Following a trend in the current administration, the U.S. Department of the Interior has announced a plan to relocate the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from Washington D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado. Many staff will also be moved to offices in other western states.

While the primary mission of the BLM is to manage access to and maintenance of public land, as well as overseeing grazing and resource extraction, the agency is also grant-awarding.

Very few of the agency’s estimated 11,000 employees currently work in D.C., with roughly 300 affected by the move. The fear is that the relocation will result in the loss of a large percentage of employees forced to move.

This “brain drain” effect has already been proven true in the case of the Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s relocation of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and Economic Research Service (ERS). Those agencies have lost a combined total of 250 employees out of 395 ordered to move from D.C. to Kansas City.

While the BLM relocation is not as far advanced as the USDA relocations, Congress has less leverage to fight the new move. The budget for the U.S. Department of the Interior has already been agreed to for the next fiscal year and it contains funds for the move. Democrats in Congress have vowed to oppose the move next year, but it is worth pointing out that they made a similar vow with the USDA agencies and were ultimately unsuccessful.