This op-ed was originally published by The Revelator. The introductory section is reprinted under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
On March 3, Randy Moore, the 20th chief of the U.S. Forest Service, stepped down after a lifelong career that started in 1981. A soil scientist and forester, Moore was also the first African American chief of the Forest Service. His resignation came on the heels of a widespread wave of mass firings of Forest Service personnel that amounted to approximately 10% of its workforce. In his farewell letter, Moore laid bare his frustration regarding the ongoing dismantling of the agency and the need for personnel to stick together and remain nimble, adding that for those in the Forest Service “feeling uncertainty, frustration, or loss, you are not alone.”
Moore was replaced by Tom Schultz, a timber executive with deep ties to the logging industry. Schultz is also the first chief in Forest Service history who has not previously worked in the agency. In his introduction letter, Schultz highlighted his 25 years of land management, focusing on his timber and mineral extraction directive roles in Idaho.
This change in leadership provides a clear example of what the Trump administration means to do to federal agencies and public lands: crush agency capacity, shift focus from conservation to exploitation, and bring private interests directly into public agencies whose mandate is to serve the public.
By weakening protections — and decimating the agencies in charge of enforcing those that are left — the Trump administration will ensure that economic activities have primacy over everything else, including, perhaps, the rule of law.
This shift is rooted in the ideology that nature should be commodified to the utmost extent allowable, and it’s part of a bigger strategy determined to withdraw the state from public life and toward a capitalist economy unrestrained from “unnecessary burdens” like public and environmental protections. Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for this presidential administration, includes detailed instructions to achieve these goals, primarily through diminishing the ability of the administrative state to fulfill its duties.
While much of this has been highly visible, just as much has not.
When austerity-minded governments cut services, often branded as “downsizing,” the costs end up in one of two places.
They can go to government contracts in the private sector, if agencies are expected to keep providing the same services or doing the same amount of work.
Or, if an agency is left resourceless and reduces its work, these costs become social and environmental externalities that fall first and foremost on frontline communities and affected ecosystems.
We’re already seeing the ground laid for both these outcomes, with dire consequences for our public lands and waters.
For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — a building block of the nation’s system for earth monitoring, climate research, and emergency preparedness and response — is preparing to lay off more than 1,000 employees — just ahead of hurricane season.
Even more concerning is the fate of the Department of the Interior, the agency responsible for managing more than 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 1.7 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf. All these resources are now up for grabs to the highest bidder. During CERAWeek, an energy industry meeting organized by S&P Global, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that “If the Interior Department was a stand-alone company, it would have the largest balance sheet in the world, bar none.”
Many of us feel overwhelmed by these changes, which was itself central to the strategy laid out by Project 2025.
We need an approach that allows us to make sense of this new reality. I believe we can understand this “war on nature” by grouping the administration’s actions into three main buckets.
