Wyoming BLM staff, key to Trump’s ‘energy dominance,’ largely spared by Musk’s DOGE

The Trump administration’s purge of “probationary”-status employees has not, to date, been felt as acutely within the Bureau of Land Management as it has in some other federal agencies that manage land and wildlife within Wyoming.  

As of Wednesday, the federal agency continued to withhold layoff numbers from the public. An inquiry to BLM-Wyoming’s office in Cheyenne was routed to the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

“We do not have a comment on personnel matters, however, BLM reaffirms its unwavering commitment to both the American public and the lands we protect,” a spokesperson for the BLM’s national office wrote in an emailed statement. 

Although official channels are yielding no information about the status of an agency that manages over 18 million surface acres in Wyoming — nearly 30% of its land mass — several of BLM’s Wyoming employees told WyoFile that mandatory layoffs have not hit the bureau especially hard so far. 

“Just yesterday, I heard it was only six,” one of the federal agency’s Wyoming workers told WyoFile on Thursday. “Compared to the Forest Service, it’s nothing.” 

WyoFile is granting the person anonymity because of the potential for retaliation. 

Losing six positions would be a drop in BLM-Wyoming’s employee bucket — just 1% to 2% of its approximately 400 permanent full-time employees across the state. In addition to working out of the office’s Cheyenne headquarters, those employees are based all across the state’s 10 field offices. 

Notably, that figure does not include bureau staffers who may have taken the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-branded “Fork in the Road” resignation offer. Thousands of federal workers in Wyoming were presented with the offer, which promised pay and benefits through the end of September in exchange for voluntarily giving up their jobs. 

Subsequently, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, known by its acronym, DOGE, began mass firings that cut across divisions of the federal government. Nationally, as many as 2,300 U.S. Interior Department employees — including 800 Bureau of Land Management staffers — were let go, according to reporting by Reuters.  

Although BLM-Wyoming employees haven’t been given an explanation for why they’ve been spared relative to other federal land managers, many believe it is because of the trove of energy and mineral resources contained within the bureau’s property in the Equality State. Those holdings include, for example, behemoth natural gas fields like the Pinedale Anticline and Jonah fields and the Powder River Basin’s bountiful coal deposits. 

“The day that we thought we were going to get fired — on Friday, Valentine’s Day — we got the call from our supervisor that we were not going to be [fired],” said a different BLM-Wyoming employee whom WyoFile also granted anonymity. “We didn’t know why. But I was like, ‘it’s because oil and gas, for sure.’ That’s just an assumption I have.” 

Mary Jo Rugwell, a retiree who served as BLM-Wyoming’s state director under the first Trump administration, agreed with the premise. 

“If one of your primary goals is to unleash American energy, reducing BLM employees isn’t going to help,” Rugwell said. “Because they have to do the work.” 

One of President Donald Trump’s many actions during the first six weeks of his second term was the “unleashing American energy” executive order. Maximizing energy production on federal land requires significant planning and preparatory work to comply with federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. To punch a new energy-producing project through, many disciplines of specialists are required, said Rugwell, who chairs the BLM advocacy group the Public Lands Foundation. 

“It’s not just engineers, petroleum engineers and petroleum technicians that you need to get that work done,” she said. “You also need archaeologists, you need wildlife biologists, you need people that are engaged in planning. You need the entire team to get that work done, because we have to follow the law.” 

Changes to the BLM-Wyoming’s workforce to date have not been of concern to the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, Communications Director Ryan McConnaughey told WyoFile. 

“In regards to staffing at BLM, we have not heard anything specific at this point,” McConnaughey said. “We’re confident that the administration understands that the BLM, through its federal leasing program, is the only other revenue-generating department besides the IRS, and that it will make decisions appropriately.”

The Petroleum Association of Wyoming has not lobbied in favor of maintaining the BLM’s workforce, he said. 

Although mandatory BLM-Wyoming job losses so far have been slim, turmoil from the Trump administration’s actions and intimidation tactics have rattled many in the workforce, its employees have reported to WyoFile. 

“Our NEPA planners are starting to get kind of nervous,” one of the Wyoming staffers said. “They don’t know what [the administration change] means for NEPA or their job.” 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration published an interim final rule in the Federal Register that gives federal agencies more discretion in how to implement the nation’s bedrock environmental planning policy.

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A different BLM-Wyoming employee described the Trump administration’s decision to spare their own agency, while deeply cutting others, as poorly planned and “weird.” The hard-hit Forest Service, the worker pointed out, also supports extractive industries and other economic drivers. 

“It’s like a fat person saying, ‘I need to lose weight,’” the federal government employee told WyoFile. “And in order to lose weight, they just start chopping their arms and legs off. It makes no sense. They just gut one agency and leave the other one.”