Trump says he’ll move thousands of federal workers out of Washington. Here’s what happened the first time he tried

In 2019, the administration of then-President Donald Trump announced plans to relocate the federal government’s largest land management agency from the nation’s capital to Grand Junction, Colorado, a city of about 65,000 people a four-hour drive from the nearest major airport.

Trump had campaigned on a vow to “drain the swamp” and throughout his time in office voiced suspicions about the federal bureaucracy. Moving the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters out of Washington, which officially happened in August 2020, was a step toward fulfilling that promise.

The bureau, known as the BLM, manages mining, hunting, recreation, timber harvesting, oil drilling and more across an area more than 50 times larger than New Jersey, nearly all of it in the West. Though most of the agency’s staffers were already in the West, the administration argued that the bureaucrats in the agency’s headquarters should also be closer to the land they oversee.

A total of 176 employees working in the BLM headquarters were told to move; 135 declined, with many leaving the agency to take positions elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy, according to the Government Accountability Office, an independent federal research agency. The office’s research also found that disruptions caused by the relocation delayed the BLM finalizing policies governing the use of federal public lands.

Looking to undo the previous administration’s “upheaval,” President Joe Biden’s administration quickly moved the headquarters back to Washington and proposed increasing the agency’s funding. The BLM’s fiscal year 2024 budget represented a more than 30% increase from fiscal year 2021, the last year the Trump administration prepared the budget request.

But if Trump wins in November, he has signaled he’ll pick up where he left off with the BLM as part of a broader strategy to shrink the federal government and create a bureaucracy more beholden to him.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the 900-plus page blueprint for a potential second Trump term, recommends sending the BLM headquarters back to Colorado and relocating other agencies, ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional offices to the Air Traffic Organization and the American Indian Environmental Office.

Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, and a senior campaign adviser told ProPublica in a statement that the document does not set policy for a potential second term. During the presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said of the document: “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it. This was a group of people that got together, they came up with some ideas. I guess some good, some bad.”

But scores of people who worked in the Trump administration helped draft Project 2025. They include William Perry Pendley, his former pick to helm the BLM. Pendley oversaw the headquarters relocation to Grand Junction and authored the Project 2025 chapter on the Department of the Interior, which includes the recommendation to move the BLM’s headquarters back to the West.

Separate from Project 2025, Trump has doubled down on his plan to take aim at the federal bureaucracy as part of Agenda47, his campaign’s outline for a second term. “Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado,” he said in March 2023, “as many as 100,000 government positions can be moved out, and I mean immediately, of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America.”

BLM employees who watched the relocation told ProPublica that the 2020 move out of Washington felt like naked politicking and the latest swing of the pendulum between administrations that has pointed the agency in wildly different directions. Rather than move, many in leadership left the agency. Those who remained were scattered, making collaboration with other divisions of the federal government more difficult and disrupting the continuity of internal programs.

“They ran the career people out,” said Steve Ellis, who spent nearly 40 years working for the federal government, rising to the level of BLM’s deputy director during the Obama administration. “This business about politicizing the civil service, that’s a problem. It’s something that should concern all Americans.”

Mick Mulvaney, then Trump’s acting chief of staff, insinuated during a 2019 speech that downsizing was the intent of the move, calling the relocation of agency offices “a wonderful way to streamline government.”

Employees in other bureaus and departments worry that what happened at the BLM will come to them in a second Trump administration.

Project 2025 advocates reinstituting the so-called Schedule F classification for federal employees that Trump created via a 2020 executive order to remove job protections and make such workers easier to fire. As part of Project 2025, backers created a database of potential replacement hires who share Trump’s mission.

Jeremy Symons, a former climate policy adviser with the EPA, is concerned that such changes would undermine his ex-employer’s ability to protect the environment and public health, in part by relocating or entirely dissolving government offices.

“What they plan on doing this time around was learned from that BLM experience,” he said.

“The Reorganization Will Functionally Dismantle the BLM”

Months before the Trump administration moved the BLM’s headquarters to Grand Junction, James Caswell, the agency’s director during President George W. Bush’s administration, warned Congress that “the reorganization will functionally dismantle the BLM.” It would remove the agency from having a voice in major decisions made in the capital, he said, and “effectively take the BLM off the playing field.”

Indeed, an exodus followed from the roughly 500-person headquarters, with numerous employees taking jobs elsewhere in the federal government to avoid leaving the Washington area, where they had put down roots. Vacancies in the office jumped to 326 from 121, according to the GAO.

The administration imposed hiring restrictions, including a freeze on filling certain senior positions to gauge whether they were necessary. “All of the BLM staff we interviewed told us about challenges in completing their duties because of headquarters vacancies after 2016,” the GAO report found. Vacancies matter because the BLM oversees an estimated 30% of all the mineral value in the country.

Pendley, the man selected to oversee the agency at the time of its relocation, is a self-avowed “sagebrush rebel,” part of the anti-federal government movement that wants public lands handed to states or sold off. (While functioning as the agency head, Pendley only officially held the title of deputy director for policy and programs and was never confirmed by the Senate. A court eventually ordered him to step aside, finding he had served unlawfully for more than a year.)

Pendley argued in Project 2025 that the BLM’s relocation was necessary and still is because a vast majority of the bureau’s staff and its jurisdiction remain in the West.

In an interview with ProPublica, Pendley said, “It makes much more sense to have the top people who are managing those lands and managing those people closer to the lands and the people themselves.”

He called the move a success, pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic as the reason the Grand Junction office building — where the agency leased space and which also hosted oil and gas companies — was never fully used. He argued that the point was not to drive away career employees.

In a potential second Trump administration, he said, there would be a “clear carve-out that things that are budget-related remain in Washington, things that are Capitol Hill-related remain in Washington.”

But the bureau is already decentralized, according to former BLM leadership, with the headquarters — what staff refer to as the Washington Office — located there to collaborate with the rest of the federal government.

“Part of the goal” of relocating the BLM’s headquarters “is for it to be disruptive,” said Mary Jo Rugwell, who was the BLM’s Wyoming state director until her 2019 retirement and now serves as president of the Public Lands Foundation, a nonprofit made up mainly of retired BLM employees. “We’ve got to stop this back-and-forth thing. It’s just not good for an organization. It’s not a healthy way to operate.”

Giving even more power to political appointees to fire career staff is a frightening proposition to Rugwell. “Putting people in place because of their loyalty to a person puts people in place that are not qualified to do the job,” she said.

“Less Effective and Less Efficient”

Project 2025 not only calls for the relocation of agencies’ offices but also goes further in promoting an industry wish list for lighter regulations. In some cases, the leaders of trade groups or industry advocates wrote chapters proposing how to redirect agencies regulating their member companies.

Among their environmental proposals: delist key species from protections under the Endangered Species Act; vacate Biden’s goal of conserving 30% of the country’s land and water by 2030; walk back protections for large swaths of the West in order to offer lease sales to the oil industry; and dismantle policies meant to combat climate change.

If such environmental and public health proposals move forward, “it would be a mistake to underestimate the scale of the demolition,” said Symons, the former EPA employee.

Under Trump, the EPA shrank to its smallest size in decades.

Symons now works with the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit composed of former EPA staff, and believes the Biden administration has begun turning around the agency. He co-authored a recent report that estimated rules the agency wrote on topics such as air pollution since Biden took office will save more than 200,000 lives through 2050.

Project 2025 proposes disbanding multiple offices within the agency, halting millions of dollars of grant funding for universities that “produce radical environmental research” and pausing Biden-era rules.

“The EPA needs to be realigned away from attempts to make it an all-powerful energy and land use policymaker and returned to its congressionally sanctioned role as environmental regulator,” Project 2025’s authors wrote.

“By putting polluters in control over our air and water instead of EPA scientists,” Symons said, “Project 2025 would put the lives of millions of Americans needlessly at risk from asthma attacks, cancer, lung disease and heart disease.”

In Project 2025, Pendley also focused on the obscure agency tasked with regulating coal mining: the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. He proposes moving its headquarters from Washington to Pittsburgh to be “in the coal field.”

The number of coal mine inspectors should be cut, Pendley wrote, pointing to the industry’s falling production. “The people that I talked to thought there were enough people out there to do the job,” Pendley told ProPublica.

Former agency staff questioned his logic. Moving the headquarters would only serve to make the agency “less effective and less efficient,” argued Joe Pizarchik, the agency’s longest-tenured director, who served until the day Trump was inaugurated.

The largest coal-producing state by far is Wyoming, not Pennsylvania, and historical coal mines in need of cleanup are scattered across Appalachia. As with the BLM, the employees who need to physically be in mines are already stationed in coal country, from offices in Charleston, West Virginia, to Casper, Wyoming. Headquarters staff, meanwhile, need to be in the capital to work alongside Interior Department leadership, Pizarchik said.

As for the agency’s inspectors, many mines that no longer produce have yet to be cleaned up, so the number of permits that the agency oversees has not fallen significantly, Pizarchik explained. Meanwhile, the number of coal mine inspections across the country, a 2018 study found, had already fallen more than 20% over the preceding decade.

“Frankly, it’s asinine,” Pizarchik said of Project 2025’s call to cut inspectors because of decreased production. “That statement is either made out of ignorance of the facts, or it is trying to mislead people.”