Reclamation starts admin leaves early

Bureau of Reclamation employees at Grand Coulee Dam who had accepted the “fork in the road” offer of deferred retirement, expecting to stop working on March 7, instead got a memo Monday morning telling them to clear out by the end of the day, March 3.

No reason was given for the rush, but the emailed instructions from Boise, the Columbia Pacific Northwest Region headquarters, had an air of resignation about it:

“Big change in the DRP rules as of 10:37am this morning,” the email began, explaining that all Deferred Resignation Program participants had to “offboard” by COB (close of business) that day.

Human Resources folks would start that process, it said, “as soon as I hit send on this email.”

“Apologies for this last-minute change,” the sender added. “Par for the course!”

That course changed five days after the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget told all federal agencies they had until March 13 to submit detailed plans for a significant reduction in force — layoffs. And just three days after Congressional Democrats released a list of office building leases for the Department of Interior the government’s General Services Administration is planning to stop.

Interior includes Reclamation, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and more, and Boise’s Reclamation office is on the list with a “planned lease termination date” of June 30, 2025.

We noted no local offices on that list, but 164 others are.

The lease termination list released Friday includes 25 BIA offices, more than a quarter of the total. It includes 22 NPS offices — ranger district offices, historic buildings and museum spaces.

Some 2 million square feet of DOI office space will be shuttered, according to House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.)

“The federal government exists to serve the people—not abandon them,” Huffman said in a press release. “But Trump and Musk are taking a wrecking ball to our country — slashing staff, cutting vital funding, and creating widespread chaos and economic devastation. “Shuttering these physical locations goes hand in glove with DOGE’s ‘destroy the government’ approach,” he continued, “and it will make their illegal cuts even more challenging to reverse. The economic fallout will ripple across America, hitting small towns and cities where federal offices are many communities’ only lifelines.”