Bureau of Land Management lost more than 87% of staffers in move; it's unclear whether Biden will bring it back to DC

Moving most of the Bureau of Land Management headquarters staffers to Grand Junction, Colo,, "prompted more than 87 percent of the affected employees either to resign or retire rather than move, according to new data obtained by The Washington Post," Juliet Eilperin reports for the paper. "The exit of longtime career staffers from the agency responsible for managing more than 10 percent of the nation’s land shows the extent to which the Trump administration reshaped the federal government." 

Of the 388 jobs at BLM headquarters, it moved 328, and "287 BLM employees either retired or found other jobs," according to the Department of the Interior. Only 41 went to Colorado. The move was "designed to shift power away from the nation’s capital," Eilperin reports. By shedding longtime employees, the agency could hire employees more loyal to the administration.

Interior communications director Melissa Schwartz declined to comment to Eilperin on how the move had affected the bureau's operations, "but several experts, including former high-ranking Interior officials, said the shake-up has deprived the agency of needed expertise and disrupted its operations. The bureau oversees all oil and gas drilling on federal lands, which has emerged as a flash point in the early days of the Biden administration."

It's unclear whether the Biden administration will—or should—move headquarters back to D.C. Though the 287 employees who didn't make the move either retired or found new jobs, "a key justification for undoing the move to Grand Junction is that a significant number of the Washington-based staffers who left the bureau are still in the D.C. area, and Biden administration officials have said privately that Interior will try to rehire some of these employees," Scott Streater reports for Energy & Environment News.

Steve Ellis, an Obama-era BLM deputy director of operations, told Streater that some of the staff would likely return to BLM if the agency headquarters were moved. That would help the agency, he said, since many employees with institutional knowledge had been lost.