email sent to bureau staffers late Wednesday that while most senior headquarters employees not currently based in the D.C. area will be required to return to Washington in the coming months, telework will remain an option for most, at least temporarily.
She also said in the email obtained by E&E News that BLM, for the first time, plans to fully staff the Grand Junction, Colo., office where former President Donald Trump moved the headquarters in 2019. Roughly 41 employees had been reassigned to the Colorado headquarters, although only a handful actually did move there, due mostly to the Covid-19 pandemic.
...But potentially complicating matters for BLM leadership on the latest moving plan is the decision by headquarters employees in May to join the National Treasury Employees Union. It’s not clear if BLM will have to negotiate the details and timelines outlined in Stone-Manning’s email with the roughly 200 headquarters employees in the union.
Stone-Manning’s email is consistent with what she has told employees on a number of occasions — her No. 1 priority as BLM director is to rebuild the bureau and beef up staffing..MORE
It is a war zone out here. The causes of the war, however, are various federal laws. It matters little where you place the soldiers. The battle will continue and harm inflicted until the cause - federal law - is addressed.
Where are Zinke's war-ending, peace proposals to amend the ESA, NEPA, CWA, CAA, FLPMA, etc?. So far, his highest legislative priority is to increase infrastructure funding and permanently fund federal land acquisition. From my perspective, that's like improving the supply lines and increasing the ranks of the federal army. We in the West want to sue for peace, but all Zinke is proposing is to move the troops around. It may appear he is doing something, but in the long run it will accomplish nothing. He's not draining the swamp, he's just moving it West.A "good faith gesture" is an accurate description of this proposal. It is just a gesture. Not a single law, regulation, field manual or policy memo is changed. The same landlord will exist. implementing the same statutory and regulatory regime.
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 been different? Would the number of endangered species listed 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?
My fear is that while we have Republicans controlling the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, we are squandering an opportunity to bring meaningful, long-term changes to the statutes under which we are governed, and instead are spending energy, time and political capital debating and determining where our oppressors will be located.
Somewhere in the West, a chamber of commerce would benefit from the relocation of these headquarters. An urban area will welcome the federal employees and the additional spending they will bring. In the rural areas, where these lands and their users actually exist, little will have changed.
My fear that a Republican-controlled Congress would squander this opportunity appears to have been well founded.
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