Interior Dept. may be withdrawing from the West, not moving to it
Will a DOGE plan to shutter federal offices affect the BLM's potential HQ move?
Ever since Trump was elected, I’ve been anxiously waiting for the administration to announce that it would relocate the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction once again. After all, the chapter of Project 2025 penned by William Perry Pendley, Trump’s BLM acting director last time, advocates for the move. And so far, the administration has followed the far-right’s “playbook” to a T.
While Rep. Jeff Hurd, the Colorado Republican who represents most of western Colorado, has introduced legislation that would make the move, the administration has remained quiet on the issue. And last week, the Government Services Administration announced it planned to shutter about 2 million square feet of office space occupied by the Interior Department around the nation. (More details below).
This seems to throw a potential BLM move — which would require a new lease — into doubt.
I suppose a lot of you are sighing with relief at that news. Not me. I wasn’t going to rail against the move. In fact, though I know I’m at odds with a majority of my readers here, I was planning on arguing in favor of it — if done correctly.
This isn’t a new position for me: I did the same last time Trump was elected. And I stand by my previous position: If carried out in a thoughtful and well-intentioned manner, the benefits of basing the agency in the West offset the negatives, even in a place like Grand Junction. I’m not going to rehash all of my arguments, especially since they may be moot, but basically I argued:
The relocation would give local and regional advocacy groups who can’t afford to travel to D.C. more access to top agency officials;
It would allow agency leadership to live among the public lands they administer and to see, firsthand, the consequences of policies. It would make it more likely that they would, say, witness a wild horse and burro roundup; see the way a herd of cattle can decimate a swath of public land; see what a 200 MW solar installation looks like; or witness the impacts of oil and gas leases or land withdrawals;
It would bring up to 300 senior employees to Grand Junction, boosting the economy (and making it less reliant on extractive industries)
If you’re interested you can read the opinion piece here.
Admittedly, this stance came back and bit me in the butt last time I took it, when the transfer was badly, and intentionally, botched. Trump and his minions used the move as an underhanded way to eviscerate the agency and get rid of senior, knowledgeable staff. After promising to stock the Grand Junction office with about 300 senior employees, only about 30 ended up there. And the top brass weren’t even there full-time: They commuted back and forth to Washington, D.C.
Oh, and also, the agency ended up sharing an office building with Chevron, Laramie Resources, and the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, thereby realizing opponents’ worst fears: That basing the agency in western Colorado would give industry more access and influence over its senior staff. I also wrote about all of these failures here.
This time around, Trump doesn’t need to move BLM HQ to gut the agency or push out long-time staff, he’s got the oligarch-led DOGE to do that. Nor would the relocation open more access to the oil and gas industry, since they already have a direct portal via presumed BLM director Kathleen Sgamma, herself a petroleum lobbyist.
Instead of beefing up the federal presence in the West, however, the administration seems intent on withdrawing it. There’s all of the federal agency firings, of course, which are ongoing. And now the GSA terminating leases and, in an apparent spasm of spite, is also at least considering shutting down all or some of the electric vehicle chargers at federal facilities.
A sampling of offices that would close under the GSA’s plan:
National Parks Service offices or buildings in: Fairbanks, Alaska; Camp Verde, Flagstaff, and Phoenix, Arizona; Arcata and Ventura, California; Fort Collins, Colorado; Lapwai, Idaho; Mountainair and Grants, New Mexico; Salt Lake City, Moab, and Monticello, Utah; and Seattle, Washington.
Bureau of Indian Affairs offices or buildings in: Show Low, Fredonia, and Phoenix, Arizona; Redding, California; Towaoc, Colorado; Pablo and Poplar, Montana; Zuni, New Mexico; Elko, Nevada; and Toppenish, Washington.
U.S. Geological Survey offices or buildings in: Anchorage, Alaska; Boulder and Golden, Colorado; Bozeman, Montana; Klamath Falls and Corvallis, Oregon; Moab, Utah; Spokane, Washington; and Cheyenne, Wyoming.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service offices or buildings in: Tucson, Arizona; Arcata, California; Fort Collins, Littleton, and Grand Junction, Colorado; Bozeman and Great Falls, Montana; West Valley City, Utah; and Lander, Wyoming.
Bureau of Reclamation offices in: Durango, Colorado; Bend, Oregon; and Boise, Idaho.
Bureau of Minerals Management Service and Bureau of Trust Fund Administration offices in: Camarillo, California, and Farmington, New Mexico.
Bureau of Land Management offices in: Ukiah, California, and Baker City, Oregon.
As is often the case with the Trump administration, the plan appears to have been made in haste and without forethought, targeting facilities where the leases are up for renewal in coming months. It’s not clear what will happen to the employees that work in those spaces or whether the services they provide will continue or be terminated as well. But it will deliver another blow to the communities that will lose the offices, many of which have already seen federal employees get the axe.
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Speaking of the economic impacts of federal lands and agencies, I did a piece for High Country News on outdoor recreation, mostly on public lands, and how it affects local and state economies. I argue that Page, Arizona, has weathered the closure of Navajo Generating Station better than expected because it already had a recreation-based economy in place. It also has a bunch of graphs on national parks visitation, visitor spending, and so forth, put together by Hannah Agosta and Marissa Garcia. Read it here.
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After I finished the above piece, I came across a cool dashboard showing economic impacts of each national forest. Go here and type in your forest to see how it’s contributing.
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A group of national park rangers are working to tally up all of the firings of their colleagues, park by park. You can check out their spreadsheet and see that Arches NP lost three employees, Carlsbad Caverns lost 14, Chaco lost one, Death Valley lost six, Grand Canyon lost 10, Joshua Tree lost six, Lake Mead 13, Zion lost 11, and the list goes on. It could be a rough summer in a lot of these places.
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🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
It’s the beginning of the month, and time for another episode of the snowpack update. And, once again, it’s a mixed bag, depending on where you are. In Colorado, the line seems to be drawn around McClure Pass: Areas north of that have an average to above average snowpack, while most places south of there are below normal. The situation is downright dire down in Arizona and much of New Mexico.
March is usually the snowiest month in most of the West’s mountains, and another storm is on its way. There’s even a chance for rain down in severely parched Phoenix and Tucson, though forecasts aren’t calling for more than a trace. In 2023 the snow was abundant for most of the winter, but really started coming down after March 10, turning a good year into a blockbuster.
Still, the chances for a full snowpack recovery in the San Juan Mountains and southward are looking dimmer with each passing day. Spring snowfall is often accompanied by dust, which hastens melting. February was unusually warm, with monthly high-temperature records broken across the Southwest; a continuation of the trend would exacerbate drought in the lowlands and decimate the snowpack up high.
Grand Junction’s average maximum temperature in February was 55° F, nearly nine degrees warmer than the 1991-2020 normal. Phoenix recorded its hottest February on record, and the high reached 90° F on Feb. 24 (the earliest on record was on Feb. 17, 2016). Phoenix has received just .02” of precipitation since Aug. 22.
The USGS Anchorage office is the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which monitors the Aleutians and southern Alaska volcanoes. Those volcanoes are a threat to intercontinental aviation, because ash from them can get into jet engines, where it melts and resolidifies and shuts the engines down. (Also, lots of planes fly over Alaska and the Aleutians, because the Earth is round and the shortest path between North America and Eurasian goes further north than one would expect from the Mercator projection.)
AVO also collaborates with USGS earthquake scientists to recognize when earthquakes are on the Aleutian trench. Large earthquakes on the trench can cause tsunamis. (Good thing NOAA deals with the tsunami warnings. Oh. Wait. Right.
Carbondale's local xc area is limping along with half the trails open, and half of those are only open thanks to shoveling and plowing. As seems usual with these years, the snowpack #s on the flats where snotels are located don't seem to fully reflect the melting that's gone on. McClure Snotel may be at 70% of "average," but the nearby south faces are down to dirt.
I just read an interesting take on how many of the Elon fan club on Xitter and in DOGE, etc., are video gamer boys. One noted how good they are at protracted "battle." I doubt they really understand what they are doing in their battle, but they are persistent little buggers with followers and influence right now. This is not good. (Actually the "sagebrush rebellion" types may understand, and have seeded the keyboard army with catchy "memes" or whatever.)