Before He Left, Trump Figured Out How to Cut 1 Federal Agency's HQ Staff by 87%
A stunning report shows that after former President Donald Trump announced he would move key positions at the Bureau of Land Management headquarters out of Washington, D.C. more than a year ago, most of the agency’s employees voluntarily quit.
Trump apparently found a way to drain the swamp after all: to move some parts of the swamp away from the country’s capital.
The Hill reported that following a Trump order, the Department of the Interior announced in July of 2019 that most land management jobs would be moved out to Colorado. Subsequently, 87 percent of those affected by the relocation order quit their jobs.
Only 41 people agreed to move out west, while 287 agency employees resigned or retired.
“The flight of employees came after Trump’s BLM rolled out a plan that would leave just 60 of the agency’s 10,000 employees in Washington, D.C., establishing a new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo., while spreading the majority of Washington-based staff to various offices across the West.,” The Hill reported.
One of the issues with the country’s vast bureaucracy seems to be that all of those career government employees are in one centralized spot — Washington. Sure, having the country’s agencies all headquartered in D.C. might make for some convenience with regard to some matters of business and for those seeking to rub elbows at all of the highfalutin parties.
But what if attending those parties became logistically impossible?
The fact that 87 percent of people in one agency chose to quit, rather than live and work in the Rocky Mountains, makes a good case for breaking up the swamp by keeping its murky creatures separated by thousands of miles of distance.
As the Federalist reported in 2019, Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee actually wanted to relocate many of the country’s agencies to places all around this vast land through a piece of legislation. Not only would such a move have weeded out some career bureaucrats, but it would have helped regions of the country in need of an economic boost.
The Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy (HIRE) Act was authored by the lawmakers and would have moved 90 percent of Washington-based government jobs into different areas of the country. Most of the new homes would have been in areas the coastal elites consider to be “flyover country.”
“Every year Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars fund federal agencies that are mainly located in the D.C. bubble. That’s a big part of the problem with Washington: they’re too removed from the rest of America. The HIRE Act will move policymakers directly into the communities they serve, creating thousands of jobs for local communities and saving taxpayers billions of dollars along the way,” Hawley said at the time.
“Moving agencies outside of Washington, D.C. both boosts local economies and lowers costs – that’s a winning combination. This legislation would enable Americans across the country to have greater access to good jobs. Tennesseans would greatly benefit from having portions of the Department of Education in the Volunteer State. It is my hope that the HIRE Act will quickly pass the Senate,” Blackburn stated.
The HIRE Act would have moved the Department of Agriculture to Missouri; the Department of Education to Tennessee; the Department of Commerce to Pennsylvania; the Department of Energy to Kentucky; the Department of Health and Human Services to Indiana; the Housing and Urban Development to Ohio; the Department of the Interior to New Mexico; the Department of Labor to West Virginia; the Department of Transportation to Michigan and the Department of Veterans Affairs to South Carolina.
Hawley and Blackburn were both criticized by the establishment media for proposing such a preposterous idea.
Hawley hit back against The Washington Post after the outlet published a jab against him, which was headlined, “The White House didn’t like my agency’s research. So it sent us to Missouri.”
“The agency has managed to hire a few sharp new researchers in Kansas City, but they’re just a drop in the bucket.” Because of course there are no smart people in Kansas City or the Midwest. You can’t make this stuff up.
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) October 21, 2019
Sadly, the bill never went anywhere. But with Thursday’s news that 87 percent of the people at the BLM refused to go about their careers in the rugged west, it appears Trump, Hawley and Blackburn were all onto something.
Trump proved the swamp can be drained, and that it is actually capable of draining itself. Apparently, all it takes for lifelong government employees to leave their jobs voluntarily is the prospect of renting a U-Haul truck headed for a place like Grand Junction, Colorado.
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