‘Wildly disruptive’: What happened last time Trump moved a federal agency out of DC

By Curt Devine, CNN

(CNN) — As part of his campaign to reclaim the White House, Donald Trump made clear that in a second term in office, he’d move tens of thousands of federal jobs outside the “Washington swamp” and into “places filled with patriots who love America.”

“This,” Trump said in one campaign video, “is how I will shatter the deep state.”

The relocation of federal jobs outside Washington, DC, was something Trump embarked on near the end of his first term — shifting the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management about 2,000 miles west to Grand Junction, Colorado.

But if that move is any indication of what’s to come, the massive push to relocate federal jobs outside the Beltway comes with the risk of kneecapping agencies through the loss of experienced workers and bogging them down in logistical minutia.

The BLM move became an unproductive debacle marked by an exodus of experienced employees and a surge in vacancies that arguably undermined the then-Trump administration’s agenda, according to a half dozen current and former senior BLM staffers – including the agency’s current director — and a CNN review of government records.

That western relocation was “wildly disruptive” and should serve as a “cautionary tale” for the incoming Trump administration, said Tracy Stone-Manning, the Biden administration’s BLM director.

“It’s years of opportunity cost when we could and should be focused on the work of the bureau, for public lands and the American people, and we had to instead focus on rebuilding the bureau,” Stone-Manning said. “We are still piecing it back together.”

Former Trump officials dispute that criticism and argue the move boosted efficiency and attracted job applicants who wouldn’t have been interested in moving to Washington, DC, where the cost of living is higher than Grand Junction. Also, some former BLM sources told CNN that the move to Colorado allowed top staffers to forge better relationships with local government officials familiar with the vast swaths of public land the agency oversees.

Still, Stone-Manning’s comments echoed a 2021 Government Accountability Office report that found that the relocation caused BLM headquarters’ vacancies to nearly triple in less than a year. Out of 176 staff who needed to relocate, only 41 accepted their reassignments and the rest left their positions.

The move also complicated the agency’s relationships with Congress and other federal offices — there are no direct flights between Washington, DC, and Grand Junction, for example — and ended up costing about $20 million over two years, some BLM sources said.

‘It didn’t make sense’

The Biden administration announced the BLM headquarters would move back to Washington in 2021, creating what some sources said was a ping-pong effect that perpetuated instability for some staffers caught in the middle, which they fear could continue with more reversals in Trump’s next term.

“What you end up doing is forcing people to do things over and over and over again,” said Mary Jo Rugwell, who retired as a BLM state director in 2019 and now serves as president of the Public Lands Foundation, an advocacy group. “It’s a tremendous waste of time, money and effort.”

Some current and former staffers further argued the vacancies contributed to obstacles for the Trump administration, such as shortcomings that created openings for legal challenges against oil-drilling plans. The bureau manages about a tenth of the nation’s surface area and nearly a third of its minerals and soils.

“When you lose all that knowledge, you lose the knowledge of the processes and how to work them effectively,” said Joe Tague, who retired as a BLM division chief in early 2020. “It didn’t make sense.”

Some BLM sources added a caveat that the headquarters move may not be the perfect example of what could happen in future relocations because the pandemic hit in 2020, which led many staffers to work remotely, and then Biden’s team moved the office back not long after.

Project 2025, a conservative blueprint written by dozens of former Trump administration officials, recommended returning the BLM headquarters to the West.

Asked about the extent to which Trump will move more federal workers outside Washington, his transition team declined to share details but told CNN he will fulfill his promises.

“The American people reelected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver,” Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt wrote in a statement.

‘A wild and crazy time for feds’

As BLM staffers anticipate the incoming Trump administration, Stone-Manning says they are now waiting “with some level of concern” to hear whether another order that could upend their lives is imminent.

Aside from potential relocations, federal workers during the next administration can expect changes to the nature of their jobs, the kind of support they receive and the level of tension with political appointees at their agencies, said Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

“It’s going to be a wild and crazy time for feds with a tremendous amount of uncertainty introduced,” he said.

The Trump administration originally pitched the BLM headquarters’ shift to the West as a way to save money and move staffers closer to the lands and communities they serve.

Most BLM staffers already worked in states outside of DC, but a disproportionate level of senior staffers worked in the nation’s capital.

“This approach will play an invaluable role in serving the American people more efficiently,” said David Bernhardt, the then-secretary of the Interior Department, which oversees BLM, in announcing the reorganization in 2019.

The move quickly fell under scrutiny.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona who then chaired the House Natural Resources Committee, called the plan a veiled effort to cut staff, dish out favors to special interests and thwart congressional scrutiny.

Adding fuel to the fire, Trump’s then-acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, suggested at a Republican event that year that moving an agency outside of Washington was an effective way to get staff to quit and said, “It’s really, really hard to drain the swamp, but we’re working at it,” according to a Washington Examiner report at the time.

At a House hearing a month later, the Ute Indian Tribe testified that the Interior Department failed to consult with Indian tribes on the proposed reorganization and relocation of offices that administer Indian lands and natural resources, which the tribe called “unacceptable.”

‘Develop a sense of the local impacts’

William Perry Pendley, a then-BLM deputy director, defended the plan in 2019 amidst a grilling from Democratic lawmakers and said the move would reduce travel costs and lower building-lease payments. He stated that the move would lead officials to “develop a sense of the local impacts of BLM’s decisions in a deeper and more meaningful way than one can do as a visitor,” and noted that some staff – such as some who worked on legislative and budget affairs – would stay in DC.

But an inspector general report later found that Trump administration officials had misled Congress in statements about the relocation. Officials had stated that BLM couldn’t stay at its DC location after its lease expired in 2021 because the rate would exceed $50 per square foot, but the inspector general found BLM did not have market research on the actual lease rate.

The move proceeded, and staffers began to exit BLM’s headquarters in droves. A GAO report found headquarters vacancies increased from 121 in July 2019 to 326 in March 2020, but then dropped back to 142 by May 2021. The relocation also triggered a decrease in headquarters diversity, the report found.

Agency staffers told the GAO headquarters vacancies caused delays in creating or clarifying policy and negatively affected performance as the agency increasingly relied on less experienced employees reassigned from other offices.

A BLM staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said that amidst the vacancies there were shortcuts taken on analyses of the environmental impacts of projects, which in turn may have made the agency more vulnerable to lawsuits.

A coalition of environmental groups, for example, in early 2020 filed a lawsuit that alleged the BLM failed to consider potential harm to health and recreation in a certain plan for oil drilling and fracking in California. The case settled during the Biden administration.

That staffer said what seemed like only a handful of headquarters staff relocated to work in Grand Junction while others were scattered throughout the West, so teams learned to work together remotely.

There were some benefits. Eric Kriley, former director of BLM’s law enforcement office, told CNN that, in his personal opinion, an in-person meeting at the relocated BLM headquarters with some representatives from a Utah sheriff’s association proved invaluable to his coalition-building efforts.

Uncertain future

Under the Biden administration in 2021, the Interior Department announced a plan to restore the BLM’s official headquarters in Washington while continuing to grow the Grand Junction office as a “Western headquarters.”

Pendley, who became an acting BLM director under Trump, later wrote for Project 2025 that the relocation to the West “was the epitome of good governance” and cited how westerners no longer had to travel cross-country to address agency matters. He also disputed the notion that the agency saw a “brain-drain” and stated that the headquarters received many job applications from people who said they would not have applied to positions based in Washington.

Pendley further argued that the roughly $18 million cost associated with the move was offset by travel and lease savings that would grow over time.

A current BLM spokesperson said the total bill for the western move was about $20 million, not including the cost of leadership travel between Grand Junction and Washington or the cost of replacing and training staff.

The Biden administration has received calls for regulations that would have made it harder for a future Trump administration to relocate agency offices and shed federal staffers, but the Office of Personnel Management has not acted on the proposal.

Federal workers are now on edge. In addition to more office relocations, Trump promised on the campaign trail to reinstate a 2020 executive order known as Schedule F, which would give him the power to commence firings of nonpartisan federal staffers who might complicate his partisan plans.

Future efforts to move federal offices out of DC could lead more federal workers to unionize. The relocation of BLM’s central office, for example, contributed to a vote by BLM headquarters employees to join a union in 2022, according to a statement by that union’s president.

Stone-Manning, the current head of the BLM, warned that a mass departure of experienced federal workers could hurt, not help, government efficacy.

“The loss of career experts, they bring decades of policy experience, political-savvy expertise, so it makes it harder to accomplish any policy objective regardless of political leanings,” she said. “There is not only disruption to the employees themselves. There is serious disruption to the work, and the work is on behalf of the American people.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.