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Interior Secretary Deb Haaland will travel to Grand Junction, Colorado on Friday to tour the mostly-empty headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management. The visit makes good on a promise Haaland made to Senator John Hickenlooper to visit Colorado before making a decision about whether to relocate the agency's headquarters back to Washington, DC.
The visit will give Haaland a chance "to see in person the extent of the damage that the Trump administration inflicted on the Bureau of Land Management," said Jennifer Rokala, executive director at the Center for Western Priorities.
"It's laudable that Senators Hickenlooper and Bennet want to keep jobs in Colorado," Rokala added, "but at the end of the day, the Trump 'relocation' of BLM headquarters was always designed to eviscerate the agency and force employees out, not create jobs."
The Interior Department previously revealed that out of 328 positions that had been located in Washington, DC at the start of the Trump administration, just three employees moved to Grand Junction, and 38 others were relocated to state offices across the West.
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The concerns that many folks have about Stone-Manning’s nomination is that she’s going to be more on the side of protecting public lands for public uses, and the folks who want public lands to be used for more development don’t like that. These other issues are being used as a way to block her confirmation. I don’t think anybody really cares what she did 32 years ago.”
