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President Trump's efforts to downsize the federal government by cutting thousands of jobs have gotten a lot of attention, but he also wants agencies to relocate from Washington to less costly parts of the country. This is something he tried during his first term, moving the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado. Colorado Public Radio's Stina Sieg reports on how that went.
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STINA SIEG, BYLINE: The desert city of Grand Junction is nearly 2,000 miles from D.C., about 70,000 people under towering red rock cliffs beside the Colorado River. It's surrounded by public land run by the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM. Western populists have long complained that decisions about what can and can't be done on federal land are made in faraway Washington. In 2018, Colorado Senators Cory Gardner and Michael Bennet, a Republican and a Democrat, made a promotional video for the city's economic partnership.
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MICHAEL BENNET: You'll not find a better place to locate the BLM headquarters than Grand Junction.
MICHAEL BENNET AND CORY GARDNER: It all comes together here in Grand Junction, Colorado.
SIEG: Robin Brown ran the economic partnership at the time.
ROBIN BROWN: But I don't think anyone thought realistically little old Grand Junction would get the BLM headquarters.
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SIEG: She's at Grand Junction's airport, which has six gates.
BROWN: We have zero nonstop flights to D.C. (laughter).
SIEG: But in 2019, Grand Junction got its Cinderella story when President Trump told the BLM to pack up its headquarters and move it here.
BROWN: It was so exciting, and it was sort of this, like, dream come true. And everything we had worked so hard for came to fruition.
SIEG: Bringing in high-paying jobs and putting Grand Junction on the map. A great decision says William Perry Pendley, who Trump appointed to run the BLM in 2019.
WILLIAM PERRY PENDLEY: You want that director of the Bureau of Land Management to be out here because he or she will have firsthand knowledge of what's going on.
SIEG: Dozens of former BLM officials signed a letter protesting the move, saying the agency needs leaders in D.C. to advocate for public lands in front of lawmakers and the president. Others saw an ulterior motive to get long-time agency employees in Washington to quit, to either make the agency smaller or to replace them with people more ideologically aligned with President Trump. Pendley says moving the agency west brought in fresh blood.
PENDLEY: And I asked every one of the final applicants - I said, if this job were advertised in Washington, D.C., would you have bid on it? And every one of them said, no.
SIEG: But of the hundreds of jobs relocated out of Washington, only three employees asked to move to Grand Junction actually did. Shortly after the new headquarters opened, the pandemic mostly shut down in-person work. And the following year, President Biden moved the headquarters back to D.C. But now, the debate over moving agencies out of Washington is alive again, literally.
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PENDLEY: Let's get it done. Thank you.
SIEG: In Grand Junction, a conservative Colorado think tank pitted William Perry Pendley against Mary Jo Rugwell, the BLM's former state director in Wyoming. Rugwell echoes the suspicions of a lot of Western liberals that Trump is trying to break federal land agencies so public lands can be privatized.
MARY JO RUGWELL: If there aren't enough people and if communication isn't good and if things don't work well, it's pretty easy for somebody to say, oh, you guys are doing a terrible job. We better do something else with these lands.
SIEG: Earlier this year, Utah and a dozen other states asked the Supreme Court to give a big chunk of federal land to state governments to manage. It declined. It was a bad idea, says Rugwell.
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SIEG: Robin Brown, whose job used to be promoting Grand Junction, says she still thinks this is the best place for the BLM's headquarters, but she's tired of it being a political pawn.
BROWN: So the idea that now we're going move the BLM headquarters back is just as disappointing as moving it away because I just feel like, well, then we wait four years till the next Democratic president, and then they'll move it away again. And then, you know, who's hurt by all this? - our community, all those employees.
SIEG: The BLM did not respond to a question about whether it plans to move its headquarters back to Grand Junction. For NPR News, I'm Stina Sieg in Grand Junction, Colorado. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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