The release by congressional Democrats of a list of federal offices - these including only those within the Department of Interior - may be swept under the radar, just another piece of the news from Washington. But it deserves more attention than that.
Those two million square feet of office space in 164 buildings amount to quite a lot of sudden closure, all set for June 30. Three of the offices are in Idaho, a Bureau of Indian Affairs building at Lapwai, an Office of the Solicitor location in Boise, and the Bureau of Reclamation office on Curtis Road in Boise.
The House Democrats pointed out that “The impact on Bureau of Indian Affairs offices will be especially devastating. These offices are already underfunded, understaffed, and stretched beyond capacity, struggling to meet the needs of Tribal communities who face systemic barriers to federal resources. Closing these offices will further erode services like public safety, economic development, education, and housing assistance—services that Tribal Nations rely on for their well-being and self-determination.”
But maybe because I have a little more of a link to the Bureau of Reclamation building - I worked across the street from it at the old Idaho Statesman office, and I’ve been in it a number of times - that one may have hit me more directly.
The idea of a closure of a federal building or two - they have lots and lots of them, right? - or the office itself may not register with quite a few people. But reality is that those offices do things. They’re there for a reason. And if one day they simply vanish, that will matter.
Southern Idaho has a rich agricultural base and a substantial and growing population in large part because of the Bureau of Reclamation, which for a century and more (sometimes under other names) the massive dam, reservoir and other projects that provide water to the area. If the Bureau of Reclamation did not exist, neither would be Magic Valley as we know it. It would instead be mostly unoccupied desert country, as it was during the Oregon Trail days.
But it’s not just history. Idaho is still heavily reliant on water management. A former BuRec staffer suggested, after hearing about the prospective closure of the Boise office, “this smackdown would hit the irrigation and water districts throughout the state with some adverse force. The bureau is a vehicle by which the districts are still somewhat subsidized by the Federal government through water and facilities management and expertise.”
Boise happens to the regional Columbia River management office, and the former staffer asked, “If they shut down C-PNRO, where would the remaining and necessary administrative staff be located? Denver? Washington DC? Yakima? Grand Coulee?”
At a time when the president seems to have designs on Canadian water - as improbable as that sounds and is - closing the office most directly involved with managing Columbia River water coming from Canada would be a serious problem.
BuRec is a bureaucracy, of course, which means it generates massive amounts of paperwork, which for most people may not seem like much of an issue. It is, as anyone involved with water rights and engineering can tell you. The staffer: “At the office, there is maintained a large amount of legal paperwork -- such as water contracts, title transfers, facility maintenance contracts, etc. -- plus a large number of reports, maintenance files, etc. that only a bureaucracy can/does maintain until they are needed.”
And not only people in the agency need those records: So do state and local governments, water districts, canal companies, water users (agricultural and otherwise), attorneys and many more. The loss of those records could quickly throw Idaho’s (and the region’s) water management into chaos.
These points only scratch the surface of the problems associated with a rapid shutdown of the Boise Bureau of Reclamation office. The full range of impacts might need a book rather than a column to enumerate.
That’s one office among 168 in the recent round for closures; and that round may be be only one among several or many. And that’s just the Department of Interior; multiply all that by two dozen or probably more if you talk about federal office closures across the country. The effects already have started to hit in many places in the Northwest; the Forest Service may be the most prominent so far, but it is far from alone.
Donald Trump always has been President Chaos. We’re now about to see, writ large, what the impact of that will be.