move HQ agy
estb 3 26 stephen vaden usda brooke rollins; also trump 1
i forget who pioneered bs strategy BLM
PENDEJO PJT 2025
Bernhardt and Pendley don't have our country's best interests at heart, and their attempt to move the BLM is only the latest in a long string of corrupt, dangerous, and purposeless decisions.
VADEN YALE LAW GRAD 2009; THIEL 2011; TAUGHT VANDY
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shit labs --> slc
3 ppl blm hq colo
Trump Admin Aims to "Break the Forest Service," Nearly 200 Million Acres at Stake
54,758 views Apr 20, 2026 Latest Shows
Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de...The Trump administration in late March announced an extensive reorganization of the Forest Service, the federal agency responsible for managing 193 million acres of public lands across 43 states, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. As part of the changes, 57 of 77 research stations across the country will be shuttered, with the headquarters relocating from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City.
While the overhaul is billed as an effort to improve efficiency, conservationist Jim Pattiz says it will effectively destroy the agency. “This is a critically important agency,” says Pattiz, co-author of the newsletter More Than Just Parks that tracks threats to public lands across the country. “The intent here is obvious. It’s to hollow out this agency and hand it to the resource extraction industry and prepare it for, potentially, the eventual transfer of our public lands to states.”
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then the regional offices, that's another big one. They're shuttering all
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nine Forest Service regional offices. Um the this is really where the institutional knowledge of the Forest
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Service is housed. And when you get rid of those offices, you know, the goal here is to make the agency um
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subservient to the resource extraction industry that the Trump administration is aligned with.
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Um can you talk about who you think the Forest Service is
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being given over to? I mean, first of all, obviously sending from Washington DC the Forest Service to Salt Lake City,
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you're going to lose a massive amount of experience for people who cannot move.
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Um, but then talk about who it's in the hands of, who's in charge now.
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Yeah. I think something um people need to understand is the Trump administration has done this before on a
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much smaller scale. Um in Trump's first term, they moved the Bureau of Land Management another very large um public
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land management agency um from Washington DC, the headquarters from DC to uh Grand Junction, Colorado. Um that resulted in 87%
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of the affected staff walking out the door. Um only three people showed up to the new office at Grand Junction. Um,
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and you know, you can talk to uh people who work at the Bureau of Land Management now and did under the Biden administration. President Biden moved it
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back to DC, but the agency has never recovered. I mean, you're talking about so much institutional knowledge um and
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key people leaving out the door because they simply can't uproot their lives and their families um to move to this far-flung, you know, new headquarters.
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Same thing's playing out here with the Forest Service, but on a much larger scale. Um, this decision will impact up to 5,000 employees. And this is an
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agency that is already lost over a fourth of its entire staff since Trump Trump took office last January. And then
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you ask me about, you know, what who this hands it to. I mean, I think, you know, look no further than the state of Utah and the anti-public lands movement.
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Um you can look throughout the Trump administration up and down in positions of leadership um in land management
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agencies. Um these are people who are avowed um proponents of transferring our
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federal public lands to states and private interests. The sitting chief of the United States Forest Service, his
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previous job was as the executive of a logging company. That's unprecedented in the history of the Forest Service to have the chief as a logging executive.
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And so, you know, the current nominee for the Bureau of Land Management is uh former Congressman Steve Pierce from New Mexico. And this is a man who said
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Theodore Roosevelt was wrong to create national parks and national forests. So,
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the intent here is obvious. It's to hand hollow out this agency and hand it to the resource extraction industry and
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prepare it for potentially um the eventual transfer of our public lands to states.
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You've called it asset stripping and you say it's illegal. Explain, Jim.
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Well, you know, asset stripping is a
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AI Overview
The Trump administration, backed by GOP lawmakers, is actively moving to relocate federal agencies out of Washington, D.C., to reduce the federal footprint, cut costs, and decentralize power
. This initiative uses mandatory relocation directives, often resulting in high employee turnover and forced resignations, effectively serving as a method to downsize the workforce and, as critics argue, disrupt operations.
reuters +3
Key Aspects of the Relocation Strategy:
- Forced Relocations: Agencies are being ordered to submit plans for moving offices out of the DC area to other parts of the country by mid-April 2025.
- "Force Quit" Mechanism: Short, mandatory relocation notices for remote employees and others are being used, which critics argue is an intentional strategy to force experienced employees to resign rather than move.
- Past Examples: The 2019 relocation of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) headquarters to Colorado and the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) to Kansas City resulted in over half of employees leaving.
- Legislative Action: Bills like the Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement (SWAMP) Act (proposed by Rep. David Johnson) aim to move various agencies. Other proposals include moving the Department of Agriculture to an agricultural state.
- Opposing Efforts: Democrats, such as Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, have introduced legislation, like the Protecting Federal Agencies and Employees from Political Interference Act, to prevent these relocations without congressional approval.
- Impact: These moves are expected to cause significant loss of expertise, disruption in government services, and reduced office space demand in DC.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton | (.gov) +6
The Department of Homeland Security, State, and others are targeted in these efforts.
YouTube
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wapo
By Todd C. Frankel
President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters say they want to move 100,000 federal jobs out of Washington to places that they describe as less expensive, closer to stakeholders and, as Trump put it in a campaign video, “filled with patriots who love America.”
Here’s what happened the last time Trump moved federal jobs out of D.C.
As he returns to the White House, Donald Trump has said he will relocate 100,000 federal workers. He tried this before.
Updated December 5, 2024
The incoming Trump administration could move thousands of jobs out of D.C., shown in 2023. (Daniel Slim/AFP/Getty Images)
By Todd C. Frankel
President-elect Donald Trump and his supporters say they want to move 100,000 federal jobs out of Washington to places that they describe as less expensive, closer to stakeholders and, as Trump put it in a campaign video, “filled with patriots who love America.”
Trump tried to move federal jobs out of Washington during his first term — on a much smaller scale — and that resulted in mass departures of experienced workers, questionable cost savings and broad interruptions to government work.
In 2019, the Trump administration said it would move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters and its nearly 600 jobs to the small city of Grand Junction, Colo. When the new offices opened a year later, just three of the bureau’s employees walked in the door.
About 40 more were assigned to other offices out West. But nearly 90 percent of headquarters employees opted to leave the agency or work remotely rather than head West. It was “a giant brain drain,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, who took over as the agency’s director under President Joe Biden in 2021.
Trump officials also moved the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to Kansas City. The relocation of the roughly 700 jobs disrupted the agencies’ work and raised doubts it was a money-saving decision, according to interviews and a critical government watchdog report that noted the agencies shed half their staff, including in key positions.
Laura Dodson, an agricultural economist and vice president of a workers local union, called it an “unnecessary kneecapping of an agency.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment. Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a second Trump term drafted by the Heritage Foundation, defended the move of land management employees as “the epitome of good governance,” saying it was “not only well-informed, but it was also implemented efficiently, effectively, and with an eye toward affected career civil servants.”
While the vast majority of the nation’s 2.3 million federal workers are already spread across the United States, Trump and his supporters have long been critical of the roughly 320,000 federal workers concentrated in and around the nation’s capital. Trump has often derided government employees in Washington as part of the “deep state” that he wants to shatter.
Their latest plan would affect nearly 1 in 3 federal workers in the Washington area — a sprawling region of 6.3 million people that extends far beyond the halls of power on Capitol Hill to the Pennsylvania state line and into West Virginia, according to the Office of Personnel Management.
The campaign promise to move federal jobs is separate from pledges by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump’s government efficiency czars, to slash the federal workforce via mass layoffs and by closing entire agencies.
So far, both efforts have been heavy on rhetoric and scarce on details.
Donald Trump at a campaign rally on Nov. 5 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
The America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned presidential transition group, said moving 100,000 jobs and relocating entire agencies from D.C. would pierce the “Beltway bubble” and save $1.4 billion a year in payroll costs. It named two small agencies as prime targets: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, to be “headquartered in the coal field” in Pittsburgh, and the Air Traffic Organization, the command center for the nation’s air traffic controllers, to be moved to an unnamed destination. Together, they employ fewer than 1,000 people in the D.C. area.
It’s not clear that 100,000 jobs could depart the nation’s capital without drastic actions such as emptying the Pentagon in Northern Virginia or the medical research campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. — the two campuses are home to roughly 40,000 employees inside the Beltway. Nine big agencies, including Defense and Health and Human Services, account for the bulk of the federal jobs in the D.C. area.
About 100,000 other jobs are sprinkled across a roster of 119 lower-profile agencies in and around Washington, including the Peace Corps and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, according to Office of Personnel Management data.
What is clear is that the loss of so many government jobs would deliver a stiff blow to Washington’s local economy, said Terry Clower, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University. It would have harmful knock-on effects, too, with the lost purchasing power from so many departing high-paying positions.
“It would put us way behind in terms of economic growth,” Clower said.
Relocating some federal agencies could make sense after evaluating factors such as whether a particular local area is a good fit, according to a 2019 report from the Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington think tank.
The job migrations of Trump’s first term started with an email in the summer of 2018 from Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to the staff of the Economic Research Service, a collection of economists who track things like vegetable production and farm trade fluctuations. The economists had once been spread across the country and focused on regional topics but had been brought together in Washington decades earlier to focus on national issues.
The small agency has a reputation for providing expert analysis on federal policy, said Susan Offutt, a former administrator under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “It speaks truth to power,” she said.
Perdue said the ERS would be leaving D.C. for Kansas City, a move that would streamline operations, save money and help recruit and retain employees. To many inside the agency, it felt like a punishment, according to current and former workers.
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westernvaluesproject.org
https://westernvaluesproject.org › action › oppose-the-reckless-bureau-of-land-management-move
Oppose the reckless Bureau of Land Management move
Bernhardt and Pendley don't have our country's best interests at heart, and their attempt to move the BLM is only the latest in a long string of corrupt, dangerous, and purposeless decisions. Add your name to our petition! Demand Secretary Bernhardt and Acting Director Pendley rescind their decision to move the bureau! Share This Post Share ...
Denver Gazette
Colorado's congressional delegation advocates for move of BLM ...
Bernhardt, Polis, Gardner, Tipton cheer BLM headquarters move to Grand Junction The federal land agency's lease of headquarters space on the Western Slope — in a building that also houses oil and gas industry offices — was a hot topic at Club 20's fall conference.
High Country News
Dozens of former BLM officials denounce moving headquarters out of D.C.
As Grand Junction gets ready to welcome the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management, dozens of former BLM top officials are speaking out against the move, saying it will deeply wound the ...
Bloomberg Law News
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[### Remote US federal employees get ultimatum to move ...
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com › world › remote-us-federal-e...](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/remote-us-federal-employees-get-ultimatum-move-washington-2025-02-28/)
Feb 27, 2025 — Labor unions and governance experts say it's another ploy by the Trump administration to force federal workers to quit.
[### Trump wants to move 100K federal jobs out of D.C. What ...
VPM
https://www.vpm.org › news › donald-trump-usda-fede...](https://www.vpm.org/news/2025-02-03/donald-trump-usda-federal-office-relocation-bureau-land-management-blm)
Feb 3, 2025 — But in 2019, President Donald Trump's first administration announced plans to break up the BLM's D.C. office, moving teams to offices across the ...Read more
[### Norton Introduces Bill to Prohibit Relocation of Agency ... Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton | (.gov)
http://norton.house.gov › media › press-releases › norton...](http://norton.house.gov/media/press-releases/norton-introduces-bill-prohibit-relocation-agency-headquarters-outside)
Mar 3, 2025 — Today, I introduce the Protecting Federal Agencies and Employees from Political Interference Act, which would prohibit the relocation outside ...Read more
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[### The argument in favor of keeping agency headquarters ...
Federal News Network
https://federalnewsnetwork.com › All News](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/facilities-construction/2025/02/the-argument-in-favor-of-keeping-agency-headquarters-right-where-they-are/)
Feb 24, 2025 — The Trump administration has promised to move the headquarters of some agencies away from the Washington area.Read more
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[### Federal agencies given deadline for plans to move offices ...
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com › 2025/02/26 › federa...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/02/26/federal-agencies-relocate-dc-trump/)
Feb 26, 2025 — The Trump administration is giving federal agencies until mid-April to suggest relocations of bureaus and offices out of the DC region.Read more
[### Summary of Reassignment
OPM.gov
https://www.opm.gov › ... › Summary of Reassignment](https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/workforce-restructuring/summary-of-reassignment/)
The reassignment regulations give an agency extensive flexibility in reassigning an employee to a different position.Read more
[### Federal agency to move more than 2500 employees out ...
https://www.facebook.com › wbjonline › posts › federa...](https://www.facebook.com/wbjonline/posts/federal-agency-to-move-more-than-2500-employees-out-of-dc-see-the-full-article-b/1363555369107047/)
Jul 28, 2025 — DOGE's Next Steps Involve Moving Federal Workers Out Of DC Area As the “Department of Government Efficiency” continues slashing federal jobs ...Read more
[### Sen. Ernst launching series of bills to move federal workers ...
Fox Business
https://www.foxbusiness.com › politics › sen-ernst-laun...](https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/sen-ernst-launching-series-bills-move-federal-workers-out-dc)
Dec 12, 2024 — Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, is going to be introducing legislation to relocate federal workers from Washington, D.C., to other areas across the U.S. as ...Read more
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