Federal Cuts Could Derail Conservation’s Historic Gains

Even those who grew up in the 1960s and early ’70s often forget how beginning hunters mostly learned on squirrels and rabbits before graduating to deer. Whitetails weren’t universally common across the eastern United States, and seldom rendered the first game meat we ate. In contrast, hunters who came of age after 1990 mostly know deer abundance; even superabundance.

But today’s fish and wildlife riches, clean air and water, and stunning public parks, forests, and wildlife refuges are neither accidents nor happy coincidences. 125 years ago, many of our public lands were privately owned and long abused, and much of our air and water was neither pure nor protected until Americans demanded lawmakers fix things during the presidencies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon.

Maybe that’s because the Democrats and Republicans who wrote those science-driven laws and programs 50 to 60 years ago personally knew hardship and scarcity. 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). As JFK said of his generation in January 1961, they were “tempered by war” and “disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” They could not take things for granted and would not burden their children with the hard choices and cleanups coming due. They made them their own.

They also knew public lands and robust natural resources are neither eternal birthrights nor divinely protected. All can be soiled or ruined, and the free market’s invisible hand won’t create or protect them. Such treasures require holding our state and national lawmakers accountable, ensuring they make long-term investments in research, protections, and renewals in our natural resources to invigorate our health, spirit, and education.

For instance, when unfettered human enterprise helped sea lampreys invade the Great Lakes and decimate its fisheries by 1950, the government — not profit motive — restored balance. The private sector didn’t fund the 1951-1957 research 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.

If the U.S. and Canadian governments hadn’t jointly funded that research — and didn’t spend $25 million annually on lampricide treatments since then — the Great Lakes region wouldn’t have the tribal, commercial, and recreational fisheries that provide 75,000 jobs and $7 billion in value each year to society.

And yet, the U.S. is now witnessing a blitzkrieg upon science-based federal programs that manage the natural resources Americans nurtured the past half-century for food, water, and conservation-based recreation. In fact, among the first cutbacks by the newly created Department of Government Efficiency were 14 federal workers — 12 in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and two with the U.S. Geological Survey — who helped the Great Lakes Fishery Commission control sea lampreys in the Great Lakes.

Those attacks weren’t unique to those federal agencies, of course. As of early March, federal agencies had cut over 62,000 jobs across the board, but specific numbers remain elusive because the cuts were so sudden and indiscriminate. In some cases, the workers’ supervisors didn’t know of the cuts until those fired told them.

The first wave of cuts included the U.S. Forest Service, which lost 3,475 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.

The 14 cuts to lamprey-control workers highlight fears that the nation could be crippling its next generation of biologists, researchers, and technicians. To remain effective, conservation programs require ongoing research and training updates, with experienced staff teaching their institutional knowledge to newcomers. As G.K. Chesterton wrote nearly 100 years ago, “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

The job cuts also threaten research by universities and agencies on avian influenza, suites of fish and wildlife diseases, and collaborative studies with laboratories worldwide to save money and hasten results. Private and public colleges and universities are severing ties with doctoral and graduate-level students and reneging on offers to newcomers as the schools lose or anticipate losing long-running grants and contracts. The University of California-San Diego, for instance, cut its biological sciences graduate program from 25 new students to 17. Likewise, Columbia University nearly eliminated 65% of incoming Ph.D. students in its arts and sciences school before scaling back those cuts, but without specifying the cutoff.

The federal job cuts hit young employees especially hard, given that the firings target “probationary” employees, those with less than a year in their current job. Only about 9% of the nation’s 2.3 million federal workers are under age 30, and the largest group with less than a year’s experience are ages 25 to 29. As a result, 34% of federal “probationary” workers aren’t yet 30. The cuts also included the Presidential Management Fellows Program, a competitive, widely respected 2-year training program for recent graduates seeking careers in public service.

But “probationary” federal employees often aren’t greenhorns. A veteran realty specialist with the U.S. Forest Service in the Great Lakes region, who prefers to remain anonymous, first worked seven years in low-paying seasonal and temporary jobs without benefits. When hired full-time and finishing the one-year probation, the worker had already spent eight years employed by the Forest Service, though only one year counts toward the employee’s government pension.

It’s too early to know if all these cuts to jobs and research will survive court challenges, but it’s clear many firings were done rashly and chaotically. It’s also clear that those making the cuts knew little of the jobs’ duties or how their loss would cause harm. As a result, skilled professionals often had to be quickly rehired when their jobs were deemed “mission critical.”

Aldo Leopold, the father of American conservation, once wrote, “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’” Leopold would likely agree it’s equally dull to ask, “What good are science and researchers?”

Meanwhile, agency officials are scrambling to offset some firings by hiring additional seasonal help, but they acknowledge the shortcomings. Those jobs might not attract as many top graduates looking to build their resumes and eventually land full-time jobs as public servants. Instead, more top candidates might seek jobs elsewhere, taking skills learned through on-the-job training in federal agencies to careers in the private sector.

Although DOGE claims the federal job cuts are reducing waste and fraud, it hasn’t itemized the specifics through audits, or identified which fraudsters face prosecution. In contrast, it’s easy to cite independent studies and analyses to justify federal work. The sea lamprey control effort, mentioned earlier, is just one of many federal programs generating private-sector profits. A 2013 Southwick and Associates study found the return on investments in conservation funding averages $2.40 for each dollar invested.

Likewise, the 2022 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation found those activities sustain entire industries and countless jobs. This famous survey, conducted every five years since 1955, found that outdoor recreation generates a combined $394.8 billion in annual spending through hunting ($45.2 billion), fishing ($99.4 billion), and other wildlife-related recreation ($250.2 billion).

Economic impacts like those help explain why voters never demanded these federal job and funding cuts. In fact, 80% of Americans in a Pew Research Center poll in August 2024 gave the National Park Service positive reviews. The support was bipartisan, with 80% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans liking the NPS. Further, the survey found NPS staff earned a 76% approval rating – the highest among federal employees, even as NPS service staffing fell 20% after 2010.

The NPS then lost 9% of its staff in just weeks in February, even though visits to national parks by Americans and foreign tourists rose over 37% from 237 million in 2020 to 325.5 million in 2023.

And the cuts continue. The National Parks Conservation Association said DOGE plans to close NPS offices and fire the staff at 34 sites. The list includes eight visitor centers, which combine to store millions of artifacts in climate-controlled facilities. The intended closures include the Fairbanks Public Lands Information Center in Alaska; the Buffalo National River headquarters in Arkansas, which provides emergency services and a water-quality testing lab; Florida’s Robert Johnson Building in Tallahassee, which houses over 8 million artifacts for dozens of national parks across the Southeast; and the San Antonio Missions law-enforcement facility, which provides regional first-responder and other public-safety functions.

Most of the fired NPS, Forest Service, and other conservation-specific federal workers don’t resemble “Washington bureaucrats.” Of the 2.4 million civilians in the federal workforce, over 80% don’t even live in the Washington, D.C., area. Many live and work in rural areas or small communities. Their wages are modest, they competed hard for jobs, and they often needed advanced degrees just to become job candidates. Once hired, they pitched in when fires, floods, blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, or other threats struck their communities.

Across rural America the past few weeks, the Forest Service, Interior Department, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other federal agencies shed experts. The losses included biologists, surveyors, engineers, hydrologists, meteorologists, naturalists, archaeologists, hatchery managers, climate-change experts, and researchers who study plants, wildlife, and wildfires. Critics might claim agency professionals should simply do more crossover work, but few foresters make competent hydrologists, and few hydrologists are expert archaeologists.

Without a comprehensive, well-researched plan to follow, few administrators expect better government operations. For example, we’ll likely see longer delays for timber sales across our national forests with less staff to coordinate logging contracts. Residents in many of those regions already endure low pay and limited job prospects, so job cuts could further penalize these communities.

And given how poorly the firings were handled, labor-relations lawyers like their chances with class-action lawsuits against the federal government. Many fired workers, for example, never received job evaluations, but their termination email included cut-and-paste justifications that now hamper unemployment claims and new job prospects. The termination statement read, in part: “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 deferred resignations were told their jobs lack value. An FAQ about whether they could 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.”

That answer aligns with thoughts from Russell Vought, the newly appointed 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.”

The terminations could also cause harm beyond lost efficiencies. Conservationists and public land advocates worry the cuts could increase calls 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.”

Given Russell Vought’s hopes to kill EPA oversight by villainizing federal workers, it’s hard to accuse Newberg of crying wolf.

The hunting and fishing public helped prod the U.S. government to make tremendous conservation gains over the past 12 decades. But past victories don’t guarantee future success.

That’s why Benjamin Franklin expressed caution, not victory, in September 1787 after he and his fellow delegates at the Constitutional Convention created the U.S. Constitution. When asked if Americans now lived in a republic or monarchy, Franklin famously said: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Conservationists today face a similar challenge, no matter the outcome of the ongoing cutbacks. We can’t assume we’ll forever keep and enjoy the robust natural resources entrusted to us by our parents and grandparents.