The Bureau of Land Management manages 245 million acres, including Vermilion Cliffs, Arizona.
The Bureau of Land Management manages 245 million acres, many of them wind-swept deserts of sagebrush and tumbleweeds in the rural West.
The agency tries to strike a balance between drilling, mining, grazing and conservation, and that's not easy — conservationists frequently take the agency to court. But most BLM critics will acknowledge the agency is understaffed.
During the Trump administration, the BLM faced a new problem: brain drain. People left the agency, for a variety of reasons.
“Things had been so stressful and bad during most of my 15 years at BLM that I could see early on in the Trump administration that things were going from bad to much worse," said Richard Spotts, who worked on Federal Land Policy and Management Act compliance on the Arizona Strip. "And so instead of waiting until my full Social Security retirement age of 66, I retired about one year early, basically to save my soul.”