Late Tuesday afternoon, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency’s 121-year history. Not a budget cut. Not a policy shift. Not a “reorganization.” An execution.
They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America. They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone. And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.
Not that it makes any difference anymore, but the Forest Service was created by several acts of Congress, and the president has zero authority to dissolve it.
Since we live in a fascist dictatorship run by a dementia-riddled orange pedophile, I guess it doesn’t matter. But I still felt the need to point it out.
If you read the article though, it’s not as simple as being dissolved. They’re just massively reorganizing how it’s run so it’s dysfunctional and the original mission is lost. They’re letting states (industry) have dominating access and control over USFS policies and shutting down long running and irreplaceable research projects. Like RFK’s CDC, if you stop testing and gathering facts, you can then justify any policy you want.
Luckily that reorganization is also illegal, and this will be reversed in the courts
Yeah, but that will take months, and in the meantime, the offices are closed, people are out of jobs, research is interrupted and lost. 9 months from now, the courts will tell them it’s illegal, and they’ll just say, “So what?”
They still get what they want anyway, so who cares if it’s illegal? It won’t stop until people start going to prison.
and this will be reversed in the courts
Eventually, after much of the damage is done and essentually irreversible.
Can you provide a source for research being shut down? Only thing I’ve seen stated is research being moved to a centralized location, but nowhere has anyone stated whether any research is being shut down, and that would thus he speculation
They are closing the labs where the work is happening. You can’t just throw your experiment in the back seat of your car and drive to Colorado.
And how can you centralize research when so much of it is location specific? It’s costs more money to fund “off site” long distance research on a temporary basis versus having something local and long term.
Let’s not forget it’s not all the orange baboons fault. He is surrounded by a gaggle of buffoons that itch to do his bidding, the checks and balances have been bought and paid for. This is a systemic failure of our government that has been guaranteed since big money got into lobbying. If not for big PACS and private donors trump would not be able to accomplish all the shit he has done. The wild dog has been let off the leash and any body that disagrees gets bit. Don’t give trump all the credit he’s not that smart, there are plenty of players in this game that makes it possible for us to get so utterly fucked. Remember this at the ballot box, and make damned sure every person you know does too. Let’s not forget voter complacency is partly to blame here, our country doesn’t fail us like this without our complacency.
I like your last point. The American people long ago fell asleep at the wheel. We either gobble up propaganda and vote for his insanity or don’t think it matters and sit out. Chickens are coming home to roost.
Indeed, for that to matter, the US constitution would have to be enforced, against the executive.
In 3 months a judge will declare it illegal. It will have been too late.
Ah, Justice.
Blitzkrieg Policies. He did it back in his 1st term but no one listened or learned.
It will have been too late
the burden of prophecy 😭
And they will still push ahead with it.
The members of the Forestry service are the only ones who can stop this. They can refuse to move to Salt Lake and they can refuse any unlawful orders.
Unfortunately they’ll have to risk their careers, and their physical well being to do it.
Don’t these things require congressional approval?
Oh yeah I forgot they just ignore everyone and do what they want
God fucking damnit I can’t write what I want to here
Although you can’t write it, I imagine many of us are feeling the same way.
Comical at this point. Eventually people just stop following these “orders”.
Rome fell when most of its population no longer saw its government as legitimate.
Eventually people just stop following these “orders”.
Will they though? So far there seems to be an endless supply of eager serfs willing to carry out every single order of his.
Eventually is too late.
Right now is also too late. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
I love you. This is something so many people need to hear, and crucially, understand.
It’s a special kind of whataboutism to always claim that nothing is good enough. Nudges in the right direction matter. We’re so tied up in the perfect solution that the nudges fail, and here we are.
It’s a special kind of whataboutism to always claim that nothing is good enough.
It’s also doomerism. I always point out that - idk, 90% is not the same as 100% - but emotionally I totally get it. I would not want to live in the USA right now.
I cope by doing cool shit.
Everything you post here is logged. Act accordingly.
https://www.fiftyfifty.one/organizer-resources
Build or join a safe space where you can do cool shit too.
A few fucking traitors growing spines could fix all of this.
In theory so could a single bullet.
It’s never too late, just too late for doing it “following the Rule of Law”.
Start filling the molotovs
…with these gas prices??
Especially because of these gas prices
whos gonna sweep the forests now?
Trump is the biggest idiot on the planet.
Tired of this dystopian show. Can someone change the channel already?
I hear the US has ~400 million civilian-owned channel-changers.
Disappointed with the article. I’d ai;dr but it’s a pretty important subject.
This is what you voted for protest-non-voters.
Think there’s just more non-voters than this mythically influential “protest voter” everyone keeps talking about. How about we focus on mandatory voting laws and anti-gerrymandering instead of falling for psyops talking points?
You’re really telling me 89 million people “protested” by staying at home, when Kamala lost by 0.96% of the eligible voting population? Or did these people just not care to even show up no matter what?
Sounds like you’re looking to find who’s responsible. I’m interested in informing protest-non-voters what they voted for.
That’s nice, but that doesn’t help us prevent our current predicament, or stop the alienation of disenfranchised voters in the future. Hispanics by and large also voted for Trump, and those were not “protest votes”. That does not mean they deserve the inhumane treatment ICE is perpetuating towards them.
There are 89 million untapped voters, Democrats should be salivating over that. Instead they are pairing with the Cheneys and moving farther right.
Harris broke fundraising records with her candidacy with 64% of those donations being first time donors. They actually could have had the momentum to mobilize non-voters. Instead they capitulated to corporate interests as usual.
Again, the problem isn’t “protest voters”, they are such a small percentage. People focusing on this are ignoring a lot of other factors, and honestly it seems like another way to scapegoat a DNC systemic problem.
See? Again, I’m informing protest-non-voters what they voted for. Ciao.
Um, technically, this is what they not voted for. As many of them just abstained from voting. Also, with the electoral college most who “protest voted” lived in heavy blue areas.
The election went for the republicans because Kamala refused to distance herself from Joe Biden and also massive campaigns of vote suppression in Georgia and elsewhere.
But yeah, argue with other leftists, it’s not like a fragmented left is the reason fascists keep winning or anything.
Edit: Seems like a lot of people on here don’t know how the electoral college works and also want to feel smug about how they voted. Typical. I’ll say it for the people in the back. We need all fucking hands on deck right now as our government is currently descending further into fascism. The last election doesn’t matter. Register to vote. Organize with your neighbors to protect your local polling places. Donate time or money to local mutual aid. If you don’t know where or how you can start at either link below.
https://www.fiftyfifty.one/organizer-resources
https://southerncoalition.org/resources/rapid-response-101/
Most importantly don’t be a smug asshole and instead think “What would I have done in 1933 Nazi Germany.” We need all the help we can get.
Also sounds like you’re looking to blame. I am looking to inform protest-non-voters what they voted for. And yes this is what they voted for.
They aren’t leftists. -They’re advocating for the old neoliberal candidate which was/is center-right
Also leftists are anti-genocide.
This is what you voted for liberals.
Pretty sure liberals largely voted correctly actually
Perpetuating a cycle of weak, corporate candidates that allowed for the Republicans to get to this point is not correct, actually.
If someone voted for Dems, this isn’t what they voted for.
Perpetuating a cycle of weak, corporate candidates that just allowed the Republicans to get stronger and stronger? Yeah mate, you did.
Lol funny how you try to turn voting into not voting, and not voting into … something else. Anyways, see article and remember, this is what you voted for protest-non-voters. Ciao.
I didn’t say anything about non-voters, nor did I equate voting with not voting. Funny how you just make shit up.
Won’t someone- anyone- finish it?
deleted by creator
I promise, Donald is.
Some more detail can be found here.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-trump-not-closing-061142459.html
Except it tried to minimize what these pieces of crap are doing.
As stated above, “They’re ripping the headquarters out of Washington and shipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah — the beating heart of the anti-public-lands movement in America. They’re shuttering every single one of the ten regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago — and with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back when politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives. They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it’s gone. And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees called “state directors,” embedded in state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their careers demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way.”
This follows the same old conservative playbook of sabotaging and defending an agency that they hate (because it actually has enforceable rules for the rich) and then complain about it’s ineffectiveness while trying to convince you rules to close it down.
Then they can buy our protected forest lands and put in data centers and taco bells. You guys are SO dumb
Considering the rhetoric of the story, and the misinformation, I don’t put much stock into it. Yahoo has never been a source of biased information and I have no idea who the other source is, or who their sources are (Facebook?).
The yahoo article is talking about a facebook post. The main article is talking about the USDA press release.
The press release is talking about shuttering research facilities and “consolidating” them as if forestry research is the kind of thing that sits on a table and can be moved easily.
It goes on to talk about reorganizing base on state level instead of regions and how this “strengthens federalism”. Those regions aren’t as arbitrary as state borders. The forestry service mission was split up like that because those regions have different needs. Colorado and Wyoming do not need separate forestry offices.
Repeating points from a press release does not make a source unbiased, it makes them have the same bias as the source.
Forestry Service just talks to a reorganization in an effort to streamline. The article from this thread is filled with wild claims that originally appeared in a Facebook post.
Expanding on what the curated language of the press release actually means for the Forestry Service is not wild claims. It’s context.
“This is just streamlining” is the bias. This is ‘streamlining’ in the same vein of what happened to USAID.
It certainly isn’t clear. I’m not going to accept a story from a source I’ve never heard of without scrutiny.
There’s a part of me that wants it to be true because I truly despise this administration, but it still deserves a critical eye.
Agreed.
I’m wondering, when will your country stop using the dummy dollar for international trade? When will your country stop buying dummy weapons? Why do the dummies have a UN veto?
When will your country stop enabling the dummies? That doesn’t seem all that smart to me.
We can’t afford forest anymore. We got wars to fight.
It’s okay. If I understand right, this doesn’t matter 'cuz some combination of Her Laugh and Gaza trump literally anything and all else, combined or something.
Or wait, are we now on the, “Dems would’ve done this too!1!”?
Edit: I take it tankies from .ml didn’t like that hefty dose of sarcasm.
No, everyone is just sick and tired of hearing you complain about how it’s all the Democrat voters faults for the billionth time every time the Trump administration does yet another terrible thing. At this point it’s not even a question of whether people agree with you or not, it’s been two years, that ship has sailed, the horse is dead, you can stop beating the bloody smear where it used to be.
Who said anything about democrat voters? Kudos to Democrat voters who voted Harris!
These are No-Voting couch sitter and Third-Party voters, after all.
It takes numerous factions acting as blocks to build beyond the finish-line, and those couch-sitters and third-party voters were one missing block contributing to the colossal fuck-up. Time to wise up before November elections, and 2028 – lest the gullible suckers fall for the right-wing wedge-driving kool-aid yet again. This is thus not so re-litigating the past insomuch as learning from past mistakes and evolving moving forward so as not to repeat history in a cycle of insanity.
You agree you’ll support and vote Democrat over this fascist regime then and advocate others who try to sit on the couch or vote third party to do the same given your comment, correct?
You agree you’ll support and vote Democrat over this fascist regime then and advocate others who try to sit on the couch or vote third party to do the same given your comment, correct?
I’ll vote Democrat but I won’t support them if they don’t do anything to deserve my support. Half the blame for the last loss is on the non and 3rd party voters (and the Republican voters of course) but the other half of the blame lands squarely on Harris and the DNC. When your own voters are screaming at you to take a position on something, and you take the opposite position it’s little surprise that you lose even if you’re “the lesser evil”. Continuing to run as diet Republicans is not a winning strategy as the last election demonstrated.
The one bit of good news going into the midterms and looking ahead to the next election is that there have been a number of actual progressive Democrat wins recently despite massive campaigns by both Republicans and old guard Democrats to smear them so there’s some hope that we won’t see a Harris or Biden 2.0 in the next couple elections. When the DNC gets out of its own way and lets popular candidates run on actually progressive campaigns they win. When they either refuse to take a stance or worse take the same stance as Republicans in order to not upset the billionaires and corporate donors they lose. You can blame the voters all you want, but the DNC is just as much at fault for failing to win those voters as the ones that sit out the elections in disgust.
I’ll vote Democrat but I won’t support them if they don’t do anything to deserve my support.
Voting is by definition a show of support, arguably the most important show of support.
Yes but also no. There are people (like presumably lennybird) that think supporting a candidate means you aren’t allowed to criticize them. For instance back when everyone was criticizing Harris for sticking with Israel there were a bunch of people attacking those people saying that they need to STFU because Trump was worse. Harris was a terrible candidate, she was just better than Trump (by a lot) or Biden (marginally). The unfortunate reality of the US political system as it exists today is that you don’t vote for a candidate, you vote against the other one, because both the Democrats and the Republicans suck, it’s just a question of degree.
So yes, I voted for Harris because she was the least bad option between the two viable candidates, but I sure as hell complained about her and Trump every chance I got. Just once it would be really refreshing to see the DNC run a candidate that I actually want to vote for instead of making me vote against the Republican.
This is just a stupid and ineffective strategy to win the election. You guys lost to Trump of all people due to Dems being ineffective and refusing to listen to their base. Now you’re just trying to do the same thing again. Remind me again about the definition of insanity?
Nah. This is completely incorrect and your boldfaced assumption as to this reason is why we lost. False Equivalence botherism needs to be put to rest. Harris was better in literally every way. The only reason, and I mean the only reason fools fell for it was because of billionaires, and foreign dictators from Bibi to Putin helping to put their thumb on the scale.
What’s so odd and outright fallacious about this line of reasoning is to suggest that the Democratic candidate must be perfect, and not just simply and obviously better than the binary alternative choice.
It’s literally outright fallacious to equate wanting a Democratic candidate that listens to their constituents with saying we want a perfect Democratic candidate. Can you please not lie so openly and brazenly? You’re simply doubling down on doing the insanity thing now. Haven’t you learned anything from 2024?
Decent attempt at gaslighting but not going to work.
Yes or no: no-voters and third-party voters contributed to the situation we’re in, and in the same way these same groups claimed Biden was complicit in genocide, so too are these no-voters and third-party voters complicit on the worsening crisis in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, the deaths from ICE and BP, and of course OP’s current subject regarding the US Forest Service (leaving aside climate change regression).
It’s okay if the own up to their catastrophic blunder, so long as they don’t repeat it going forward.
What part of showing you misrepresenting what I said is gaslighting? Do you even know what the word means?
Funny how you think voters are complicit in the worsening crisis by demanding Biden and Harris to stop supporting a genocide, but somehow the Biden administration gets a pass despite directly strengthening Israel and vetoing every effort by the UN to rein in Israel’s actions which led to them being emboldened and doing whatever they currently please. Now that’s pure gaslighting if I ever see one.
You can continue defending the Democrats only listening to the elite class and alienating their voters, but it is the responsibility of the party to persuade voters to vote for them. Expecting the majority of voters to be informed enough to vote for the lesser evil of the Democrats without them putting in any effort to court them is hilariously naive considering the continuous gutting of your education system and worker’s rights. That’s the biggest blunder of the whole 2024 election. It also shows how out-of-touch the Democrats have become to even think that was possible.
In order to win, you need to look at reality and stop imagining the existence of the large voter base that is always informed enough to vote for the lesser evil despite being ignored and the moderate Republican that would vote for Democrats if you appeal to them. You also need to stop advocating for the status quo given that it is the current system that created the mess you’re in right now. Any Democratic candidate that is in favour of the status quo in the next presidential election is one that supports the continuous downward spiral of your country.
I agree with you, but, I am curious, what does a departure from the status quo mean to you? Is not supporting Israel enough? I tend to say a lot of the same things you have in conversations, but, then I go “I don’t really have any solutions though…” so I look like an idiot.
You guys need more progressive policies. Examples being:
- Proper healthcare system, either through single payer system or through government-controlled pricing of medicine and drugs and a national insurance. The rights to access healthcare for anyone should also be enshrined if possible.
- Tax your billionaires properly. The top bracket should not be 37%.
- Get rid of Citizen United. Get uncontrolled money lobbying out of your politics. To go even further, you might even want to get rid of corporation personhood and stop people in charge and investors from being shielded from the consequence of their decisions.
- Move away from car dependency and invest more in public transport. Get better standards for driving tests and get rid of loopholes that allows car manufacturers to categorise SUVs and all pickup trucks as a work vehicle to avoid emission requirements.
- Stricter gun regulations, especially for private gun sales. Psychological evaluation should be a basic requirement to owning a gun.
- Improving worker’s rights with federal minimums for paid leave, sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, increased minimum wage to a livable wage, and remove exceptions for minimum wage by counting tips and such.
- Invest more in lower education while regulating the price of universities and colleges. Education is one of the first steps toward improving the lives of the future generation and the country.
These are just some examples of things that can help the US catch up with the rest of the world. It might not be possible to achieve all of these within 4 years, but you guys need a politician that are willing to fight for them instead of ones that only flip flops their opinion based on consultant recommendation.
Edit: I take it tankies from .ml didn’t like that hefty dose of sarcasm.
“I was just joking, guys!”
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Reporting in from not .ml, you’re a pretentious edgelord at best, or a Russo-Asian toe-sucker at worst.
Absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand my comment?
Russo-Asian toe-sucker at worst.
Like, what does this mean? That you believe I’m an apologist for them, or… ?
Removed by mod
Putin and Xi along with Bibi can all fuck off; agreed?
