The Department of Interior, which oversees BLM, announced the move in letters to key congressional committees. The decision will save taxpayers US$50 million on costs like real estate, salaries and travel expenses and will locate BLM officials closer to the areas they serve, officials said.

BLM is charged with overseeing programs on vast swathes of public lands including grazing, oil and gas drilling and recreation.

Most BLM land is in the western U.S. and includes about 155 million acres of grazing land and rangeland in 14 states, among them Montana, North Dakota, Idaho, Washington and Alaska. U.S. cattle and sheep producers hold almost 18,000 grazing permits and leases on BLM-managed public lands.

The BLM will move 27 Washington-based staff to a new headquarters in Grand Junction, about 390 km west of Denver, and an additional 222 positions will be relocated to other agency offices in the U.S. west close to where their work is needed.

For instance, staff working on the agency’s timber program would move to Oregon, and those working on rangelands and grazing would move to Idaho.

Conservation groups were quick to say the move amounted to a dismantling of the agency by moving it away from the place where decisions are made. Such groups have been critical of the Trump administration’s efforts to open up more public lands to oil and gas drilling and to loosen environmental policies aimed at protecting federal lands.

In a statement, Center for Western Priorities executive director Jennifer Rokala called the move “another cynical attempt to drain the Interior Department of expertise and career leadership. Our public lands deserve an agency that is effectively co-ordinating with the Interior Department more broadly, and with Congress.”

On a conference call with reporters, BLM officials said such critics lacked an understanding of how the agency’s business is conducted.

“Most of the work of the bureau gets done at the state and local level,” said Joe Balash, Interior’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management.

Experienced BLM employees who choose to relocate will be able to mentor a new generation of BLM staff, he added.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nichola Groom. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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The armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in remote southeast Oregon followed a judge’s ruling sending Dwight Hammond and his son Steven back to prison to serve longer terms after their initial release from shorter sentences. Police shot one of the occupiers dead during the 41-day midwinter protest.

The takeover was another flare-up in a decades-old conflict over federal control of millions of acres of public land in the western U.S. In Oregon, about half of all land is controlled by the federal government.

The leaders of the Malheur standoff, including activists Ammon and Ryan Bundy, were cleared of federal charges for their role in the protest in October 2016.

Ammon Bundy called the pardon “long overdue.”

“We went up there to prevent the atrocity from happening to begin with, and if people would have listened to us, the Hammonds wouldn’t have to have gone through this suffering,” Bundy said in a telephone interview.

Dwight Hammond, 76, and Steven, 49, were convicted in 2012 for setting a fire that spread onto public land after years of disputes with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

The Hammonds said they were using standard brush-control and land-management techniques, but the government said in at least one instance they were trying to hide evidence of their slaughtering a herd of deer.

Some conservation groups were dismayed at the cattle ranchers’ pardon.

Jennifer Rokala, the executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, called the Hammonds “lawless extremists.”

“Pardoning the Hammonds sends a dangerous message to America’s park rangers, wildland firefighters, law enforcement officers, and public lands managers,” Rokala said in a statement.

The two were initially sentenced to less than the legal minimum five-year prison sentence by a judge who thought the minimum too harsh and later released, the father after three months and the son after a year.

After the government’s appeal in 2016, a different federal judge ordered the pair back to prison to serve the full five years, sparking protests and the refuge occupation.

In a statement on Tuesday, the White House said the decision was “unjust” and that the fire had burned only “a small portion” of public land.

“The evidence at trial regarding the Hammonds’ responsibility for the fire was conflicting, and the jury acquitted them on most of the charges,” the statement said.

Trump has often used his pardon power to benefit people he sees as targeted by his political opponents.

As of 2018, Dwight had served about three years in prison and Steven had served four, according to the White House.

Alan Schroeder, a lawyer for the Hammond family, said the two men could get out of prison before the day was over.

“It’s very welcome news, and the family is greatly humbled by the fact that President Trump has looked so kindly on a family in rural Burns, Oregon, of all places,” he said in a telephone interview.

Ammon Bundy and his father Cliven also orchestrated a 2014 standoff in Nevada between scores of armed ranchers and their supporters and law enforcement agents over cattle grazing rights.

— Reporting for Reuters by Gina Cherelus and Jonathan Allen in New York.

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U.S. District Judge Gloria Navarro dismissed the case “with prejudice,” meaning that rancher Cliven Bundy, two of his sons and a militia member will not face another trial. Navarro had declared a mistrial last month.

Navarro’s decision was a rebuke to prosecutors in the politically charged case, which arose from Bundy’s grazing of cattle on federal land without paying fees for two decades. His defiance galvanized right-wing militia groups challenging U.S. government authority over vast tracts of public land.

Bundy emerged from the courthouse to cheers from about 100 supporters and said he still did not recognize federal authority over the land where he grazed his herds.

“They stuck the guns down our throats and that’s definitely not what our Founding Fathers meant to happen in America,” the 71-year-old rancher said, his wife, Carol, at his side.

Navarro told a packed Las Vegas courtroom that prosecutors made “several misrepresentations to the defense and to the court” that amounted to misconduct and prevented a fair trial for Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan and militia member Ryan Payne.

She said more than 1,000 pages of Federal Bureau of Investigation memos were kept from the defense until well past an October deadline. The agency failed in its duty despite years of investigations and two years of trial preparation, she said.

Prosecutors appeared stunned after the judge’s decision, and Bundy family members wept in the spectators’ section.

The 2014 revolt at the heart of the trial was sparked by a court-ordered roundup of Bundy’s cattle by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, after the rancher had refused to pay federal grazing fees.

Hundreds of supporters, many of them armed, rallied at his ranch in a show of force to demand the return of his impounded livestock. Police and federal agents retreated rather than risk bloodshed and no shots were fired.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said prosecutors had bungled the case and let the Bundys succeed in breaking the law.

“The failure of this case will only embolden this violent and racist anti-government movement that wants to take over our public lands,” he said.

— John Smith is a freelance journalist reporting for Reuters from Las Vegas; writing by Ian Simpson.

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The request from nine organizations in a letter sent on Monday to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has the potential to increase tensions in the debate over federal control over vast areas in the West.

The BLM had previously seized Bundy’s cattle for illegally grazing on federal land. However, it backed down in 2014, releasing the livestock to end a standoff with hundreds of armed protesters who came to support the rancher in the Nevada desert.

With Bundy currently jailed in Nevada on charges stemming from the standoff, his relatives have allowed hundreds of cattle to graze on public land around the family’s ranch, said Rob Mrowka, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that sent the letter.

The groups are asking the BLM to seize the cattle from the Bundy family, whose ranch is less than 130 km northeast of Las Vegas, and send the animals to farms or sell them for slaughter.

“We recognize that the cattle roundup of 2014 failed due to real threats to agency personnel,” Travis Bruner, executive director of Western Watersheds Project, one of the groups that signed the letter, said in a statement.

“Those ‘threats’ are now mostly imprisoned and awaiting trial, but the crimes against desert tortoise continue,” Bruner said.

BLM spokesman Ronald Evenson said in a statement, “Mr. Bundy’s cattle continue to be in trespass.”

But Evenson said the agency has no immediate plans to round them up, because it continues to work with the U.S. Department of Justice on legal cases against Bundy and others.

Bundy, 70, whose sons led an armed occupation earlier this year at a wildlife refuge in Oregon, was arrested in February at the Portland airport.

He has been indicted on charges that included conspiracy and assault on a law enforcement officer.

Bundy’s sons, Ammon and Ryan, were indicted in connection with the Oregon occupation and face charges in the Nevada standoff. The family is popular with anti-government groups.

Bundy on Tuesday sued President Barack Obama, U.S. Senator Harry Reid and the judge in his criminal case, accusing them of violating his constitutional rights.

— Reporting for Reuters by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles.

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The occupation, which began on Saturday, followed a march in Burns, a small city about 80 km north of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, in support of Dwight Hammond Jr. and his son, Steven Hammond.

Hammond and his son, convicted in 2012 of setting fires that spread to public land, traveled to Los Angeles on Sunday evening to turn themselves in to federal authorities, according to their lawyer W. Alan Schroeder. They were to be sent to back to prison after federal prosecutors won an appeal that resulted in their resentencing to longer terms.

Their ranch borders on the southern edge of the refuge, a bird sanctuary in the arid high desert in the eastern part of the state, about 490 km southeast of Portland.

The protest was being led by Ammon Bundy, the son of Cliven Bundy, owner of a ranch in Nevada where his family staged an armed protest against the Bureau of Land Management in April 2014. The agency sought to seize Bundy’s cattle after he refused to pay grazing fees. Federal agents finally backed down, citing safety concerns, and returned hundreds of cattle to Bundy.

Federal and state authorities have not said how they planned to respond to the occupation of the refuge’s headquarters in Princeton, Oregon.

It involved an unknown number of people, Jason Holm, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, said in a statement. No employees were in the building.

Holm described the occupation as a break-in, although federal justice and Interior Department officials contacted later declined to say whether any crimes were committed in the occupation.

Wildlife refuge buildings were closed over the holiday weekend. As of Sunday night, the FWS website for Malheur said the refuge is closed until further notice, citing the occupation at the facility.

In an interview posted on Facebook, Bundy said the occupation was in reaction to the government intrusion into the rights of private-property owners.

“It is the people’s facility, owned by the people,” Bundy said. “It has been provided for us to be able to come together and unite and make a hard stand against this overreach — this taking of the people’s land and resources.”

Bundy told CNN some of the occupiers were armed.

The Hammonds distanced themselves last month from the Bundys, according to a letter Schroeder, wrote to the county sheriff on Dec. 11.

“I write to clarify that neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone with his group/organization speak for the Hammond family, Dwight Hammond or Steven Hammond,” Schroeder wrote in the letter, which was seen by Reuters.

The incident is part of a decades-old conflict between ranchers and the federal government over Washington’s management of hundreds of thousands of rangeland. Critics of the federal government say it often oversteps its authority and exercises arbitrary power over land use without sufficient accountability.

‘Alternative motives’

Bundy told a news conference on Sunday he had yet to communicate with any law enforcement officials. He said occupiers planned no violence unless that was justified by actions taken against the occupants. He would not say how many people were inside the headquarters.

He encouraged anyone opposed to overreach by the government in the management of federal lands to join the occupation at the refuge.

“For those that understand what is going on, and those who want to and feel a need to stand, we’re asking them to come,” he said. “We have a facility that we can house them in.”

“We will continue to monitor the situation for additional developments,” Holm said in the statement. He did not immediately return a phone call seeking further details. No one answered a call to the phone number of the refuge.

Harney County Sheriff Dave Ward was critical of the protesters and their motives, and advised local residents to stay away from the refuge.

“These men came to Harney County claiming to be part of militia groups supporting local ranchers, when in reality these men had alternative motives to attempt to overthrow the county and federal government in hopes to spark a movement across the United States.”

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, encompassing 292 square miles, was established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt as a breeding ground for greater sandhill cranes and other native birds. The headquarters compound includes a visitor centre, a museum and the refuge office.

— Jim Urquhart is a Reuters reporter and photographer. Reporting for Reuters by Kevin Murphy in Kansas City; additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee and Mark Hosenball in Washington. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

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