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Bureau of Land Management employees voted 136 to 20 to join the National Treasury Employees Union. The new union will include roughly 200 workers based in Washington and regional offices across the country.
By forming a union, employees will gain more control over major changes to the agency. This decision comes after several years of intense upheaval for BLM employees. In 2019, President Trump relocated the BLM headquarters from Washington to Colorado. The majority of the relocated employees chose to quit or retire instead of moving across the country, causing a severe staffing shortage. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced this year that the BLM headquarters will return to Washington while keeping a Western office in Colorado.
With an estimated 2,000 vacancies at the agency, union advocates are hopeful this move will attract more employees to BLM.
Supreme Court rejects red states’ bid to block Biden accounting metric
The Supreme Court denied an attempt to block the Biden administration's use of an important climate accounting metric. The metric known as social costs of greenhouse gases is a set of values that help the government calculate the climate costs of its actions. It sets a dollar amount for the damages caused per ton of greenhouse gas emissions. Attorneys representing some Republican states challenged the use of this metric, claiming their states are harmed when it is used to evaluate oil and gas leasing on their lands. On Thursday, the Supreme Court denied the application to block the use of social costs in the administration's decision-making.
The social cost estimate for carbon is currently $51 per ton of emissions, compared to about $1 per ton under former President Donald Trump.
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It's now up to the tribes that we represent, conservation groups, community groups, concerned citizens. Those are the folks now that have to bring the suits, expend the resources to enforce the law and do the job that the federal government itself should be doing.”
