Working out of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Lander office back in the 1970s, biologist Richard Baldes helped engineer a remarkable turnaround for species nearly or completely gone from the Wind River Indian Reservation, like pronghorn and bighorn sheep.
Learning this week that the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency is planning to eliminate the longstanding office when its lease ends in March 2026, the octogenarian Fort Washakie resident was aghast.
“This would be devastating to the fish and wildlife program on this reservation,” Baldes told WyoFile. “When you think of the big picture, this reservation … is probably one of the most important fish and wildlife chunks of ground in the United States.”
The whole purpose of the Lander Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office is to help steward habitat on the 2.2-million-acre Wind River Reservation, and the wildlife that depends upon it. It’s proclaimed right on the office’s homepage: From 2000 to 2022, the Lander office’s staff collaborated with the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes to restore 54,236 acres of sage-steppe, 1,721 acres of wetland and 26 miles of river, the website boasts.
It’s unclear if those historic successes were considered when the agency’s Lander office was added to the General Services Administration list of 2 million square feet of Department of the Interior office space that’s being shuttered across the country. Officials at the Fish and Wildlife Service’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. declined to comment.
“Nothing to share at this time,” Acting Chief of Public Affairs Laury Marshall wrote WyoFile in an email.
Fish and Wildlife’s Lander office isn’t the only Interior Department facility in Wyoming included on the General Services Administration list. Also in line to be eliminated is the U.S. Geological Survey’s Water Science Center in Cheyenne, which houses 17 full-time employees. It’s set to go sooner, with the facility’s lease up at the end of August.
What else?
The list of 164 Department of Interior offices slated for elimination was shared by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., a member of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, who blasted the planned closures in a press release.
“Shuttering these physical locations goes hand in glove with DOGE’s ‘destroy the government’ approach,” Huffman said in a statement, “and it will make their illegal cuts even more challenging to reverse.”
Soon-to-be-terminated building leases came up during a Wednesday roundtable organized by three U.S. senators, who spoke with former federal workers and a small business owner about Trump administration cuts to public lands management.
National Park Service managers learned this week of plans to shutter 34 offices that house eight visitor centers, law enforcement offices and other services nationwide. None of those planned closures are located in Wyoming.
The surprise termination of building leases comes as park managers already are grappling with hiring freezes, employee firings and employee buy-outs, said former Glacier National Park Superintendent Jeff Mow during Wednesday’s roundtable.
“Every day, there seems to be something new to adjust and adapt to,” Mow said, describing superintendents as “having to pick up the pieces from so many things in motion.”
“They’re navigating staffing impacts around the buyout, the indiscriminate firings of probationary employees, overcoming the delays in seasonal hiring, which are ongoing now,” Mow added. “In the last two days, the surprise termination of building leases — very much a surprise to many managers — and now waiting to hear the impacts of the upcoming reduction in force.”
The “ripple effect” of so much chaos and uncertainty is “palpable,” he said, for national park staff, their organizational partners and even nearby gateway communities.
Outside of the Interior Department, a handful of other federal facilities in Wyoming are on the Trump administration’s chopping block.
The Dick Cheney Federal Building in downtown Casper had been “designated for disposal” on a General Services Administration website page that has since been removed, Oil City News reported on Thursday. The 116,799-square-foot building’s four stories provide office space for roughly 20 federal agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service, the Casper-based news outlet reported.
More Wyoming leases being nixed
Several more non-Interior Department federal building leases in Wyoming are in line to be eliminated. According to DOGE.gov/savings, they include the Mine Safety Health Administration Office in Green River. In an interview with Wyoming Public Radio, Green River trona miner and local union president Marshal Cummings condemned the planned closure of the 2,297-square-foot facility.
“Just like the language they use to identify the spending being reckless and wasteful, this is reckless and irresponsible,” Cummings told WPR. “Say there is a disaster, and [the Mine Safety Health Administration] needs to be there right now. That’s what the field office is there for.”
The 4,140-square-foot U.S. Attorney’s Office in Lander and the 4,131-square-foot Social Security Administration facility in Rock Springs are also in line to go, according to the Department of Government Efficiency. The last Wyoming facility known to be on Musk and Trump’s list of cuts is the 2,311-square-foot Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration office in Cheyenne.
Altogether, the termination of five federal government leases in Wyoming will save taxpayers roughly $451,000 annually, according to DOGE. That figure doesn’t account for any defrayed costs from the potential elimination of the Lander Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office and Dick Cheney Federal Building, neither of which is included on the DOGE webpage.
Wyoming’s congressional delegation has lauded Musk’s cost-saving efforts, claimed to be $105 billion to date, though the accounting has been riddled with errors so far, the New York Times has reported.
The day that an untold number of Wyoming residents were fired by the federal government, U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis spoke glowingly to the Wyoming House of Representatives about the change of administration, which was ushering in a “new golden age.”
“If you’re watching network television, you’re not seeing and hearing what Elon Musk is actually doing to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse,” Lummis told state lawmakers, who applauded.
But the senator has simultaneously advocated to ease the impacts of DOGE cuts on the Equality State, according to a statement from Lummis’ office.
“Senator Lummis is sympathetic to Wyoming communities affected by proposed cuts and has made sure the administration understands how important it is [that] our national parks and federal lands are properly staffed,” a spokesperson said in a text message. “Lummis will continue to weigh in with the White House, Departments of Interior, Agriculture, EPA and others, to make sure Wyoming’s interests are advanced while the President fulfills the campaign promises he made to the American people.”
Implications hard to call
At the U.S. Geological Survey office in Cheyenne, 17 federal employees who study hydrology, streamflow and an array of other water-related sciences don’t know what they’re going to do come September when their building is supposed to be vacated. Terminating the lease, according to DOGE, will save $183,415 a year.
One federal employee who’s familiar with the office’s plight said that USGS staffers intend to make the best of a difficult situation.
“The termination, from GSA, of the lease of this building does not mean that the functions of this office or our agency will cease in Cheyenne,” the federal worker told WyoFile. “What it means is we will have to find another place to locate that fits within the parameters of what the new leasing requirements will be.”
WyoFile granted the worker anonymity because of the potential for retaliation. An inquiry to the USGS’s regional office in Denver for information yielded no response.
Another possibility, according to the source, is that USGS staffers would scatter, and relocate their workspaces to other federal facilities in Cheyenne or to the Water Science Center’s other offices, which include Casper, Riverton and four locations in Montana.
It’s equally unclear what Fish and Wildlife Service employees who are losing their office in Lander will do. Five full-time staffers work out of the office, according to Steve Stoinski, a retired Fish and Wildlife law enforcement officer.
The Lander lease cost was not listed in the spreadsheet posted by Huffman, the California representative. But Stoinski characterized the lease as “pretty expensive,” and said there’s been a discussion about moving out of the office for years.
“It’s not surprising that they want to get rid of the office space, especially where GSA is getting gouged,” Stoinski told WyoFile. “I think it would be prudent if we renegotiated the lease agreement.”
If the outcome is that the remaining Fish and Wildlife Service staffers scatter, it’ll hurt the agency’s operations in west-central Wyoming, he said.
“When I needed help, they were there,” Stoinski said. “If I needed an ATV to cruise a power line looking for dead eagles and mine was broken, I always had [a colleague’s] to use.”
Baldes, the retired biologist, was the person who launched the Lander Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office. As long ago as 1982, he said, there were efforts within the federal government to close the office.
Baldes and other parties advocated to keep it open — and they succeeded.
“Only because of support from the tribes,” he told WyoFile. “They got Wyoming congressional support. And the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at the time was supporting this office, and the National Wildlife Federation.”
In the years and decades that followed, the Baldes-led Lander Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office was instrumental in developing and helping to enforce a tribal game code. It worked, and today, the Wind River Indian Reservation is actively managed and full of native ungulates and large carnivores that were scarce or absent during much of the 20th century.
WyoFile Collaborations Editor Rebecca Huntington contributed to this story.
Correction: This story was updated to remove a reference to a federal employee who was terminated. —Ed.
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