Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

February 25, 2025

😵 Trump Ticker 😱

One of the things the Land Desk is trying to do in these troubled times is to try to separate the rhetoric from reality, or to weed through the hype and alarmism to determine how a Trump administration action will play out or already is playing out on the ground.

It’s not easy, in part because the administration keeps working at cross purposes, making it very unclear who’s running the show or even what is actually being done. Is Trump, who yearns for the golden age of 1870 to 1913, when the Robber Barons ruled the roost and tariffs were in place to protect their industries, in charge? Or is it his billionaire benefactor (and Robber Baron of the AI age), Elon Musk, who has boasted of taking a “chainsaw” to the bureaucracy, purportedly in the name of efficiency?

On the one hand you’ve got Musk taking his figurative chainsaw to federal agencies in a ham-handed way, as one Land Desk commenter charitably put it, slashing jobs thoughtlessly and without foresight. And on the other, you have Trump urging Musk to get “more aggressive” with his chainsaw even as the administration scrambles to retract Musk’s actions by rehiring at least some of the fired employees — thus offsetting the claimed spending cuts. It’s hard to tell whether this is the result of sheer incompetence, or some elaborate shell game intended to confuse and distract us from even more sinister actions.

Maybe the goal is simply to traumatize federal employees — as Project 2025 architect and Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought put it — and make them afraid to go to work. That way they won’t be able to protect Americans and their land, water, and air from corporations. I’m not making this up:

What is wrong with these people!?!

That motive jibes with Musk, Trump, and far-right pundits characterizing federal employees as freeloading, paper-shuffling bureaucrats — even calling them members of the “parasite class.” Which is wrong, inaccurate, and frankly a rather shitty way to talk about the folks who keep airplanes in the air, work to ensure our food and water is safe, enforce federal laws, and maintain the trails, clean the restrooms, and work to prevent catastrophic forest fires on the public lands that make America great. If MAGA actually believes their own rhetoric, then it is more proof that they have no idea what they’re talking about or doing.

One thing is clear: There’s nothing efficient about any of this. Musk and his minions are not only wasting tens of millions of dollars on this ketamine-fueled charade, but also the goal clearly is not to tackle waste, fraud, and abuse. If it were, he’d bring in a team of forensic accountants — not software coders — to meticulously comb through the books and make surgical, precise cuts if and where they were needed. If cost-saving was the goal, he would not have fired more than 6,000 IRS employees — including more than 100 in Ogden, Utah — who were hired to ensure that the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes — and therefore increase revenues and more than offset their salaries.

And, if it were sincere about its stated mission, instead of eviscerating federal agencies, the administration would give the folks on the ground more latitude in determining how to cut costs and better serve the public — even if it meant increasing the number of employees. After all, a stretched-thin workforce does not make for a well-oiled machine, and it may even work against Trump’s other objectives. While firing a bunch of Bureau of Land Management folks might make the agency less able to enforce regulations on oil and gas companies, it also slows down the drilling permitting process. That’s why the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association donated $800,000 to the state BLM office in 2014: It wanted to grease the wheels, of course, but also increase staffing to speed up permit processing for drilling the Greater Chaco Region.

If Musk and Trump knew what they were doing, they would realize in advance that axing the staffers that oversee the nation’s nuclear arsenal was a bad idea, that firing National Park Service employees and freezing seasonal hires would wreak havoc on the parks and their gateway communities, and that terminating more than 400 employees of the Bonneville Power Administration would imperil reliability on the Northwest’s grid.

In the last several days, some of those firings have been reversed — or at least Trump has indicated that he will reverse them. But again, it’s not clear which positions will be restored or why or even when. At BPA, for example, they only brought back 30 of the employees (which was apparently a struggle, since they had already been cut off from their federal email accounts). The National Park Service has indicated it may hire more seasonal employees this year than in the past — but there are no plans to restore the jobs of 1,000 permanent workers who were unceremoniously fired. This in an agency that has seen staffing numbers decrease even as visitation has soared.

The result of all of this back and forth? More confusion.

What is clear is that thousands of federal employees are out of jobs and the effects are bound to ripple across communities and economies, especially in rural Western areas where the federal government is one of the largest, most stable employers and the private sector isn’t large or robust enough to reabsorb those workers. Visitors to the parks will experience it as well: Traffic into Zion National Park has been backing up into Springdale thanks to understaffed entrance booths, and Saguaro National Park is closing its visitor center on Mondays due to staff shortages. This, surely, is merely the beginning of the fallout.

I’ll do my best to keep track of how it plays out, and if you see any of the impacts on public lands near you, please let me know!