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As President Biden's nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management prepares for her confirmation hearing this morning, the Interior Department made a stunning confession: just three BLM employees accepted their forced relocation to the agency's new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Previously, the agency had said that 87 percent of affected employees had resigned or found new jobs rather than move out of Washington, DC. Colorado Newsline reporter Chase Woodruff recently visited the headquarters building and found it completely deserted. A security guard said employees were “mostly teleworking.”
The revelation regarding the headquarters move, which was overseen by former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and former acting BLM head William Perry Pendley, puts new urgency on the nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning to run the land management agency. More than 100 conservation groups across the ideological spectrum sent a letter to Senate leaders on Monday urging them to confirm Stone-Manning.
The broad range of support for Stone-Manning is reflected in recent op-eds and editorials that note she is both extremely qualified and is known as a consensus-builder—a stark contrast to the Trump administration, which pulled Pendley's nomination once it became clear he would have trouble getting confirmed even by a Republican-controlled Senate.
Stone-Manning's confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is scheduled to start at 8:00 am Mountain Time this morning.
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So here’s the question: Will Republican Steve Daines subvert his political and policy differences with Stone-Manning and get behind an unassailably qualified Montana candidate? Or will he continue to play the shrill, strident partisan role he has taken on this session, ever since fund-raising off spurious allegations that Democrats were trying to ‘steal the election’? We hope he is bigger than that.”
