Trump | Environment.org

Trump said cuts wouldn’t affect public safety. Then he fired hundreds of workers who help fight wildfires.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders shrinking the federal workforce make a notable exception for public safety staff, including those who fight wildland fires. But ongoing cuts, funding freezes, and hiring pauses have weakened the nation’s already strained firefighting force by hitting support staff who play crucial roles in preventing and battling blazes.

Most notably, about 700 Forest Service employees terminated in mid-February’s “Valentine’s Day massacre” are red-card-carrying staffers, an agency spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica. These workers hold other full-time jobs in the agency, but they’ve been trained to aid firefighting crews, such as by providing logistical support during blazes. They also assist with prescribed burns, which reduce flammable vegetation and prevent bigger fires, but the burns can only move forward if there’s a certain number of staff available to contain them. (Non-firefighting employees without a red card cannot perform …

Yellowstone’s gateway town fears for its future amid Trump funding cuts

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| Pollution

On March 1, hundreds of people gathered in Gardiner, Montana, at the northern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The crowd — which included residents from across the state and current and former public lands employees — was part of a nationwide protest against the layoffs of federal workers.

Roughly 5 percent of National Park Service workers have been caught up in the sweeping layoffs carried out by Donald Trump’s administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. This isn’t counting the hundreds of others who are taking the “fork in the road” offer to resign from their positions. The staffing crisis facing national parks is felt not only within the federal workforce itself but also in gateway towns like Gardiner, where the economy depends heavily on Yellowstone.

There, under the Roosevelt Arch — named for President Theodore Roosevelt, who laid …

Republicans once embraced ‘green banks.’ Trump is trying to raid them.

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| Pollution

Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced last week that he had uncovered evidence of a massive fraud perpetrated by the Biden administration. In a video posted to social media, the former Republican congressman from New York said that Biden’s EPA had “parked” roughly $ 20 billion at a private bank, “rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day.”

The Biden administration’s plan, Zeldin said, was for the bank to distribute the money to a handful of nonprofits, which would then send it out to “NGOs and others” for climate-related spending. But he vowed to stop that plan. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” he said.

But the scheme Zeldin described is not …