Government is too big. Bureaucrats send letters to businesses and families, not based on the law, but to scare them into bad business decisions. Now the EPA is cutting back its employees and offices. There will be more control over the ideological employees that runamuck.
“As part of a broader push by the administration to slash the federal government’s footprint, Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team has announced more than 700 lease terminations for offices across the federal government.
Those cancellations include dozens of offices used by energy and environmental agencies for employees including EPA scientists, National Park Service officials and energy regulators.
On top of canceled leases, the administration Tuesday released a list of more than 400 federal buildings “designated for disposal.” That list included massive buildings in downtown Washington — including the headquarters of the Energy and Labor departments — although the list was removed from the General Service Administration’s website by Wednesday morning without explanation.
The government bloat is killing America. Trump is giving us the pill to take back our government.
DOGE ditches environmental offices nationwide
By Robin Bravender, Heather Richards, Jennifer Yachnin, E&E Politico, 03/05/2025 https://www.eenews.net/articles/doge-ditches-environmental-offices-nationwide/
The moves are surprising federal employees, including some who learned about canceled leases from their landlords.
The Trump EPA in February celebrated renaming its new “Gulf of America Division,” stating that the Gulf will “help power our Great American Comeback” and that EPA is “ready to protect it.”
But that EPA office, based in Gulfport, Mississippi, is also on a list of offices whose leases the Trump administration’s DOGE operation has targeted for cancellation.
As part of a broader push by the administration to slash the federal government’s footprint, Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team has announced more than 700 lease terminations for offices across the federal government.
Those cancellations include dozens of offices used by energy and environmental agencies for employees including EPA scientists, National Park Service officials and energy regulators.
On top of canceled leases, the administration Tuesday released a list of more than 400 federal buildings “designated for disposal.” That list included massive buildings in downtown Washington — including the headquarters of the Energy and Labor departments — although the list was removed from the General Service Administration’s website by Wednesday morning without explanation.
At the Interior Department, Trump officials are looking at closing as many as 164 offices across the country, including 27 percent of all Bureau of Indian Affairs locations, according to a GSA list obtained and released by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.). Huffman’s list overlaps but does not perfectly align with DOGE’s published list.
“Not a single moment of thought has been put into the net effect of these lease terminations, including the employees who work and live there,” said Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service during the Obama administration, who reviewed both DOGE’s list and Huffman’s.
“These are leased spaces in rural and some urban communities across the country, putting federal workers near the people,” he said.
Trump’s early blitzkrieg on office space is raising questions about how many federal employees, including those far from Washington, are likely to face relocations or lose their jobs in the months to come. The push to shed office space comes as the Trump administration is also requiring federal employees, many of whom had remote working status under prior administrations, to return full time to federal offices.
The public announcements about canceled leases and building disposals are creating more uncertainty for federal workers already nervous about their job prospects as the administration eyes large-scale terminations at federal agencies.
The Trump team touts the moves as a boon for taxpayers. In a Feb. 26 post on the Musk-owned social media platform X, DOGE said it was saving between $100 million and $171 million in rent by canceling leases of spaces that were not being used to capacity or were sitting vacant.
“Still, plenty of available office space for the current workforce,” the post said.
Interior Department: 164 offices nationwide
The 60,000-strong Interior Department appears to face sweeping lease cancellations and shuttered offices in the next few years.
According to the list released by Huffman, which overlaps with some of the facilities already announced for cancellation by DOGE, more than 2 million square feet of Interior office spaces could be canceled in 2025 and 2026.
That includes 164 total offices. Notably the lease for Interior’s inspector general offices in Herndon, Virginia, currently staffed with roughly 100 employees, is proposed for cancellation as early as September of this year, according to Huffman’s list.
“The federal government exists to serve the people—not abandon them,” Huffman said in a statement. “The economic fallout will ripple across America, hitting small towns and cities where federal offices are many communities’ only lifelines.”
Interior nodded to its review of department facilities in an emailed statement but did not provide details of its leases to be canceled.
“The Department of the Interior and its bureaus are committed to upholding federal responsibilities to communities and tribes,” Interior spokesperson Elizabeth Peace said in the statement. “We are working with [the General Services Administration] to ensure facilities or alternative options will be available for the continued delivery of Interior services as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who has fired roughly 2,300 people in his department in recent weeks — while another 2,700 took Trump’s offer of deferred resignation — applauded the Trump effort to cut roughly $1 trillion in expenses in a recent interview with the conservative podcast Morning Wire.
National Park Service: A Seattle landmark, an Alabama visitors center
The National Park Service stands to lose 22 leases, according to DOGE’s list. The Huffman list includes 33 National Park Service facilities.
DOGE’s list includes an office in Flagstaff, Arizona, that houses natural resources staff that serve multiple parks and public lands, as well as the visitors center for the Little River Canyon National Preserve in northern Alabama. DOGE said the Little River Canyon lease costs $78,171 per year.
Two bizarre leases that could face cancellation, according to Huffman’s list, are the NPS leases for the Cadillac Hotel in Seattle, which is itself a national park. The hotel is the park service’s Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.
The logic behind the potential lease cancellations was not clear to Chuck Sams, who served as director of the National Park Service during the Biden administration.
“I don’t understand what their end game is,” he said.
Sams warned that closing offices on top of Trump’s mass layoffs is going to greatly reduce the experiences for people visiting national parks.
“It’s surprising because the National Park Service is generally bipartisan,” he said. “I never met a member of Congress that didn’t support their parks.”
Wisconsin’s only BIA office
DOGE is making sweeping cuts to the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices across the country, targeting 20 offices nationwide. The lease cancellations include the only BIA office in Wisconsin. There are 11 Native American tribes in that state.
Another office whose lease is being cut by DOGE is the BIA office in Toppenish, Washington. Situated on the Yakama Nation’s reservation, that office is also a hub for several other Pacific region tribes, including supporting the health program for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, said Sams, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla.
Sams said many BIA offices operate this way: located on a large tribal reservation but serving several nearby American Indian nations.
According to Huffman’s tally, one in every four BIA offices could be closed in the DOGE purge.
A former tribal official, who has deep experience working with the federal government, said the BIA could face expensive ramifications for closing offices if tribes take the Trump administration to court. Those costs may outweigh the savings of breaking leases for small office facilities in rural areas of the country, the former official said.
“The Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Indian Health Service are legally required to provide services to tribes and individuals on reservations,” said the former official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak by the legal firm they work for. “Closing these offices will make it hard, and in some cases impossible, for tribes and individuals to receive those services.”
In a statement, the BIA said it is committed to upholding its responsibilities to tribes.
“Indian Affairs offices remain open and continue to provide services,” the BIA said in an emailed statement. “The Department of the Interior is working with GSA to ensure facilities will be available for the continued delivery of BIA services.”
EPA: ‘Gulf of America,’ LA offices
DOGE has terminated office leases at seven EPA offices, according to a website listing cuts to government spending.
EPA’s canceled leases include offices in the Virgin Islands; Stanford, Connecticut; Los Angeles; Gulfport, Mississippi; Castle Rock, Colorado; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, according to the DOGE website.
EPA’s Gulfport office is the home of its recently renamed “Gulf of America Division.”
EPA declined to confirm the lease cancellations or provide further details about the data listed on the DOGE website. “EPA does not have further information to provide as we are still awaiting guidance from [the General Services Administration],” an EPA spokesperson said in an email.
In some cases, employees have heard about their offices’ canceled leases from their landlords before they were announced publicly, said a former Biden EPA official who was granted anonymity to relay conversations with career employees at the agency.
“If you’re shrinking these offices, you are basically cutting the ties that hold together environmental protection in our country,” said Matthew Tejada, who led EPA’s environmental justice efforts and now works at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Tejada noted that the Trump EPA has been publicly touting its response to the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles. “That would be severely hampered if you don’t have an LA office,” Tejada said.
USDA: Forest Service, conservation leases
DOGE includes a dozen Forest Service leases on its list of cancellations. Those include offices in Anchorage, Alaska; Fort Collins, Colorado; Tallahassee, Florida; and other locations around the country.
Another 36 leases for USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service made the DOGE list. That agency, housed inside the Agriculture Department, offers technical assistance to farmers and other landowners.
“Secretary Rollins fully supports President Trump’s directive to eliminate wasteful spending and ensure taxpayer dollars are used effectively,” a USDA spokesperson said in an email. “USDA is optimizing building capacity and consolidating underutilized offices to reduce inefficiencies while continuing to prioritize frontline services for farmers, ranchers, and producers.”
FERC: Outposts in Georgia, Indiana
Energy regulators could see their offices downsized, too. DOGE has cited lease cancellations at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission offices in Duluth, Georgia, where the commission has a regional office, and in Carmel, Indiana, where FERC has a satellite office.
“We are aware of the listing of those two offices on the website,” FERC spokesperson Celeste Miller said in an email. “In compliance with prior direction from the [the Office of Management and Budget], we are assessing our real estate expenses to ensure cost efficiency. Our goal, as always, is to maintain FERC’s critically essential missions and services and retain the employees necessary to perform those essential functions.”
DOE: A nuclear waste field office
An Energy Department office in Carlsbad, New Mexico, is on the DOGE list of lease terminations.
The department’s Carlsbad Field Office manages the nuclear waste disposal operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which DOE says is the nation’s only deep geologic repository for defense-related transuranic waste.
DOE did not respond to a request for comment about the plans for canceling that lease. The department also did not respond to requests for comment this week about the initial inclusion of DOE’s headquarters and offices in Germantown, Maryland, on the list of buildings slated for “disposal.”
NOAA: 19 leases on DOGE’s list
DOGE named 19 leases held by NOAA on its list of cancellations, including sites in Alaska, Florida, Hawaii and Vermont.
A NOAA lease in Key Largo, Florida, is among those listed as canceled on the website. NOAA’s Key Largo office is used by Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary staff. The protected waters off Key Largo are known for their elkhorn, star and brain corals.
NOAA did not respond to a request for comment about its lease terminations.
Bureau of Reclamation: Boise’s main office
The Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees dams, power plants and canals across 17 Western states is also slated to lose real estate, including a major facility in Boise, Idaho.
The list of leases to be terminated, published by Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee, includes five sites now utilized by Reclamation staff: the Columbia-Pacific Northwest Regional Office in Boise, Idaho; the Southern California Area Office in Temecula, California; the Western Colorado Area Office in Durango, Colorado; Trinity River Restoration Program Office in Weaverville, California; and theBend Field Office in Bend, Oregon.
The Boise office, a three-story brick building that sits on a 4.66-acre lot, appears to be the largest potential loss to Reclamation. The site is home to the Columbia–Pacific Northwest region’s headquarters, supported by nearly a dozen smaller offices across Idaho, Montana, Washington and Oregon. That office is responsible for oversight of 72 dams and 54 reservoirs.
A Reclamation spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about how many employees could be affected by the potential June 2025 lease termination, or where they would be relocated, instead referring to the general Interior statement.
According to data maintained by OPM, Reclamation had 466 employees in Idaho in September 2024, the most recent data available.
Other offices that could be affected included the Southern California Area offices and Western Colorado Area offices, both of which list at least 10 employees in each location on their websites.
Cut the waste!