If Not RIF, Why RIF Shaped?

Everything going on on public lands right now, why it’s happening, and where it’s going

“Flood the zone with shit.” That’s Steve Bannon’s famous strategy for manipulating the media, and is very much the playbook for this second Trump administration’s attempts to turn America’s natural treasures into a profit center for billionaires. The idea is to roll out so much bad news all at once, all the time, that it becomes impossible to process it all, and hard to distinguish between real threats and utter nonsense. Every Monday, I try and cut through that noise, and make sense of what’s going on.

Let’s experiment with a simple format here, with the aim of taking complex and nuanced actions and making them as easy to understand as possible. Definitely open to your feedback.

White House Budget: $10 Billion For Arc de Trump, Plus Bribe For Military To Do Self-Invasion

What’s Happening: The White House has created its budget proposal for FY2027, and it contains cuts to pretty much anything anyone cares about in order to spend $10 billion building monuments to Trump in DC, and $500 billion bribing the military to do something scholar-of-fascism Timothy Snyder describes as a “self-coup” combined with a “self-invasion.” Included in it are massive cuts to the National Park Service that, if they happened, would essentially eliminate that agency’s ability to function.

Why It Matters: Sorry if I sound like a broken record here, but like I explained in that article about the Forest Service reorganization, a bunch of activists and journalists whose entire job should be knowing better are going all Chicken Little about every little thing, in an effort to scare people into giving them money.

There are three pieces of context no story about this White House budget should go without: 1) Congress sets budgets, not the President. 2) When it comes to the Park Service specifically, these cuts are essentially the same thing the White House proposed last year. If they were dead on arrival during the height of Trump’s power, they’re definitely not going to happen now that his masked thugs have murdered Americans in an American city in broad daylight, now that he’s created yet another forever war in the Middle East, now that he’s destroying the world economy, and now that the primaries are wrapping up and Republican lawmakers no longer need to worry about the threat of a far-right opponent. And 3) Adding to the already exploding deficit in order build a $10 billion “Arc de Trump” is such a laughable non-starter that this entire budget should be taken as nothing but the really bad joke that it is. We should all be laughing so hard we cry right now. The second we stop taking these clowns seriously is the second we stop giving them power over our lives.

Why You Should Care: During times as crazy as these, we need media outlets and advocacy organizations to help lead the way through, not focus on their own self interests. I get why that’s hard, I also lost my career in mainstream media to the whole obeying-in-advance thing. But sensationalism is not the answer. If we go in that direction, we risk losing our ability to break through to audiences at all.

Is this an indication of the administration’s priorities? Of course. But we’ve known all that since that golden escalator ride in 2015. The question we should be asking ourselves is why, given that knowledge, our friends and neighbors still voted for this. We need that answer, and we need a solution sometime between now and November, when our best chance at stopping it will come with the mid-term elections. If Democrats can take both houses of Congress, we can impeach and convict Trump, and move on with the project of forming a more perfect union.

DOI Plans To Cut Even More Staff

What’s Happening: Last week, the Department of the Interior issued notice that it plans to “offer” a Deferred Resignation Program and Voluntary Early Retirement to staff it thinks are in the way of carrying out “Interior’s mission and deliver world-class service for the American people.” It’s not clear what numbers it hopes to hit or exactly which agencies and roles will be targeted beyond ones that may not be “visitor-facing.”

Why It Matters: This is a good example of administration goals running into management realities. They want to privatize the park service, they want to dismantle services for Indigenous peoples, they want to stop doing anything on public lands but drilling them. And yet, they can’t just do that stuff, they have to follow the law. And the budgets Congress sets are laws. Those determine whether or not departments can be eliminated, or major changes can be made to staffing programs. Since they can’t just fire, say, every wildlife biologist in a national park, they will instead make their lives miserable, while offering them easy paths out of their employment.

Why You Should Care: Despite the rhetoric that this is about efficiency, cutting staff like this actually ends up costing you and me money. Not only does that come in the form of reduced services and functions, but also the costs inherent to terminating employment contracts. It’s estimated that last year’s DOGE RIFs cost taxpayers at least $135 billion in termination liabilities. And public service is inherently more efficient than privatized operations, which are one of the administration’s stated goals for the park service. An analysis by Project On Government Oversight found that privatizing government functions resulted in an average of an 85 percent increase in their cost to taxpayers.

Trump Versus The Endangered Species Act

What’s Happening: In a very rare move, the administration used the war in Iran as pretext to assemble the Endangered Species Committee last week, which voted to exempt oil and gas drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico from measures intended to protect endangered species there.

In a lesser reported story, following a seven-year legal battle a federal judge finally issued a ruling about assaults on the ESA the first Trump administration pursued, and vacated them.

The rules struck were:

• The “death by a thousand cuts” rule which stated that a project would have to impact the entirety of an endangered species’ habitat to be impermissible. This allowed, for instance, a logging clearcut project to move forward in spotted owl habitat because it only threatened a portion of that habitat, not the whole thing.

• A rule which limited considering to only direct impacts of the project in consideration. For example, permitting for a highway construction project would only consider the impacts of the highway itself, and not the associated development its traffic would bring.

• A rule which required permitting agencies to accept promises of mitigation at their face value. This meant that a company could just make a vague promise it’d plant trees or something, and permitting would be required to continue even when it was obvious that company had no intention of planting any trees.

• A rule that would have allowed USFWS and NOAA to ignore ongoing harm being created by existing projects, with no requirement for those agencies to require companies to change their practices or mitigate their harm.

Why It Matters: The pace of the legal system is not able to keep up with the rate at which the Trump administration breaks stuff. Take the Gulf’s Rice’s Whale for instance. It’s thought that only 51 individuals remain, and that those are uniquely vulnerable to oil and gas operations, which will now be allowed to expand in the whale’s habitat. Even if a judge rules that overriding the ESA for some bullshit “emergency” was illegal seven years from now, that will likely be too late for that species.

Why You Should Care: When this is all over, one of our primary goals as a nation will have to be preventing it from ever happening again. That means codifying norms into actual laws, and empowering our institutions to act on timelines that meet current and future challenges. We need leaders capable of meeting that challenge.

Big Bend Border Wall Protests

What’s Happening: The administration wants to build a wall right down the middle of the Rio Grande river in Big Bend National Park, for reasons untethered from reality. Everyone from local sheriffs to local hippies are upset about this, and they all assembled in Austin this weekend to protest.

Why It Matters: America seems to have lost the ability to organize resistance in any way other than lame protests, which cannot be shown to produce any sort of result.

Why You Should Care: The formula for organizing to stop projects like this one is clear, and I laid it out in this article. If you actually care about Big Bend, or immigrants, or wildlife, or whatever, then you need to find a way to create effective boycotts any and every company involved, enable workers to strike by raising the money necessary to pay their living costs while they’re out of work, and generally apply pressure to the legislators who have the power to prevent this project from going forward. No, none of that is as easy as showing up for a march through downtown Austin, but that’s the point. The appearance of action is not the same thing as actual action.

And Finally, Some Good News

What’s Happening: The reason why we have politicians who work in the interest of billionaires rather than the rest of us is that the Supreme Court gave those billionaires the ability to spend unlimited sums of money on elections, and to do that anonymously. A bunch of seriously credible current and former lawmakers in Montana think they have a solution to working around Citizens United without directly challenging it in court. And now, following an attempt by evil Republicans to keep that measure off the ballot, a state supreme court ruling has permitted it to go forward. Should the Transparent Election Initiative garner enough signatures, Montana’s voters will have the chance to end dark money’s corrupting influence on American politics this November.

Why It Matters: I explored the whole thing at length in this article. This is very real, and something you should be spreading the word about.

Why You Should Care: Should this pass, any corporation doing business in Montana will lose the ability to spend money on politics. That will include many large entities, even ones incorporated elsewhere. Never before has a vote in Montana mattered so much to every American. Should it pass, it will also provide a model other states can follow, and our country will be on its way to ending this extremely corrupt moment in our history.

Top photo: One of the last Rice’s Whales in front of a NOAA research vessel. Credit: NOAA.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life.