Bureau Of Land Management Confronts Brain Drain Under Trump Administration
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The Bureau of Land Management manages 245 million acres, many of them wind-swept deserts of sagebrush and tumbleweeds in the rural West.
The agency tries to strike a balance between drilling, mining, grazing and conservation, and that's not easy — conservationists frequently take the agency to court. But most BLM critics will acknowledge the agency is understaffed.
During the Trump administration, the BLM faced a new problem: brain drain. People left the agency, for a variety of reasons.
“Things had been so stressful and bad during most of my 15 years at BLM that I could see early on in the Trump administration that things were going from bad to much worse," said Richard Spotts, who worked on Federal Land Policy and Management Act compliance on the Arizona Strip. "And so instead of waiting until my full Social Security retirement age of 66, I retired about one year early, basically to save my soul.”
His job was to ensure compliance with environmental regulations on the Arizona Strip. He says many in the organization were pro-development, and over time, the job became difficult and stressful. He was left out of information loops and became more and more isolated. And that was during the Obama administration.
“Although there’s good people working at BLM, the dominant long-standing management culture, is basically corrupt, regressive, biased and secretive,” Spotts said.
Not everyone who works at BLM was disillusioned with the agency and its mission.
“We do our very best to work with everybody that has an interest in using public lands in any way,” said Mary Jo Rugwell, former state director for the BLM in Wyoming. She says the agency operates best when it is true to its mission of multiple use. That means finding a balance between resource development and conservation.
That’s not always easy.
“When you start talking about multiple use and sustained yield, that is messy. It’s very difficult,” Rugwell said.
Although Rugwell remained committed to the organization, she saw changes under the Trump administration.
“One of the things that I found was that the current administration did, you know, they really believed that everything that happened under the Obama Administration was bad, and they wanted to change everything," Rugwell said. "And certainly every administration has the right to, you know, focus on different priorities. But when you want to change something it’s really important to do it thoughtfully and deliberately.”
She saw changes in how people were treated.
“Rank and file employees of course were not being treated well, but, executives were not being treated well either, and I just thought, maybe this is a sign,” she said.
So she retired. She watched as the agency moved from one acting director to the next. The latest, William Perry Pendley, was so controversial that the Republican-led Senate would not confirm him.
“The entire time that this administration has been in place, the Bureau of Land Management has been directed by a revolving door of acting directors. And that is just not, that’s not a good way to run an organization," Rugwell said.
In August the agency was forced to move its offices from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colorado. The idea was to move employees closer to the lands they manage. But the BLM has about 10,000 employees, and most of them already live in the West. The few people located in Washington were there so they would have access to congressmen and other Washington officials. Critics of the move say the purpose was to reduce the agency's influence.
Most of the Washington staff resigned or retired rather than move their families to Grand Junction.
“The BLM was in many ways broken going into the Trump administration, and the Trump administration has gutted it. They’ve dismantled it, they’ve forced people into retirement. And they’ve made the agency in many ways dysfunctional except for the service of industry,” said Taylor McKinnon, of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The center is frequently at odds with the BLM. He hopes the Biden administration can rebuild the agency.
"There needs to be some deep reform at BLM. And some clear direction for BLM from the new administration," McKinnon said.
Oil and gas production boomed under former President Barack Obama’s watch, because prices were higher. Trump has slashed regulations, but production has been sluggish.
If Biden wants the support of conservationists, he’ll need to earn it. But with coronavirus surging and the economy still sluggish, fixing the BLM is not likely to be high on his list, and the workload will largely fall on the new Secretary of Interior.
