USGS Faces Potential Office Closures

The future of dozens of U.S. Geological Survey facilities across the country has been called into question after House Natural Resources Committee Democrats published a list of 34 places where the Trump administration reportedly plans to close USGS offices.

The list includes the sites of multiple state water science centers, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, and one of the sites of the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which houses equipment to monitor possible eruptions.

A statement from House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-CA), which criticized the Trump administration’s plan, said that “many USGS locations need to be field-based to do important monitoring for things like earthquake and volcanic activity. They also operate stream gauges that provide critical flood warnings for cities and towns near rivers.”

“Shuttering USGS offices is a short-sighted move that will severely weaken our nation’s ability to monitor natural hazards, manage water resources, and understand how our environment is changing,” said Kristen Averyt, executive vice president for science at the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization that represents Earth scientists, in an emailed statement. “This decision would undermine decades of scientific infrastructure that directly serve the American public and puts both lives and livelihoods at risk.”

Beyond the list published by committee Democrats, which is based on information obtained from the General Services Administration, the Department of Government Efficiency hosts a real estate savings list on its website that includes more than 30 USGS building leases that DOGE claims to have terminated. Separately, GSA published but later removed a list of several hundred federal properties, including some USGS facilities, for potential sale. The USGS properties that appear on the lists provided by the Natural Resources Committee Democrats, GSA, and DOGE do not perfectly align.

The DOGE list, for example, claims to have terminated a lease worth $1.8 million for a 20,000-square-foot space at USGS’s Menlo Park campus in California, a site that is not included on the committee Democrats’ list and did not appear on the GSA list. USGS began moving out of its Menlo Park campus to Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, in 2019 and appears to have largely vacated the site. GSA plans to hold a public auction to sell the Menlo Park campus on April 15, with minimum bids starting at $85 million. The agency has previously tried to sell the campus without success.

At the time of publication, USGS had not responded to a request for comment on the proposed lease terminations. However, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, which oversees USGS, said the department is “committed to fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency, and governmental accountability” and is “eliminating wasteful programs, cutting unnecessary costs, and ensuring every dollar serves a clear purpose.”

USGS is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, and employs around 10,000 scientists, technicians, and support staff who work at hundreds of locations across the U.S. The agency provides scientific information to support the management of water, energy, mineral, ecosystem, and land resources. This work includes monitoring, forecasting, and issuing warnings related to wildfires, earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, and floods.

The exact number of USGS employees affected by recent layoffs at the agency is unclear. Sources who spoke to FYI under the condition of anonymity — as they were not authorized to speak publicly — suggested at least 200 probationary employees were fired in February. They also estimated that a couple hundred more employees accepted the deferred resignation offer made in the “fork in the road” email sent by the Office of Personnel Management to all federal employees in January. Internal USGS communications viewed by FYI suggest the agency has hired back some of the probationary employees it dismissed. A Department of the Interior spokesperson declined to verify how many USGS employees have been affected by recent staff cuts.

With fieldwork season fast approaching, some USGS staff have shared online that travel restrictions and spending freezes will impede their work in the coming months. The nonprofit organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, known as PEER, issued a press release last week stating the Trump administration imposed a $1 limit on credit card spending across the entire Department of the Interior at the end of February, with limited exceptions. The limit has reportedly been applied to thousands of credit cards across the federal government, and a USGS employee confirmed to FYI that their credit card purchase limit has been capped at $1.

“It looks like the Trump administration is monkeywrenching government by needlessly disrupting even basic operations,” said Rocky Mountain PEER Director Chandra Rosenthal in the statement. “The individual Interior agencies, such as the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, have been taken by surprise and are themselves grasping for additional guidance.”