Commentary — From the Trenches
By JW August –– Special to the OB Rag
When President Donald Trump’s calliope of confusion is at its noisiest, we’ve learned a game is afoot in numerous places. This particular game comes with a warning from a source who has a highly placed position in a large federal agency.
The source is named “S” and says an end-of-March announcement about moving the U.S. Forest Service out of Washington, D.C. is a foreshadowing of a massive reorganization effort of the federal government. The suggested agency suspected of being the next ordered to move will be the Bureau of Land Management, according to my source.
The overall goal, made in the name of efficiency, is to punish the cities and states that vote Democratic and reward Trump loyalists with jobs and money, says our source. By creating these new offices, away from D.C., there will be far less oversight, and far more access.
The source says that “as long as it’s a Republican town, they’re going to get an infusion of cash and jobs because their plan is to go out to isolated areas of the country so that they can do whatever they want.”
Brooke Leslie Rollins, one-time founder of the American First Policy Institute runs the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Forest Service is within her department. Rollins explained the move as sensible and an improvement. Her AFPI non-profit is still very active in supporting right-of-center conservative positions.
In a lengthy press release Rollins is quoted as saying, “Establishing a Western headquarters in Salt Lake City and streamlining how the Forest Service is organized will position the Chief and operation leaders closer to the landscapes we manage and the people who depend on them.” The administration calls it “common sense management.”
The cut backs in the first half of 2025 by Elon Musk’s DOGE raiders cost the agency 5,860 of its 35,500 employees. So reported by the Inspector General of the Department of Agriculture last December. Now the agency is moving
Source “S” says agencies are being told to move out and do this without Congressional approval. “It is just like the tear down of the East Wing of the White House”.
The costs will be excessive, our source believes, because: the agency is actually expanding the number of offices, which need to be leased and furnished, and that is the minimum.
What this also means is that what is left behind in D.C. are massive office spaces, some buildings much in need of billion dollar renovations, we are told.
The Trump White House’s primary concern is the looming midterm elections. Is there a potential disaster of launching agency relocations, putting billions of tax dollars into play, if the Republicans lose the midterms?
Under the new model, 15 state directors will be distributed throughout the country to oversee Forest Service operations within one or more states.
This claimed cost savings means replacing the current eight Forest Service regions across the country. The regions that are now headquartered in Sacramento, Portland, Atlanta and Milwaukee are being shut down.
The four regions being forced to shut down also have a heavy Democratic Party base.
Here are the numbers from the last general election:
- Sacramento 61.4% Democrat
- Atlanta (Fulton County) 72.6% Democrat
- Portland 79.2% Democrat
- Milwaukee 69.1% Democrat
One regional office moves 38 miles away and now becomes the ‘Western headquarters” for the entire agency. Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah are in the same county in which Salt Lake City sits. President Trump won there by 59.38% in the 2024 election.
California and Hawaii offices will be in Placerville, not Sacramento, as is the current arrangement. In the 2024 election Placerville voted 53% for Trump; Sacramento County voted 38% for the president. It appears there is a pattern emerging.
“They’re trying to disrupt and basically destabilize the federal government by moving federal agencies away from the seat of power in D.C. and out to isolated areas of the country,” says our source “S.”. The source, while apolitical, is offended as well as colleagues in other agencies being referred to “as a bunch of swamp rat bureaucrats who are stealing taxpayer funds.”
If they are, they’re smart rats; no one gets a job with a high school diploma at a D.C. federal agency. Widely available data supports a claim made to the OB Rag that the federal workforce is highly educated. And now the employees, many with their lives invested in their jobs and families living on the east coast, face the difficult decision to move to the far west.
To help fill those new jobs, last September was the death knell for the practiced system of robust resumes. The Trump administration’s very busy Office of Personnel Management provided a guide to understanding the new two-page resume limit. We spoke, in confidence, to someone familiar with federal personnel issues.
As explained to us, before the Trump administration downgraded the process by creating the two page shortcut, getting hired for a senior position required a resume with supporting materials which could run up to 15 pages. For professionals like engineers and scientists, they also submitted as many as ten pages of their certifications.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is quoted as saying “This is a big win for Utah and the West. Nearly 90% of Forest Service lands are west of the Mississippi, so putting leadership closer to the lands they manage just makes sense.”
Source “S” also told the OB Rag the administration “has been instructing federal agencies to pay bills since October out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure” monies. That’s former President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion program that is supposed to provide the dollars to upgrade our infrastructure across the country. The money originally budgeted for the agency is now being saved to cover the costs to move away from D.C.
