fwiw I think there are two separate questions here: Will BLM headquarters nominally remain in Grand Junction? (maybe) and Will the agency’s de facto senior leadership once again be located in Washington? (almost certainly yes) https://coloradosun.com/2021/01/21/grand-junction-fights-keep-bureau-of-land-management-headquarters/

you’re misunderstanding the issue if you’re starting from the premise that BLM HQ was relocated to Colorado, because that’s not what happened. What happened was that BLM HQ was almost entirely dismantled under the pretext of relocation

the entire goal of the “relocation” was to force out hundreds of senior staffers responsible for critical land-management processes like environmental reviews, whom extractive industries wanted gone but who were subject to civil service protections

You can really see the corner that Colorado Dems have backed themselves into by supporting the “relocation,” even though they had no excuse for not understanding what the Trump administration’s intent was https://twitter.com/caitlynkim/status/1353000859030986753

In Bennet and Hick’s telling, moving BLM HQ to Grand Junction was a great idea that was betrayed at the last minute by the Trump admin’s lack of “follow through,” moving only a few dozen employees there rather than hundreds. They want the GJ HQ to be more than “symbolic.”

But moving hundreds of senior BLM employees to Grand Junction while maintaining the agency’s oversight capacity was always *impossible* — and it was the very impossibility that appealed to the Trump admin, as a pretext for destroying a lot of that oversight.

Hundreds of senior civil servants with decades of experience navigating complex regulatory regimes like NEPA and FLMPA, who could not be fired by law, were given a “choice” between uprooting their lives to move to GJ (or elsewhere in the West) and being forced out of the agency.

Unless you’ve somehow gotten those hundreds of folks so desperately addicted to Palisade peaches that they’ve changed their mind, or you want to spend the next decade building the BLM’s senior leadership back up from scratch, a non-symbolic BLM HQ in GJ is pure fantasy.