# Bureau of Land Management forced relocations of DC employees



## wadin' forever (Jun 22, 2018)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/i...ederal-land-agency/ar-AAHBg6l?ocid=spartandhp

Article is largely excerpted from ProPublica article.
This was already done at Department of Agriculture (linked article within). White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, "wonderful way to streamline government". Instead of merit based policy debates, just do ideological war of attrition.


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## Lumberman (Sep 27, 2010)

Couple different ways to look at this. 

1. Why in the world would the headquarters for the BLM be in Washington? All of the land is out west? 

2. There’s nothing merit based in government. If anything at least this will prove they are dedicated to their jobs. 

3. Sounds like a bunch of people with very Cush jobs crying because they might actually work on something. 

I think it’s great.


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## wadin' forever (Jun 22, 2018)

Lumberman said:


> Couple different ways to look at this.
> 
> 1. Why in the world would the headquarters for the BLM be in Washington? All of the land is out west?
> 
> ...


To your outlook points:
1)As the article points out, about 9,700 of the 10,000 BLM jobs ARE ALREADY located out west, close to or at BLM lands. Every organization has a headquarters - our government's is in DC. BLM is part of that organization. BLM, US Forest Service, FWS, NPS, et al, Congressional Committees, have to interact to make policy, coordinate priorities. 
2) Being dedicated to your job is an attribute I personally believe the vast majority of people working in government, especially in public lands/resources positions, have, probably at a higher level than people working in the private sector. Many have a more cynical view of government employees writ large. As the article points out, the acting head of the agency wrote that the Founding Fathers believed all public land should be sold. Large tracts were given away in the 19th century in the western expansion. If public lands are to be "sold" I hope they sell it at pennies on the dollar to the African American and Native American population that was widely left out of many of the giveaways in that era. Doubt that will happen. 
3) Your cynicism that these people work on nothing, feel confident in that, good for you. F all these people, screw them out of their positions via coercion, make them disrupt their families, life planning for no reason. I would bet that many if not most of these people worked their way up the ranks from working "in the field" as is usually the case for mid to upper management positions in public resource agencies. As ProPublica found in internal memos and recordings, it makes no sense economically in terms of efficiency of government. Despite baseless assertions made by Trumpniks. 

"Alt Right" leader and Trump chief initial domestic advisor/guru Steve Bannon famously said his goal in government was the "deconstruction of the administrative state" - a quote he attributed to Lenin. I believe that his reasoning was simply to create a state of corruption, get rid of oversight, regulations, and even public ownership of resources so a transfer of public goods can be corruptly handed over to political allies similar to what happened to the state owned resources of the USSR, creating a billionaire mafia oligarch class in Russia. More or less.


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