Mothers Against Greg Abbott Sums Up the Awful Record of the Texas Legislature

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2025 //
0

You know the Bad MAGA, the one that wants to drag us back a century.

There is also a good MAGA: Mothers Against Greg Abbott.

It’s led by Nancy Thompson, who spends her time trying to help others, unlike the other MAGA.

My leading nominee for silliest bill of the year is this one: “Rep. Stan Gerdes filed HB 54, a bill that aims to ban non-human behaviors in Texas public schools.” This is an adult man who took seriously the absurd claim that some children asked for litter boxes because they identify as cats. That’s a wack-a-doo rumor, not a reality. Why not legislate about the best way to respond to men in flying saucers if they should land and disembark in Texas?

This her latest report on the Republican-dominated legislature in Texas, which does nothing to help others:
 

TX LEGE BREAKDOWN

📚 Education Legislation 📚

  • On April 24th, the Texas Senate voted to redirect $1 billion in taxpayer funds to their favored private schools in passing Greg Abbott’s school voucher bill. We (and tens of thousands of folks across Texas) organized hard to stop it, but a final phone call from Donald Trump sealed the deal. This scam on the taxpayers, I mean voucher bill, has just been signed into law by Abbott.
  • While voucher programs and charter schools are getting our hard-earned pennies, the TX Lege hasn’t passed a single public education funding bill yet this session. This is BS.

🏠 Housing and Water Legislation 🏠

  • HB 32 and its Senate companion, SB 38, would escalate the Texas housing crisis by making evictions faster, easier, and far more common. These are being sold as a fix for “squatters,” but in reality, the bills are Trojan horse policies that would dismantle due process, weaken eviction warnings, and reduce opportunities for legal protections for all renters in Texas.

😵‍💫 Wtf Legislation 😵‍💫

  • The Texas legislature has considered a record number of bills this year that only serve to bully transgender people. On April 23rd, the Senate approved SB 240, the ridiculously named “Texas Women’s Privacy Act,”which requires Texans to use bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with the gender assigned on their birth certificate — even if they’ve transitioned.
  • The Texas House passed HB 366, a bill that would make it a crime to distribute altered media, including political memes, without a government-approved disclaimer. Violators could face up to a year in jail. WTF?
  • Rep. Stan Gerdes filed HB 54, a bill that aims to ban non-human behaviors in Texas public schools.
  • The Texas Senate passed SB 1870, a bill that would prohibit cities from putting any citizen initiative on local ballots that would decriminalize marijuana.
  • The Texas House is expected to consider House Bill 2436, to exempt law enforcement officers from being charged for “deadly conduct” (killing members of the public) while in the line of duty. The Senate approved a similar bill in early April. This is a dangerous escalation of the power of state violence and a lack of accountability for the harm it causes.
  • The Texas Senate also approved SCR 42, which declares that the state only recognizes two genders. Let’s be clear: trans and intersex people have always existed. This is just more dangerous bullying toward a vulnerable minority from Texas Republicans.

HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED

  • Follow us on social media — we’ll be posting live updates, actions you can take to speak out on legislation, and more.

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It’s important to be clear-eyed about the damage Texas Republicans — arm in arm with the Trump Administration — are inflicting on our state. When the consequences come, like underfunded classrooms, law enforcement officers shielded from legal consequences, and discrimination and violence against vulnerable people, we need to be ready to make sure Texans know who to hold accountable – Texas Republicans.

Get ready to use your voice when the time comes.

Nancy Thompson

Categories Funding, Stupid, Texas, Trump, Vouchers

Texas: More Than 700 Cases of Measles Reported

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2025 //
4

In 2000, the contagious disease measles was officially eradicated in the United States. However, since the rise of anti-vaccine anxieties during the COVID pandemic, a growing number of parents have refused to let their children be vaccinated.

Texas is the center of a measles outbreak. 702 children have measles; 95% had not been vaccinated. Two have died, neither of them had been vaccinated. The national number is certainly larger.

The Houston Chronicle reported:

The measles outbreak that started in the South Plains region of Texas surpassed 700 cases on Tuesday, according to health officials.

The latest update from the Texas Department of State Health Services shows the state has seen 702 cases of measles since the outbreak began spreading in late January. The outbreak, which has also spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma, is the largest in the United States since measles was declared eliminated in the country in 2000.

Two children, an 8-year-old girl and a 6-year-old girl, died after contracting the virus, and 91 people have been hospitalized. Neither child who died had received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, and they did not have any underlying medical conditions, according to the DSHS.

Roughly two-thirds of cases in Texas have been in children and teens. More than 95% have been in individuals who are unvaccinated, or whose vaccination status is unknown.

Categories Health, Ignorance, Texas

Financial Times: Bill Gates Slams Elon Musk

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2025 //
3

Bill Gates is one of the few billionaires and power players who have stood up to the South African-born bully, Elon Musk.

I’ve had my differences with Gates over his disastrous intrusions into “reforming” education. First, he thought that small schools were “the answer,” and small schools sprouted in many cities while beloved high schools with multiple pathways to graduation were closed. He climbed aboard the charter idea, funding many charters and underwriting the propagandistic charter-pushing film “Waiting for Superman,” in which every charter does its own thing.

Then he decided that “the answer” was standardization, and he bought and paid for the Common Core standards and urged alignment with tests, textbooks, and teacher training. Simultaneously, he funded districts to evaluate teachers by the rise or fall of student scores, and Arne Duncan made that practice a key element of his $5 billion Race to the Top. None of those data-based, data-driven policies worked. They were correct on paper but failed in reality.

Happily, he has turned his attention to problems where he can make a real difference: saving lives in impoverished nations.

He was appalled when Musk, his fellow billionaire, peremptorily shut down USAID. And he is not afraid of Musk or Trump.

The UK Financial Times interviewed Gates:

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates ratcheted up his feud with Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through what he said were misguided cuts to US development assistance.

Gates, who is announcing a plan to accelerate his philanthropic giving over the next 20 years and close down the Gates Foundation altogether in 2045, said in an interview that the Tesla chief had acted through ignorance.

In February, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in effect shut down the US Agency for International Development, the main conduit for US aid, saying it was “time for it to die”.

The co-founder of Microsoft, and once the world’s richest man himself, said the abruptness of the cuts had left life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses and could cause the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the Financial Times.

Gates said Musk had cancelled grants to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that prevents women transmitting HIV to their babies, in the mistaken belief that the US was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East. “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” he said.

Gates, 69, on Thursday announced plans to spend virtually his entire fortune over the next 20 years, during which time he estimates his foundation will spend more than $200bn on global health, development and education against $100bn over the previous 25 years. The Gates Foundation will close its doors in 2045, decades earlier than previously envisaged.

Good for you, Bill!

Categories Education Reform

Qatar Gives Trump a Super-Luxury Airplane to Replace Airforce 1

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2025 //
33

This is a shocking development. The government of Qatar is giving Trump an airplane worth $400 million to replace Airforce 1 and for Trump’s personal use after his Presidency. It will eventually be retired to the Trump “library.”

Forget the fact that the Constitution forbids the President from accepting gifts from any foreign nation (the Emoluments Clause). Trump fired all the federal ethics officers and replaced them with his personal choices. Coincidence?

The AP reported the funniest line:

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, when asked Friday if the president during his upcoming trip might meet with people ties to his family’s business, said it was “ridiculous” to suggest Trump “is doing anything for his own benefit.”

The Daily Mail has photos of the interior, fit for a Sultan.

Categories Ethics, International, Trump

Jeff Tiedrich: MAGA Doesn’t Like the New Pope!

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2025 //
4

Jeff Tiedrich is a graphic artist who writes a popular blog called “Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion.” He is irreverent, profane, outrageous, and very funny.

He wrote recently about MAGA’s reaction to the new Pope.

The College of Cardinals must have been conclaving the shit out of their search for a new pope, ’cause it only took those honchos two days find their boy.

meet Robert Prevost. he’s an American, born in Chicago. he roots for the White Sox. he’s 69 years old, and he’ll be popin’ up a storm as Leo XIV.

oh wait, I almost left out the best part: he’s a WOKE MARXIST POPE.

it only took about five minutes for someone to find the new pope’s not-twitter feed — and MAGA is throwing a shit-fit because it turns out that Robert Prevost/Leo XIV is their worst nightmare: a religious leader who actually follows the teachings of Jesus.

“According to his X/Twitter feed (@drprevost), the newly selected pope trashed Trump, trashed Vance, trashed border enforcement, endorsed DREAMer-style illegal immigration, repeatedly praised and honored George Floyd, and endorsed a Democrat senator’s call for more gun control.”

the horror.

pour one out for the internet oddity who calls himself Catturd. he’s going through some things right now.

too bad, so sad.

here’s Donny Convict’s side-piece Laura Loopy, back with another hot take.

the diaper-fillers are not entirely wrong — the current top-most thing on Robert/Leo’s not-twitter feed is a retweet taking Donny Convict to task for disappearing Venezuelan migrants off the streets and fuckity-byeing them into a Salvadoran slave-labor gulag.

furniture molester/eyeliner model JD Vance now has the distinction of being called out for shithead behavior by two consecutive popes— which I believe is a world record.

To finish reading, subscribe.

Categories Humor, Religion, Trump, Vance, J.D.

Republicans Planning Major Increase in Tax on College Endowments

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2025 //
15

Republicans are looking for ways to subsidize tax cuts for billionaires, and one likely target is endowments of colleges and universities. This move is an extension of Trump’s war against elite higher education, especially Harvard.

In Trump’s 2017 tax bill, he levied a tax of 1.4% on institutions of higher education with large endowments, relative to their enrollments. Current Republican thinking is a huge increase in that tax.

Be it noted that endowments fund scholarships for low-income students. The proposed taxes are mean-spirited and short-sighted.

Politico reported:

Endowments valued at $750,000 or less per student would be taxed at the current 1.4 percent rate, according to two of those people. Endowments valued between $750,000 to $1million per student would be taxed at a 10 percent rate and those greater than $1 million per student would be taxed at a 20 percent rate…

Under Trump’s 2017 tax bill, only universities with more than 500 students and endowment assets surpassing $500,000 per student face the current 1.4 percent tax. Ways and Means Republicans have considered both bumping up that tax rate significantly and applying it to a broader mix of U.S. colleges.

A menu of policies prepared by the House Budget Committee and obtained by POLITICO in January suggested bumping up the endowment tax to 14 percent. That would raise $10 billion over 10 years, according to the document.

One bill, introduced by Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas), would raise the excise tax on endowment profits up to 21 percent.

Categories Higher Education, Republicans, Trump

Michael Tomasky: Why No One Cares that Trump Is Raking in $1 Billion a Month

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2025 //
11

Why did Trump run for President in 2024?

  1. To stay out of jail.
  2. To destroy our government.
  3. To make money.

All three answers are correct. Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, recounts the latest financial scandal associated with Trump–the sale of Trump crytocurrency that is pulling billions into family pockets. And he tries to figure out why the story appears to have faded, instead of blowing up as a mind-boggling violation of the emoluments clause. That’s the part of the Constitution that says Presidents are not supposed to be getting rich by being President, especially by any sort of gift from foreign powers. Trump evaded that restriction in his first term, when he owned the hotel closest to the White Hiuse, and visiting potentates rented the most lavish suites. That was small potatoes. An investment firm in Abu Dhabi just put $2 billion into Trump cryptocurrency. Tomasky asks: does anyone care?

He writes:

Nicolle Wallace had Scott Galloway on her MSNBC show Thursday. She began by asking him what he makes of this moment in which we find ourselves. Galloway, a business professor and popular podcaster, could have zigged in any number of directions with that open-ended question, so I was interested to see the direction he settled on: “I think we essentially have become a kleptocracy that would make Putin blush. I mean, keep in mind that in the first three months, the Trump family has become $3 billion wealthier, so that’s a billion dollars a month.”

Stop and think about that. A presidency lasts, of course, 48 months (at most, we hope). Trump has been enriching himself at an unprecedented scale since day one of his second term—actually, since just before, given that he announced the $Trump meme coin a few days before swearing to protect and defend the Constitution.

And now, we know that he’s having a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in two weeks for his top $Trump investors, whose identities we may never know. How might these people influence his decisions? This whole arrangement is blatantly corrupt. And The New York Times had a terrific report this week about Don Jr. and Eric going around the world (Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia) making deals from which their father will profit.

I read these stories, as I’m sure you do, and I think to myself: How on earth is he getting away with this? It’s the right question, but we usually concentrate on the wrong answer.

For most people, they think first of the Democrats, because they’re the opposition, and by the traditions of our system they’re the ones who are supposed to stop this, or at least raise hell about it. Second, we might think about congressional Republicans, who, if they were actually upholding their own oaths to the Constitution, would be expressing alarm about this.

They both shoulder some blame, but neither of those is really the answer. Every time I ask myself how he gets away with this, I remember: Oh, right. It’s the right-wing media. Duh.

After the election, I wrote a column that went viral about how the right-wing media made Trump’s election possible. Fox News, most conspicuously, but also Newsmax, One America News Network, Sinclair, and the rest, along with the swarm of right-wing podcasters and TikTokers, created a media environment in which Trump could do no wrong and Kamala Harris no right.

Think back—I know you’ve repressed it—to that horror-clown-show Madison Square Garden rally Trump held the week before the election. It was, as the Times put it, a “carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism.” A generation or two ago, that would have finished off his campaign. Last year? It made no difference. No—it helped. And it helped because a vast propaganda network—armed with press passes and First Amendment protections—spent a week gabbing about how cool and manly it was.

Newsflash: They’re still at it.

First of all, Fox News is basically the megaphone of the Trump administration. In Trump’s first 100 days in office, key administration officials, reports Media Matters for America, appeared on Fox 536 times. That, obviously, is 5.36 times per day; in other words, assuming that a cable news “day” runs from 6 a.m. to midnight, that’s one administration official about every three hours. I’ve seen occasional clips where the odd host challenges them on this point or that, but in essence, this is a propaganda parade.

I tried to do some googling to see how Fox is covering the meme coin scandal. Admitting that Google doesn’t catch everything, the answer seems to be that it’s not. On the network’s website, there was a bland January 18 article reporting that he’d launched it; an actually interesting January 22 piece summarizing a critical column by The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, who charged that it was an invitation to bribery; and finally, an April 24 report that the coin surged in value after Trump announced the upcoming dinner—“critics” were given two paragraphs, deep in the article. (Interesting side note: Predictably, other figures on the far right have aped Trump by launching their own coins, among them former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley.)

But it’s not just Fox, and it’s not just on corruption. It’s all of them, and it’s on everything. You think any of them are mentioning Trump’s campaign promise to bring prices down on day one, or pointing out that all “persons” in the United States have a right to due process? Or criticizing his shambolic tariffs policies? I’m not saying there’s never criticism. There is. But the thrust of the coverage is protective and defensive: “Expert Failure & the Trump Boom” was the theme of one recent Laura Ingraham segment.

So sure, blame Democrats to some extent. A number of them are increasingly trying to bring attention to the corruption story, but there’s always more they could be doing. (By the way, new DNC Chair Ken Martin announced the creation one month ago of a new “People’s Cabinet” to push back hard against Trump. Anybody heard of it since?)

And of course, blame congressional Republicans. Their constitutional, ethical, and moral failures are beyond the pale, and they’re all cowards.

But neither of those groups is the reason Trump can throw a meme coin party and nothing happens; can send legal U.S. residents to brutal El Salvador prisons; can detain students for weeks because they wrote one pro-Palestinian op-ed; can shake down universities and law firms; can roil the markets with his idiotic about-faces on tariffs; can whine that bringing down prices is harder than he thought; can empower his largest donor, the richest man in the world, to take a meat-ax to the bureaucracy in a way that makes no sense to anyone, and so much more.

It’s all because Trump and his team operate within the protective cocoon of a media-disinformation environment that allows just enough criticism to retain “credibility” but essentially functions as a Ministry of Truth for the administration that would have shocked Orwell himself.

And just remember—a billion dollars a month.

Don’t be surprised to see Trump-branded stuff on the White House website any day now. Trump Bibles, Trump sneakers, MAGA hats, Trump watches, Trump trading cards, etc. why not?

Categories Accountability, Character, Corruption, Ethics, For-Profit, Media, Trump

Arkansas: Supporters of Abortion Rights Meet, Protestors Don’t Show Up

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2025 //
1

Arkansas is deep-red, so of course the Legislature banned abortion. Supporters of abortion rights gathered enough signatures to put the issue to the voters, but the politicians knocked their referendum off the ballot. But the issue has not gone away.

I thought readers might like to read about the persistence of abortion right supporters.

The Arkansas Times is a dissident website that keeps readers informed about events like this one. If you want to know what Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is doing, this is a great source.

Austin Gelder wrote about the annual planned parenthood Garden Party:

For proof of the sorry state of reproductive rights in Arkansas, consider that for the second year in a row, no protesters even bothered to show at the annual Planned Parenthood Garden Party.

It’s been a brutal run here since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision of 2022 whipped away the national right to abortion access,  pulling the trigger on an Arkansas law primed to ban virtually all abortions in the state as soon as our blood-red state government officials could get away with it.

Since then, the annual Planned Parenthood fundraiser still goes on. But the protesters who used to hoist their placards of bloody, dismembered fetus parts in view of the wine sippers and bidders at the silent auction tables aren’t a problem anymore. Transgender people and immigrants have displaced abortion care providers as the right’s new bogeyman, leaving reproductive rights advocates to regroup in peace.

Anti-abortion groups tout Arkansas as the “most pro-life state in the nation.” To the crowd at the Planned Parenthood Garden Party in Little Rock Wednesday night, other superlatives – worst maternal mortality rate in the country, vying with Mississippi for the highest rate of teen pregnancy, among the worst states for child well-being – are more apt. 

Planned Parenthood Great Plains Executive Director Emily Wales was in town for a party nonetheless. And while she didn’t sugarcoat the status report, it wasn’t quite as bitter as you might expect. 

“Arkansas has paved the way for some pretty awful policies, not just for abortion access, but also excluding us from the Medicaid program and then continuing to pass anti-abortion billswhen there is really no abortion that is accessible for people,” Wales said. “That is not about health care, it’s about messaging and fear.”  

Arkansas’s consolation prize for winning this race to the bottom is that we’re down here pioneering tips and tricks to share with other states who find themselves shut off from access to necessary medical care. A decade ago, then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson blocked Planned Parenthood clinics in Arkansas from collecting Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion services. (Federal reimbursements for abortions generally were banned even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.) Now, Planned Parenthood affiliates in other states are facing similar threats, and the Trump administration maintains a chokehold on the Title X federal funding that once helped cover the cost of family planning consultations, prescriptions and procedures.  

“I don’t want to lean into our trauma or say that we’re resilient, because we’ve always been under attack,” Wales said. “But we have learned lessons about how to adapt and change and meet the moment. And right now, we have sister affiliates in Planned Parenthood who are trying to figure out what happens if they lose Medicaid, or if their Title X funding that was recently cut for many Planned Parenthoods doesn’t come back, what do they do? And for places like Arkansas, we are now in the position of advising other Planned Parenthoods on how you keep your doors open.”

Doesn’t seem like much to brag about until you consider that Arkansas’s two Planned Parenthood clinics – one in Little Rock and one in Rogers – are seeing increasing numbers of patients each year, even with the state’s abortion ban in place. The number of patients served by Planned Parenthood in Arkansas rose nearly 45% from July 2023 to July 2024. Turns out they really do provide lots of other medical services after all!

Iffy weather necessitated a change of venue for this year’s garden party, from the grounds of a historic home in the Quawpaw Quarter to the decidedly less garden-themed Next Level Events in the Union Station basement. The regulars showed up anyway, their numbers weighted toward people old enough to have a glimmer of memory of the pre-Roe days, but a three-dozen-strong corps of young volunteers organized the nametag table and passed out hors d’oeuvres. 

Speakers skipped those apologetic qualifiers that used to precede seemingly every statement about abortion. None of that tired and defensive, “Nobody likes abortion, but …” anymore.

Instead, speakers leaned into the freedom that comes with having little to lose. The din of a chatty, tipsy crowd packed into a subterranean space helped, too. “I feel like I could say anything and you wouldn’t know,” Wales said. “I could be wildly offensive about, perhaps, the current administration, and no one would ever know.”

Other speakers laughed about the time Lori Williams, longtime clinical director at Little Rock Family Planning Services and the night’s winner of the Brownie Ledbetter Award, helped torpedo a 2013 bill to require ultrasounds for abortion access at six weeks by pulling out an alarmingly phallic vaginal ultrasound probe during a legislative committee hearing. 

Sarah Thompson, a leader with Grandmothers for Reproductive Rights and winner of this year’s Christina Mullinax Persistent Spirit Award, lamented progress made and lost.

“When I needed abortion care in Arkansas, I had to leave the state, and it was a long time ago. And now young women still have to leave the state to obtain abortion care,” Thompson said. “I’ll never stop doing this work. It’s part of who I am for the rest of my life.” (It should be noted that many Arkansas women still do access abortion services without leaving the state thanks to the prevalence of mail-order medication for early term abortions — though many Republicans want to put a stop to that as well.)

Arkansas is part of Planned Parenthood of Great Plains, a consortium that includes Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. Abortion is legal in Kansas, and last year, Missouri voters reinstated abortion rights, although state lawmakers there are angling to repeal them again. That kind of heartache is familiar to the 100,000+ Arkansans who signed a petition to give the state a chance to vote on reinstating abortion rights in 2024, only to see that opportunity smothered by dubious legal shenanigans.

“Care in Arkansas does not look the way we want it to, and eventually it will return to what it needs to be, but we’re going to keep working on that,” Wales said. “Until then, we will be creative and thoughtful, and we are not about to be intimidated by what’s happening at the federal level, because we are really, really good at undermining authority.”

Categories Arkansas, Gender, Health

Senator Chris Murphy Gives a Master Class in Cutting Through B.S.

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2025 //
4

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Homeland Security a few days ago. During the hearing, Senator Chris Murphy gave her a stern lecture on all the ways she is breaking the law–by overspending her budget, by picking up and deporting people with legal status, by ignoring the due process rights of those detained, and by repeatedly breaking the law and defying Congress.

It’s five minutes of your time, time well spent.

Categories Accountability, Character, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Trump

Trump Plans Deep Cuts to Interior Department, National Parks Service

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2025 //
10

Government Executive describes the deep cuts that the Trump administration and the DOGE team intend to impose on the Interior Department, with the collaboration of Secretary of the Interior Douglas Burghum, former Governor of North Dakota.

The Interior Department is finalizing reduction-in-force plans expected to target thousands of employees, including 1,500 at the National Park Service, with notices going out to employees within 10 days. 

The anticipated layoffs follow the departure of thousands of Interior employees leaving the department under various incentives. Interior earlier in May initiated a consolidation of several functions currently conducted by each bureau individually by rolling them up into the department’s headquarters, where they will report directly to Secretary Doug Burgum. Some of the employees who were part of that consolidation—such as those in IT, communications, finance, human resources and contracting—are eventually expected to feel the impacts of workforce downsizing. 

NPS is expected to issue around 1,500 RIFs, while the U.S. Geological Survey will lay off around 1,000 employees—focused on its Ecosystems Mission Area, according to a person familiar with the plans—and the Bureau of Reclamation will target around 100 to 150 employees, according to another employee there briefed on the details. Other components, such as the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife Service, are also expected to experience layoffs. Four sources confirmed the first round of RIFs are expected on or around May 15.  

Reclamation already lost about one-quarter of its 5,800 employees through incentivized departures, according to an employee briefed on the details, so it is expecting a smaller RIF of 100 to 150 employees. At NPS, meanwhile, just 5% of employees have so far opted into the “deferred resignation program”—which has enabled them to take paid leave through September, at which point they must leave government service—leading to a more significant expected RIF for the agency. 

In addition to NPS headquarters and regional offices, NPS’ Cultural Resources Stewardship, Partnerships, and Science Directorate and Natural Resource Stewardship and Science directorates are expected to be heavily impacted, with the vast majority of staff being laid off. Those divisions are made up of hundreds of biologists, archaeologists, geologists, historians and other scientists and specialists who help preserve and understand resources within the parks. 

While NPS staff were originally told the RIFs would focus on Washington and regional staff, wiping out those directorates would mean individual parks would also see direct impacts. Some of the functions of those offices are statutorily required, said Kriten Brengel, the National Parks Conservation Association’s senior vice president for government affairs, who added groups like hers would sue Interior if it follows through on its plans….

Government Executive first reported on Interior’s plan to consolidate functions across the department earlier this month, which Interior Secretary Doug Burgum subsequently confirmed in a memorandum. Burgum tapped the assistant secretary for policy, management budget—a role currently being filled by Tyler Hassenm—to lead the effort. Hassen previously served in the Department of Government Efficiency….

The cuts come on top of a significant exodus across Interior as employees have flocked to the deferred resignation, buyouts and early retirements all while a hiring freeze is in place. NPS has already lost around 13% of its workforce, according to NPCA, complicating Burgum’s order to keep parks open without reducing hours. 

The mandate—park superintendents will need a sign off from agency leadership to close even a trail or visitor center—already raised concerns with agency stakeholders even before the layoff plans were made clear. NPCA’s Brengel suggested Burgum was “setting up the Park Service for failure” as it aims to carry out the same level of operations without the requisite staff to do so. 

She added the expansion of NPS RIFs to the science teams means the cuts are “larger and more directly attacking the Park Service.” 

A USGS employee in the Ecosystems Mission Area said the cuts will likely spell the end of fish survey work, in which agency staff go out on ships to inform states of fish stocking and harvest rates. 

“The states do not have the funds or staff to take over,” the employee said. “There are few people in the US with these skills.” 

Mary Jo Rugwell, a long time BLM executive who now leads the Public Lands Foundation, said her former agency has lost more than 1,000 employees since President Trump took office, or about 10% of the workforce. The agency has long suffered from understaffing, Rugwell said, an issue exacerbated in Trump’s first term when he moved the agency’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado. Now, she said, as employees head for the exits and more RIFs are expected, BLM will struggle to carry out the Trump administration’s priorities to approve oil and gas leasing, grazing permits, drilling and timber sales, work that requires significant experience. 

“The very people you need to get this work done, they’re sending them packing,” Rugwell said. “And it doesn’t make any sense….”

“Morale is at an all time low,” one employee said. “People are worried about RIFs, contracts being cut and so many changes coming at once. Consolidation at the department is seen as a hostile takeover of bureau level functions, and a way to group people to make RIFs easier.”  

Categories Budget Cuts, Extremism, Funding, Musk, Elon, Trump
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