One BLM Reinvention Story

It seems to me that new Admins have a variety of ideas.  Agencies are composed of human beings who have differing views of any ideas, and also different views of how seriously to engage in doing what the Admin wants, and what tactics are ethically OK to avoid doing so.

One interesting thing about this retiree’s story is that the State Offices who disobeyed the order to take out a layer (at least according to the retiree) was that the State Office had good relationships with Congressionals, who gave the State Offices political cover.  So that’s an interesting admin/Congress/agency dynamic.

When Bill Clinton became President he almost immediately initiated one of his campaign platform planks which was to “reinvent government”.  He put Vice President Al Gore in charge of the effort.  I was working for Interior in Washington, D.C.  at the time and can honestly say; it didn’t work out so well, at least not for BLM.  I remember going to a “town hall meeting” with Al Gore in the MIB (main Interior Building) basement cafeteria not long after the inauguration.  Gore sat on a stool in the middle of the room and preached about reinventing government. The majority of career employees rolled their eyes and thought, here comes another political driven and probably not really thought out government reorganization. I remember Gore preaching about eliminating bureaucrat layers from Interior and other organizations. Veteran Interior civil servants were accustomed to these distracting and costly efforts with Administration changes. Regrettably, BLM political leadership took this literally and quickly decided to remove a layer from the field; the District Offices. It wasn’t thought out…no studies were done to asses the pluses, minuses, or options. Area Managers became “Field” Managers, a term which still sticks today. In the Forest Service world, this would have been equivalent to removing the Forest Supervisor layer and having all District Rangers reporting directly to the Regional Forester.

As it turned out, some states in the BLM organization did as they were told and removed the District office layer.  Other states decided it was a bad, disruptive and costly idea (it was all these things) and “declined” to implement. The only part of the initiative all states adopted was changing the title of Area Manager to Field Manager.  When the Bush administration came in, BLM quietly reverted back to the traditional three level field organization and have remained as such ever since.

All the BLM Field Managers (who had been Area Managers) received upgrades to GS-13 as part of the title change.  This was done agency-wide.

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Lessons Learned:

All Admins can have bad ideas.

Cultivating relationships with congressional delegations can be helpful in dealing with bad ideas.

New Admins.. take your time! It’s about good governance, not (always) about getting talking points for your next job or next election.

Changes supported by (at least some) career folks are likely to last longer than those not.

Others?

1 thought on “One BLM Reinvention Story”

  1. Funny, I once suggested that the Forest Service trend of consolidating districts and SOs could ultimately lead to consolidating those two layers, with what’s left of the districts reporting to a regional office. (Or consolidating with BLM and reporting to a state office!) Is local opposition (like me not wanting to leave Missoula for Ogden when Jim Lyons had that on his agenda), supported by a local congressional interest, the best way to design “good governance” for a national agency?

    Reply

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