Trump's plan to move BLM jobs west is a shallow pretext to gut the agency's mission
Part of the problem with the constant flow of news out of the White House — from offensive tweets to potentially disastrous policies — is that acts that would have seemed outrageous in previous administrations slip past, hidden by the smoke of the Trumpster fire. The administration’s plan to effectively gut the Washington-based Bureau of Land Management is a case in point.
Some Trump administration policymakers, as well as some influential members of Congress, are philosophically opposed to the federal government owning public lands, much of which happens to be in the West, including about 80% of land within Nevada and 46% of California. All told, the federal government owns about 28% of the country’s acreage (most of it originally stolen from native tribes, but that’s another issue), and in some cases has done so for more than two centuries. The largest player in the management of non-marine federal lands is the Bureau of Land Management, which controls 248 million acres of public land and administers some 700 million acres of federal subsurface mineral rights.
And now the Trump administration — propelled by those who believe the federal government should cede much of its Western lands to state and local governments — wants to move nearly all of the BLM’s headquarters out of Washington and relocate the jobs mostly to Western states. It couches the reorganization as an effort to put more BLM workers closer to the lands they manage and reduce the agency’s costs in D.C. — office space in Grand Junction, Colo., where it wants to send 85 of the 222 affected positions, is much cheaper than in Washington.
On the surface, those seem like reasonable arguments. But public lands advocates argue persuasively that they are mere pretexts for undercutting an agency Trump advisers dislike. The vast majority of BLM jobs — 97%, according to the Public Lands Foundation — are already dispersed around the country, mostly in the West, and the bulk of the jobs to be moved out of Washington are top-level administrators and policy staffers who craft regulations and provide national oversight to regional offices. (The administration says about 60 mostly budget, legal and public affairs jobs will stay).
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-18/trumps-blm-jobs-west-environment-public-lands-congress
= new reply since forum marked as read
