Project 2025 and public lands and environment

[elkhunter505]

I have always been a proponent of hunting, fishing, trapping opportunity. Thus I will always push for the best habitat management for all wildlife. We need the Federal Agencies (DOI, FWS, Commerce Dept) to manage our public lands and waters, not sell out. We need a Congress that will fund the management plans for our public resources. My fear and I think it is mutual fear, that the current administration will just burn all of our institutions to the ground. We need to push back and get the funds to fix the problems with resource management. A “Scorched Earth Policy” doesn’t work.

Anyone with any executive management experience what-so-ever can say that you find out what the problems are then you figure out how much money it takes to fix the issues. Write up your management plan and budget then go to the people with the purse strings and show them what they are getting for the money….

This post is exactly right. As someone who is a graduate student in the wildlife biology field at a university that does get many projects funded through federal agencies, money that is being used to research and manage the public's wildlife has constantly been in flux for the last month. We're living day by day wondering if funding for some of our projects will come through or if it is going to be frozen or eliminated all together. Just keep that in mind for those of y'all that are supporting those cuts. We are doing this to benefit your wildlife and in turn, your hunting experience, so if funding is cut and the level of wildlife research has to decline, please think about who did it and why they did it. Because they believe that spending money to adequately manage wildlife with the best scientific tools available is not worth your tax dollars. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of us on this forum would rather see our tax dollars going there than going to SpaceX with their most recent $38 million dollar government contract that somehow is not considered a conflict of interest for ol daddy Musk.

And along the lines of sending public lands back to the people, I will reiterate what many others have said here. That land is not going to end up going to small farms. It will end up in the possession of Ted Turner, the Wilkes Brothers, name of your favorite large landowner to hate on here, etc. I definitely don't agree with putting solar panels or wind turbines out on those areas, particularly solar panels. We have thousands upon thousands of homes and office buildings that could support solar panels and new transmission lines would never need to be built to transfer the energy into the grid. But apparently, nobody in congress has half a brain to think about that as a solution to the energy problems that doesn't cause massive ecological damage.

 

[PLhunter]

This post is exactly right. As someone who is a graduate student in the wildlife biology field at a university that does get many projects funded through federal agencies, money that is being used to research and manage the public's wildlife has constantly been in flux for the last month. We're living day by day wondering if funding for some of our projects will come through or if it is going to be frozen or eliminated all together. Just keep that in mind for those of y'all that are supporting those cuts. We are doing this to benefit your wildlife and in turn, your hunting experience, so if funding is cut and the level of wildlife research has to decline, please think about who did it and why they did it. Because they believe that spending money to adequately manage wildlife with the best scientific tools available is not worth your tax dollars. I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of us on this forum would rather see our tax dollars going there than going to SpaceX with their most recent $38 million dollar government contract that somehow is not considered a conflict of interest for ol daddy Musk.

And along the lines of sending public lands back to the people, I will reiterate what many others have said here. That land is not going to end up going to small farms. It will end up in the possession of Ted Turner, the Wilkes Brothers, name of your favorite large landowner to hate on here, etc. I definitely don't agree with putting solar panels or wind turbines out on those areas, particularly solar panels. We have thousands upon thousands of homes and office buildings that could support solar panels and new transmission lines would never need to be built to transfer the energy into the grid. But apparently, nobody in congress has half a brain to think about that as a solution to the energy problems that doesn't cause massive ecological damage.

Thanks for having your career be a service career. It’s wild to me how a career in service has become a scarlet letter. I recommend anyone curious to directly engage with your local bio’s if you haven’t. Helps with hunting and they’re incredible people. Hardly a waste

 

[elkhunter505]

Thanks for having. Your career be a service career. It’s wild to me how a career in service has become a scarlet letter. I recommend anyone curious to directly engage with your local bio’s if you haven’t. Helps with hunting and they’re incredible people. Hardly a waste

No problem! Shoot it all started to get better at hunting, but it has blossomed into taking care of the environment and its species as a whole. I even get excited watching talks on hawks, small mammals, and things many people don't care about cause you can't shoot them. I can tell you first hand that every student, biologist, and researcher that I know in this career field is doing it to make a difference. We don't get paid anywhere near enough to do these jobs purely for the money. If I wasn't doing this because I love it and want to make a difference, I would have taken up engineering with my brother's company by this point with the amount of seasonal jobs and minimum wages that I have scraped by with. I know so many people who rag on biologists continuously thinking they're not doing the absolute best they can with the minimal resources they are given. Let alone if their resources get cut even more during this administration. They think we are all out here pushing some agenda and truthfully none of us can do these jobs purely objectively, but we do our bests to try and that is good enough for me.

 

[TaperPin]

No kidding.......

What seems to escape so many people is that there is literally no one out there to fill the void. A good living can currently be made in the trades, but I don't see parents pushing their children toward them.

A good question to consider is "What kind of annual salary would it take for me to encourage MY children to work on a roofing or drywall hanging crew?" $75,000? 100,000? $150,000? When you realize that plenty of those jobs are getting done for $40,000 per year it sort of brings the problem into focus.

Now I am a huge fan of professionalizing the trades, and the system needs reform. Perhaps the biggest reason is that a lot of employers are simply taking advantage of undocumented workers, with unsafe working conditions, no Workers Comp, etc. But the current trend makes me anticipate some real disruption. Folks could easily be waiting a year on a new roof at double or triple current rates, for example.

I'm fortunate in that my area doesn't have a lot of undocumented workers, and all of our crew and subcontractors crews are US citizens. Honestly the trend of deportation will likely make our work much more valuable, but at the cost of some serious inflation.

Part of me thinks there will be a token amount of deportation, quite well publicized, and then it will end when the consequences set in.

Americans have proven time and again that they want everyone else to teach their children to be willing to do manual labor, but their own are just too special.

Rant off.....

I started off in Northern Colorado/Southern Wyoming and there were a lot of sharp young kids looking at the building trades as a career option. Community colleges had construction programs and some high schools built complete houses. Farther west there is less interest in careers, pay is lower, crews seemed to get more specialized and less skill is being rewarded, especially with new construction.

I always have a question of some sort to ask sub contractors when we cross paths. I asked a stucco contractor if threats to deport affects his guys and was surprised to learn a lot of them work the nicer months and spend the winter in Mexico. Years with more deportation talk fewer guys come up from Mexico in the spring and just work back there doing the same work in one of the resort towns. When the boarder crossing is just a normal part of a worker’s yearly routine that’s crazy.

 

[woods89]

I started off in Northern Colorado/Southern Wyoming and there were a lot of sharp young kids looking at the building trades as a career option. Community colleges had construction programs and some high schools built complete houses. Farther west the crews seemed to get more specialized and less skill is being rewarded, especially with new construction.

I always have a question of some sort to ask sub contractors when we cross paths. I asked a stucco contractor if threats to deport affects his guys and was surprised to learn a lot of them work the nicer months and spend the winter in Mexico. Years with more deportation talk fewer guys come up from Mexico in the spring and just work back there doing the same work in one of the resort towns. When the boarder crossing is just a normal part of a worker’s yearly routine that’s crazy.

Agreed that the nonchalant travel back and forth is crazy.

There are certainly some regional variations. As I said, my area here in southern MO has very few illegal immigrants. My brother-in-law, however, is a custom homebuilder in a college town in KY, and I get to walk through his projects a couple times a year. I think it's safe to say that deportations will hit that area very hard.

Changes were certainly warranted. The system has been dysfunctional for quite a few years. I just would like to see a alternative pipeline of labor, and in a lot of markets, it seems like no such thing can be found.

Apologies to the OP for getting a bit afield........

 

[TristanJH]

Now stay with me. If we the consumptive sportsmen and women in this country could create a non-profit or hell just any entity to pool those resources together to buy and manage lands to keep open to the public we’d have roughly 3 billion dollars each year to buy up acreage, open it to the public, manage it effectively and get around some of the litigation that the govt has to deal with when it comes to doing any cutting (based on my experience the NC mountains) and effectively be setup to combat any land sales that may arise in the future via purchase. Obviously administrative costs, taxes, management costs, etc would cut into that number but the answer as I see it is to use grassroots and capitalism to our advantage instead of being Don Quixote and chasing windmills. Lots of assumptions I know (no more than what’s already in this thread) and organizing and getting something like that off the ground would be difficult but you can’t tell me between the current non-profits that it can’t be done, hell looked at APR. RMEF has experience in the land acquisition realm, Safari Club is deep in the legislative realm. It can be done and in a way where it’s strictly focused on land acquisition for public use that is technically in private hands like a Land Trust. Except this focus would be for consumptive users to utilize and not just for the sake of saving land. Of course I can already tell that there would be issues because someone doesn’t want a forestry plan that includes logging or someone wants solar and not oil and gas leases, etc. Everyone would have to leave their own biases, wants and desires at the door as the mission statement would be for land open to and managed for consumptive users, it starts and ends there. Recreational users would be welcome of course but there would be no catering to them. Now back to your regularly scheduled twisting at windmills.

This sounds an awful lot like what we already have but without the advantage of scale. Indeed, RMEF and others have done a great job at what you describe, but often with the end goal of transferring both ownership and management back to the public, since the costs are too great to be able to provide certainty to those holding the deed.

 

[TristanJH]

Depends how they do it.

Presently corporate cash reserves are at all-time highs, personal savings rates are at relative lows, and there is little reason to expect that to change in the near term. So if land starts coming up for sale, I think it's probably fair to say that currently the best predictor of who's in a position to buy...

 

[PLhunter]

Something I don’t think people realize with the cuts is how federal investment can provide a solid roi and that all spending isn’t inflationary or a suck on the economy. Truly wasteful spending, sure chop it, but whether that benefits you or not should be something you still ask even with the most obvious budget cuts. Cuts even when seemingly a good idea can still end up costing you if you don’t ask about the end game.

Heads rolling may be to the delight of some but in the end they likely won’t see the savings show up. We are however going to be getting less for our same monies in. And that goes beyond just losing public services. That goes with the stability of employment of neighbors affecting local businesses that benefit from those dollars. Prices of goods going up. A massive loss of innovation that fuels economic growth. Modern Carbon fiber, the .223, radar, MRI’s, microchips, touchscreens etc… were all invented or came about because of government investment in innovation. Those investments fueled billions in innovation and industry... So cutting those funds back then may have seemed like a savings at the time but would have cost us as a nation dearly in the long run. So ask, how do I or even we benefit from that cut and what does that cut cost us in value.

Calling anyone concerned or affected by cuts the “parasite class” while holding tight to your own subsidies and federal dollars is not just embarrassingly unserious and unprofessional for government work it’s corrupt.

 

[chanson_roland]

Something I don’t think people realize with the cuts is how federal investment can provide a solid roi and that all spending isn’t inflationary or a suck on the economy. Truly wasteful spending, sure chop it, but whether that benefits you or not should be something you still ask even with the most obvious budget cuts. Cuts even when seemingly a good idea can still end up costing you if you don’t ask about the end game.

Heads rolling may be to the delight of some but in the end they likely won’t see the savings show up. We are however going to be getting less for our same monies in. And that goes beyond just losing public services. That goes with the stability of employment of neighbors affecting local businesses that benefit from those dollars. Prices of goods going up. A massive loss of innovation that fuels economic growth. Modern Carbon fiber, the .223, radar, MRI’s, microchips, touchscreens etc… were all invented or came about because of government investment in innovation. Those investments fueled billions in innovation and industry... So cutting those funds back then may have seemed like a savings at the time but would have cost us as a nation dearly in the long run. So ask, how do I or even we benefit from that cut and what does that cut cost us in value.

Calling anyone concerned or affected by cuts the “parasite class” while holding tight to your own subsidies and federal dollars is not just embarrassingly unserious and unprofessional for government work it’s corrupt.

I always get a chuckle over people complaining about government R&D spending without a solid cost/benefit analysis while...

- staring at a liquid flat screen
- connected to semiconductors
- over the Internet...

All of these were challenged by "fiscal conservatives" as wasteful spending at some point.

I can say firsthand that the cuts to NSF/NIH/NCI/DOE/SBA just in the last two weeks have already set the US back, as talented researchers are leaving the US and following the research funding. Canada, the EU, Australia, and Singapore will be the first wave of beneficiaries, but China and India are expected to capture talent as well. All this research btw, will have been funded by American taxpayers, but will now be exported for scale up.

The last time I saw this was in 2002 when the stem cell ban came down. Overnight we lost life sciences researchers to other G8 countries. That's part of the reason you can buy over-the-counter drugs in certain countries that cost 100x here.

Rest assured that some of the fortunes created abroad will be used to buy up public land for newly-minted foreign billionaires.

 

[Loo.wii]

Presently corporate cash reserves are at all-time highs, personal savings rates are at relative lows, and there is little reason to expect that to change in the near term. So if land starts coming up for sale, I think it's probably fair to say that currently the best predictor of who's in a position to buy...

Theres alot here who think they wil be the next john dutton.

 

[Loo.wii]

I always get a chuckle over people complaining about government R&D spending without a solid cost/benefit analysis while...

- staring at a liquid flat screen
- connected to semiconductors
- over the Internet...

All of these were challenged by "fiscal conservatives" as wasteful spending at some point.

I can say firsthand that the cuts to NSF/NIH/NCI/DOE/SBA just in the last two weeks have already set the US back, as talented researchers are leaving the US and following the research funding. Canada, the EU, Australia, and Singapore will be the first wave of beneficiaries, but China and India are expected to capture talent as well. All this research btw, will have been funded by American taxpayers, but will now be exported for scale up.

The last time I saw this was in 2002 when the stem cell ban came down. Overnight we lost life sciences researchers to other G8 countries. That's part of the reason you can buy over-the-counter drugs in certain countries that cost 100x here.

Rest assured that some of the fortunes created abroad will be used to buy up public land for newly-minted foreign billionaires.

Im beginning to see this in my field. Cyber security research is beginning to change as well. and people aren't going to be happy once they start losing their high paying jobs because of it.

 

[CJ19]

Im beginning to see this in my field. Cyber security research is beginning to change as well. and people aren't going to be happy once they start losing their high paying jobs because of it.

you guys are not listening to people. those are not what anyone wants cut or will be cut. waste fraud and abuse. are you suggesting there is waste fraud or abuse in those items?

 

[Ozarkansas]

@CJ19 but who determines what is waste, fraud, and abuse? A billionaire media tycoon with millions of dollars in government contracts? I’m supposed to take his word? Imagine if Soros was given this level of power.

I’m very pro-logging on public lands, as well as pro-fire. One thing that worries me about these DOGE cuts is that we’re likely cutting some of the money we use to fund burn crews and foresters. I’d rather see more funding for these positions, and more support for small local lumber mills, so that we can increase harvest and improve management.

I think we’ll see management stall out a bit in the near term, because I don’t expect the kind of tech-bros running DOGE to know anything about what constitutes “waste” in public lands and forest management

 

[CJ19]

@CJ19 but who determines what is waste, fraud, and abuse? A billionaire media tycoon with millions of dollars in government contracts? I’m supposed to take his word? Imagine if Soros was given this level of power.

I’m very pro-logging on public lands, as well as pro-fire. One thing that worries me about these DOGE cuts is that we’re likely cutting some of the money we use to fund burn crews and foresters. I’d rather see more funding for these positions, and more support for small local lumber mills, so that we can increase harvest and improve management.

I think we’ll see management stall out a bit in the near term, because I don’t expect the kind of tech-bros running DOGE to know anything about what constitutes “waste” in public lands and forest management

right so what we have in this thread is nothing but a TDS induced cryfest at the moment. there is bloat that needs cut. when things get this bloated deep cuts are necessary. Do not set up systems that make the small cuts virtually impossible if you don't want it to get to the point deep cuts are needed. And in this TDS cryfest, we have the usual "OMG what if they cut this program or that program". None of that has happened. So if it does we will have to discuss getting the ones American's need back in.

 

[chanson_roland]

@CJ19 but who determines what is waste, fraud, and abuse? A billionaire media tycoon with millions of dollars in government contracts? I’m supposed to take his word? Imagine if Soros was given this level of power.

I’m very pro-logging on public lands, as well as pro-fire. One thing that worries me about these DOGE cuts is that we’re likely cutting some of the money we use to fund burn crews and foresters. I’d rather see more funding for these positions, and more support for small local lumber mills, so that we can increase harvest and improve management.

I think we’ll see management stall out a bit in the near term, because I don’t expect the kind of tech-bros running DOGE to know anything about what constitutes “waste” in public lands and forest management

fyi...

Forest Service fires 3,400 people

 

[Ozarkansas]

right so what we have in this thread is nothing but a TDS induced cryfest at the moment. there is bloat that needs cut. when things get this bloated deep cuts are necessary. Do not set up systems that make the small cuts virtually impossible if you don't want it to get to the point deep cuts are needed. And in this TDS cryfest, we have the usual "OMG what if they cut this program or that program". None of that has happened. So if it does we will have to discuss getting the ones American's need back in.

Cuts to USFS Probationary Employees
Many of these employees are going to be foresters, maintenance workers, and burn crew

Pause to Wildfire Mitigation Funds
This is only a pause to review funding, but still a short-term interruption of mamagement

Not every criticism of Trump is “TDS”. That term gets thrown around the way liberals throw around “fascist”, just to silence internal dissent.

And this definitely isn’t worrying about something that may or may not happen, this is worrying about something that is happening and might get worse.

 

[CJ19]

fyi...

Forest Service fires 3,400 people

Yes, we see cuts to agencies where the union and people like Buzz Hettick make it impossible to let people go on merit based or other rational criteria. So instead, the union preferred tool is something like this. Cut all the probationary employees and such. And it's a nice touch that you linked an article paid for by the very bloat we are trying to cut out. US tax payer money likely funded that politico article.

 

[CJ19]

Cuts to USFS Probationary Employees
Many of these employees are going to be foresters, maintenance workers, and burn crew

Pause to Wildfire Mitigation Funds
This is only a pause to review funding, but still a short-term interruption of mamagement

Not every criticism of Trump is “TDS”. That term gets thrown around the way liberals throw around “fascist”, just to silence internal dissent.

And this definitely isn’t worrying about something that may or may not happen, this is worrying about something that is happening and might get worse.

Right. i get that. No problem bring up the concern. No one was concerned in those agencies when people brought of the fact that DEI should not be a criteria used to fight fires either. I am sorry to tell you this. We are spending too much money. We need an audit and no one until now has had the stone to do a real one.

 

[chanson_roland]

Yes, we see cuts to agencies where the union and people like Buzz Hettick make it impossible to let people go on merit based or other rational criteria. So instead, the union preferred tool is something like this. Cut all the probationary employees and such. And it's a nice touch that you linked an article paid for by the very bloat we are trying to cut out. US tax payer money likely funded that politico article.

That's just one source. If you bother to cross-check, you'll see that the Politico article is one of several sources confirming the same.

 

[JohnB]

@CJ19 but who determines what is waste, fraud, and abuse? A billionaire media tycoon with millions of dollars in government contracts? I’m supposed to take his word? Imagine if Soros was given this level of power.

I’m very pro-logging on public lands, as well as pro-fire. One thing that worries me about these DOGE cuts is that we’re likely cutting some of the money we use to fund burn crews and foresters. I’d rather see more funding for these positions, and more support for small local lumber mills, so that we can increase harvest and improve management.

I think we’ll see management stall out a bit in the near term, because I don’t expect the kind of tech-bros running DOGE to know anything about what constitutes “waste” in public lands and forest management

Along with other people our local Forest Service District is likely to have lost their full time NEPA person. (I'm not going to call my FS friends to find out which of their coworkers got shit canned last night) This is sure to mean a slowdown in the rate of new timber sales as well as smaller WUI thinning operations.