Hundreds of Bureau of Land Management staffers have voted to join the National Treasury Employees Union, partly in response to the Trump-era relocation of the bureau’s Washington headquarters and the movement of hundreds of D.C. jobs to the West.

The decisions by about 200 non-supervisory headquarters employees in May, and another roughly 200 in the New Mexico state office in February and in the Taos and Rio Puerco field offices there last spring, were also spurred by the Biden administration’s efforts to undo the Trump BLM reorganization.

They likely will not be the last bureau employees to join the union, NTEU President Tony Reardon said.

“We continue to hear from a lot of BLM employees, not only in New Mexico, but really in states throughout the Western part of the country,” he said. “And so we are right now in the process of determining what the level of interest in those various locations are.”

The Interior Department’s decision three years ago to reorganize BLM and to relocate its Washington headquarters to Grand Junction, Colo., and other state offices in the West was pitched to employees and the public as a move to improve bureau operations by placing senior officials closer to the lands they manage.

But it was done with little consultation with BLM “employees and key stakeholders,” according to the Government Accountability Office (Greenwire, March 6, 2020).

At least 135 mostly senior-level staffers left BLM rather than move, according to a follow-up GAO report...

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