Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

16. Department of the Interior · Minor

Put all BLM law enforcement officers in a law enforcement chain of command

Not started

527 16. Department of the Interior

“One, however, remained undone: placing all BLM law enforcement officers (LEOs), that is, its 212 Law Enforcement Rangers and 76 Special Agents, in an exclusively law enforcement chain of command. … They should report to a professional, expert, and knowledgeable chain of command.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No change to BLM's law-enforcement chain of command was found, and the negative is now taken from the directives library the earlier pass could not reach rather than from the Secretary's Orders alone. **BLM reissued most of its law-enforcement policy inside the window and changed nothing about who its officers report to.** Eight of the eleven MS-9260 Law Enforcement General Orders on BLM's manuals index were republished in 2026: Critical Incident Peer Support, Use of Force, Firearms, Vehicles, Officer Involved Shooting, Operational Medical Unit and Electronic Control Devices, plus General Order 22, Law Enforcement Operations, signed 2026-08-17 by the Director of BLM's Office of Law Enforcement and Security. GO 22 is the one that would carry a reporting change, and its own transmittal sheet answers the question in a line: under "Delegations of Authority Updated" it says **"None"**. Its scope clause reaches "all BLM LEOs and their supervisors" without saying who those supervisors are, and its seven pages are operations policy — pursuits, ride-alongs, records — not organization. The organization manuals are older still: MS-1201, Organization Management, is the 2003 edition, unrevised. BLM's Instruction Memorandum index for FY 2025 and FY 2026 lists no law-enforcement directive of any kind. The rest of the earlier negative stands: the Secretary's Orders series through SO 3453 contains one law-enforcement realignment, SO 3440 (2025-08-25), which moves supervision of the Chief of the United States Park Police to the Secretary or his designee and leaves BLM alone; no Federal Register document in the window addresses BLM law-enforcement supervision; and BLM's FY2027 justification treats Resource Protection and Law Enforcement as a budget subactivity — $28.6 million, 95 FTE — without proposing a reporting change. Interior's only BLM-adjacent law-enforcement announcement in the window is a pay raise (2026-01-09).

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The ask is an organizational one: take BLM’s 212 rangers and 76 special agents out of the state- and district-manager chain and put them under a law-enforcement chain instead. Interior has reorganized one police force in the window — the U.S. Park Police — and not this one.

  • BLM’s directives library, read 2026-09-06. The manuals index (blm.gov/manuals) and BLM’s handbook, instruction-memorandum and information-bulletin pages open. The manuals index links each General Order’s PDF directly, and the year-and-month segment in those links dates the reissue; the PDFs carry a release number, a signature block and a signing date on the transmittal sheet, so they are dated Evidence and not undated pages.
  • Two of the eleven General Order links do not lead to public documents, and are recorded so the negative says how far it reaches: GO 46 (Uncrewed Aircraft Systems) leads to a Microsoft sign-in page, and GO 39 (Electronic Control Device) to BLM’s internal editing site, which does not resolve at all. Both are equipment orders, not organization orders, and neither could change a reporting chain.
  • BLM’s own site search, which runs on search.usa.gov, answered the Chaco search on #1472 and then stopped returning results under repeated queries. The manuals index is what this negative rests on.
Action
restore
Object
Exclusive law enforcement chain of command for BLM law enforcement officers
ID
1481