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During a Feb. 14 speech before the Wyoming Legislature, U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R, heaped praise on the Trump administration and its frenzied policy push. She gushed about axing environmental protections and bashed electric vehicles even as she praised Elon Musk’s DOGE-ified crusade to “ferret out waste, fraud and abuse.”
“Wyoming is going to enjoy the opportunity to be part of this great golden age,” she said.
Not all of Lummis’ constituents will see much gold in this age, however. Even as she spoke, many of them were falling victim to the administration as it terminated thousands of federal employees — i.e., members of what Musk considers the “parasite class” — including nearly 6,000 from the U.S. Forest Service and the Interior Department. Dozens if not hundreds of those jobs were in Wyoming, where, at the end of 2024, the federal government employed about 8,400 people — 3% of the state’s entire workforce. This was all on top of the National Park Service’s hiring freeze, which could eliminate more than 300 seasonal positions at Yellowstone National Park alone.
Most of the fired employees were probationary, a category that applies not only to rookies, but also to people who have been promoted or transferred within the last couple of years. And because most were fired rather than laid off, they may not be able to collect unemployment. These are people who relied on their jobs to pay for rent, food and health care — Wyoming residents who paid taxes and raised families in their local communities, and who may now have to leave the state, since the private sector in the rural West is rarely large enough to absorb that many workers.
This purge has deprived the state not only of a number of jobs and their economic benefit, but also of the many services the ex-employees provided, from fire prevention and wildfire smoke-exposure research to wastewater treatment, trail maintenance and restroom cleaning. That’s already being felt in national parks like Zion, where understaffed entry booths caused a traffic jam that spanned the entire length of Springdale, the park’s gateway community. Yosemite National Park has paused reservations for several campgrounds this summer due to understaffing, and some national park units are considering opening only part-time.
It’s not just public-lands agencies. The federal Bonneville Power Administration, which operates hydropower dams and a good portion of the Northwest’s electrical grid and funds itself through electricity sales, lost more than 400 positions in the purge, either through outright termination, buyouts or early retirement. This abrupt loss has generated serious concerns about grid reliability and safety.
The administration insists that the firings and other spending cuts are all happening in the name of efficiency and waste reduction, and that the mass cutbacks are saving the government — and therefore the taxpayers — billions of dollars.
But this is a lie.
The federal government may very well be rife with inefficiencies, but to honestly tackle this would require an actual audit by forensic accountants of each agency’s budget. Instead, Trump has given his billionaire benefactor — who is not an accountant, and barely an engineer— free rein and a large budget to haphazardly slash jobs without regard for the public good. The firings will reduce efficiency, not raise it; any short-term savings will soon give way to long-term losses.
Trump’s erratic freezing of Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts funds is rippling across the region as well, in ways that reveal the arbitrary nature of the cuts. Western states each lost as much as $156 million that was earmarked to bring rooftop and community solar to their residents, though some of that funding was later restored, while elsewhere it remains in limbo. Some $90 million in federal funding has been withheld from the Hopi Tribe in Arizona, forcing it to suspend projects to electrify off-grid homes and install solar-powered microgrids to pump well water, as well as attempt to economically recover from the shutdown of Black Mesa’s coal mines. At the same time, the administration released a $1.44-billion, Biden-era loan to Calumet to fund its biofuel refinery expansion in Montana so that it can produce “sustainable” jet fuel. How’s that for priorities?
Sheer incompetence can explain some of this, together with impatience and more than a soupçon of malice aforethought. For Donald Trump, it’s another example of governance by spite: His policies are designed to avenge himself on all the people and groups that he feels victimized by, whether it’s Barack Obama, Joe Biden or the entire population of California. Musk’s motivation is similar: He wants to eliminate the agencies that oversee his myriad businesses even as he tweets that his DOGE rampage is part of his vow to “destroy the woke mind virus,” whatever the hell that means. His cuts include 6,700 Internal Revenue Service workers, including about 100 in Ogden, Utah, many of whom were hired by the Biden administration to get wealthy folks to pay their fair share of taxes.
In addition to delivering direct economic pain to Western communities, Musk, Trump and company are also driving already underfunded and understaffed federal agencies into a state of utter dysfunction. This is likely to leave the Park Service unable to keep up with the millions of park visitors or their impacts and hinder the Forest Service’s ability to carry out prescribed burns and other fire prevention work, while the Bureau of Land Management will have even fewer folks around to enforce regulations — and the agency will also be slower to process permits for oil and gas drilling, solar, wind and geothermal installations and other projects on public lands.
Some $90 million in federal funding has been withheld from the Hopi Tribe in Arizona.
This will spawn claims that the federal agencies are unable to carry out their missions, which in turn will provide more ammunition to right-wing lawmakers to hand over public lands and their management to state and private interests.
Perhaps that’s what Lummis had in mind when she described this as a new golden age, one in which states like Wyoming and Utah seize control of public lands, unleash drill rigs and draglines on the resource-rich parcels, and sell off the rest to the highest bidder, the public interest be damned. This blessed age will also be one of diminished local economies, decaying national park infrastructure and overflowing toilets, widespread power outages, catastrophic wildfires and decimated public lands. In the end, that might not be a coincidence.
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