Woodie Guthrie wrote the famous song that cried out, “This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me.” He did not subscribe to the idea that the air we breathe, the water we drink, the forests, the hills, and the plains we traverse are all here to enrich powerful corporations, billionaires, and people like President Trump and his family.
Trump is moving the business of preserving national forests from Washington, D.C., to Utah. The expectation is that those who would privatize public lands will be better able to rake in profits from the privatization. How dare working people think that public forests and national parks belong to them? Not when they are just waiting to be grabbed by privatizers aiming to turn them into profit machines.
The Trump regime’s plan to chop down not just a bunch of trees but to chop down the entire U.S. Forest Service is “reckless, illegal” and a prelude to giving away public lands to private hands, says the United States Forest Service workers’ union president, Randy Erwin.
And Erwin, who heads the National Federation of Federal Employees/IAM, wants Congress to step in, assert its constitutional authority over federal spending, launch investigations, and refer appropriate Trump officials to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
“The bottom line is that Congress must do their jobs,” said Erwin. “We view this as not just a policy disagreement that will result in the collapse of the Forest Service as we know it, but also a breach of the Constitution.”
“President Trump is blatantly attempting to ignore the laws his own party passed. Congress must stand up for their authority and protect the public lands of the American people.”
In this period, when workers are crushed by an economy increasingly geared to making the wealthy richer and the bulk of the population poorer, one of the very few remaining things for workers to enjoy—public lands—is being eyed by billionaires. The land, the air, the water, and all their natural wealth are seen by many as the only remaining taste of a good life that millions have left. And now they are being told to move over and give up even that.
In a May 7 letter, Irwin listed his demands and the negative impacts of the attacks on the Forest Service, while reminding Congress of both its authority and its duty. It’s his second move to try to stop the destruction of the Forest Service.
Trump and his Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, first revealed their intentions a month ago when they issued a “move or quit” order to the 6,500 Forest Service headquarters staffers. They’d get only a few months to decide whether or not to sell their houses at a loss, uproot their lives, and move to Salt Lake City. Now, says Erwin, Trump and Rollins are taking an ax to the rest of the agency.
If the past is prologue, data from two prior Trump “move or quit” edicts to USDA agency staffers during his first term show most would quit, taking years of institutional knowledge and expertise with them. The same thing would occur with this forced relocation, Erwin’s letter said.
Though Erwin didn’t say so, the “move or quit” order can be seen as part of Trump’s continuing crusade to both shrink and denigrate the federal workforce, leaving private interests freer to run rampant without congressional or agency oversight. At least 200,000 federal workers have quit or been fired—most for no reason at all—since Trump returned to the presidency.
And the rest, including those NFFE represents, had their union contracts terminated.
Rollins’s edict to the USFS, which is part of the Agriculture Department, would yank the headquarters workers out of a classic neo-Gothic building near the White House and transfer them—Rollins says—closer to their “customers,” including loggers and ranchers. Others would lose jobs as offices close.
Not said is that the move is a way of rewarding areas that backed Trump with additional business and activity generated by operating in the area in question. Being in Salt Lake City, however, would make the staffers more vulnerable to private interests seeking to profit from the millions of acres of public lands, especially since Trump and Rollins would replace top non-partisan career officials with “political appointees.”
The Forest Service, unlike the National Park Service, allows logging, ranching, and even oil drilling on the public lands it owns. Most of its acreage is in the Great Plains and the Mountain States, but there are large forests in and around Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin, too.
The USDA money bill for this fiscal year “explicitly prohibited using appropriated funds for reorganization without prior notice and approval,” Erwin wrote to Congress. “Yet this sweeping overhaul—eliminating regional offices, consolidating research infrastructure, and replacing career expertise with political appointees—was announced unilaterally, without the transparency, notice, or authorization required by law.”
And in practical terms, he added, the move and closure of regional USFS offices and 57 research centers would make fighting western wildfires harder, because of a lack of coordination. It would also decimate research on forest conditions, ecosystems, wildlife, climate, and habitat, and reduce the opportunity for the general public to hunt or fish in the forests, too.
Already, due to past firings by Trump and his minions, 20% of USFS researchers with PhDs in the fields the Forest Service covers have quit, Erwin informed lawmakers.
“This [reorganization] is a direct challenge to Congress’s constitutional… power of the purse. If Congress does not act now, it will be conceding its laws, appropriations, and oversight responsibilities can be ignored at will. This Is Not Reform. It Is Irreversible Damage to our Country’s Greatest Resources,” Erwin declared. The capitalization, for emphasis, is his.
“This is not efficiency. It is the destruction of institutional knowledge, scientific capacity, and operational readiness,” Erwin said. But even more, it’s “a direct threat and theft of public lands and public access.”
“This dismantling creates a clear pathway for transferring federal lands to state and private control without the consent of Congress or the American people.”
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