Federal Job Cuts Could Derail Conservation’s Many Gains

   After living our entire life in the most comfortable society ever created by hard work, sound science, free speech and hitherto intelligent leadership, it’s hard to imagine any other world.

   Heck. Those of us living through the 1960s and early ’70s barely recall when kids hunted squirrels and rabbits before hunting white-tailed deer. Deer weren’t common, and they were seldom the first game species we ate.

   But today’s abundant fish and wildlife, clean air and water, and stunning public parks, forests and wildlife refuges are neither accidents nor happy coincidence. Many protected lands didn’t exist in 1900, and many resources weren’t purified or protected until Americans demanded lawmakers correct things during the John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon presidencies.

   Maybe it’s because the Democrats and Republicans creating those science-driven laws and programs knew suffering and hardship personally. They endured the Great Depression and World War II; and watched helplessly as diseases tortured family and friends until science delivered penicillin to kill infections (1941), and vaccines to prevent polio (1955) and measles (1963).

   They knew public lands and robust natural resources aren’t divine or eternal birthrights. All can be soiled or ruined, and the free market’s invisible hand doesn’t breed or protect them. Those gifts require long-term government investments in society’s health, spirit and education.

   For instance, when unfettered human enterprise helped invasive sea lampreys collapse Great Lakes fisheries by 1950, the government — not profit motive — restored it. The private sector didn’t fund the 1951-1957 effort in which scientists tested over 6,000 chemicals to find one that selectively kills sea-lamprey larvae with little or no harm to other lifeforms.

Ongoing job cuts to the U.S Forest Service could hamper logging contracts and conservation programs across the Great Lakes region.   — Patrick Durkin photo

   If the U.S. and Canada hadn’t jointly funded that research, and didn’t still spend $25 million annually on lampricide treatments, our region wouldn’t have the tribal, commercial and recreational fisheries that provide 75,000 jobs and $7 billion in value each year.

   In fact, a 2013 Southwick and Associates study found our return on investments in conservation funding average 2.4 to 1. And yet we’re now witnessing a blitzkrieg upon science-driven federal programs that manage the natural resources we’ve relied on the past half-century for food, water and conservation-based recreation.

   This attack risks our next generation of scientists and technicians through indiscriminate firings of probationary staff at the U.S. Forest Service, which shed 3,475 lost jobs; and the Interior Department, where over 2,300 jobs vanished at the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Reclamation. Likewise, we risk losing battles against avian influenza, and fish and wildlife diseases by cutting federal funding for university and agency research, much of which is done in collaboration with laboratories worldwide.

   Voters didn’t demand those cuts. In fact, 80% of Americans in a Pew Research Center poll in August rated the Park Service positively. Neither was it partisan, with 80% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans liking the NPS.

   Federal agencies provide over 18,000 jobs in Wisconsin, including 1,743 in the Agriculture Department and 742 in the Interior Department. A union representative for the Forest Service told Wisconsin Public Radio that the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest fired at least 12 probationary employees. Likewise, the NPS office at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in Bayfield reported firing “several” probationary employees. A full accounting of federal job cuts, however, isn’t yet available.

   Let’s also note that most “probationary” employees aren’t greenhorns. I know a veteran realty specialist in the Forest Service who built his resume for seven years by working low-paying seasonal and temporary jobs without benefits. After being hired full time and finishing his one-year probation, he had already worked eight years for the Forest Service, though only one year counts toward his pension.

   Most such federal workers live in rural areas or small communities, and they’re neither slackers nor bureaucrats. And though their wages are modest, they faced tough competition for their jobs, and they often needed advanced degrees just to be considered. And once hired, they could only sit silent as lawmakers blamed them while slashing their staffs and budgets.

   Last week’s cut in Chequamegon-Nicolet staff included a five-member recreation crew. Also cut were four of six Forest Service staff at the David Obey Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center in Ashland. Such losses could reduce wildfire prevention work, close trails and campgrounds, and reduce or eliminate forest-road maintenance.

   Across the Great Lakes region, the Forest Service and Interior Department also lost biologists, surveyors, engineers, hydrologists, naturalists, archaeologists, hatchery managers, climate-change experts, and researchers who study plants, wildlife and wildfires. Apologists say agency professionals should do more crossover work, but where’s their plan? Yes, foresters could teach Elon Musk much about chainsaws, but few of them make competent hydrologists, and few hydrologists are expert biologists or archaeologists.

   The job cuts will likely delay or scrap timber sales across our national forests. The Chequamegon covers 858,400 acres in Ashland, Bayfield, Sawyer, Price, Taylor and Vilas counties. The Nicolet covers 661,400 acres in Florence, Forest, Langlade, Oconto, Oneida and Vilas counties. Rural Northwoods residents already endure low pay and limited job prospects, so why penalize them further by firing a neighbor who coordinates logging contracts?

   Besides, these DOGE-driven firings lack basic decency. Although many fired workers never received job evaluations, their termination email included a cut-and-paste lie that hampers unemployment applications. It read: “The agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment would be in the public interest.”

   Likewise, experienced federal employees who accepted a deferred resignation were told their jobs lack value. An FAQ about whether they can seek new work while on deferred-resignation status reads: “Absolutely! … The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”

   Such insults align with comments by Russell Vought, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, who said in 2023:

   “We want bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. … We want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

   These crude, humiliating terminations of thousands of skilled natural-resource professionals will likely decrease government efficiency and increase justifications to sell public lands. Longtime hunting advocate Randy Newberg, host of the “Hunt Talk Radio” podcast, has often expressed that fear: “Someday, somehow, (they’re) going to make these lands so impaired and so degraded that the public won’t have any problem getting rid of them.”

   An overreaction? Read again Russell Vought’s goal of demonizing public servants to destroy EPA oversight, and then tell Newberg he’s crying wolf.

   Our state and nation made tremendous conservation gains the past five decades, but we can still lose them far faster than our parents and grandparents built them.