Summary
The Trump administration’s recent mass layoffs of national park and forest staff have sparked outrage as services deteriorate and safety concerns grow.
Around 1,000 National Park Service employees (5%) and 3,400 Forest Service workers (10%) were terminated on February 14, causing long entrance lines, trail closures, and reduced visitor services.
Former employees like wilderness ranger Kate White worry about visitor safety and ecological damage at popular destinations.
Conservation work for endangered species has halted, and wildfire response capabilities are threatened. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the cuts as deficit reduction, while critics call for policy reversal.
Who will rake the leaves? Not raking the leaves is the cause of the recent increased wildfires, according to Donald Trump’s own word salad.
Conservatives not liking conservation.
Ironic that Joe Rogan hosts a monthly ‘Protect our Parks and Wildlife’ pod, then considerably helps to get Trump elected, who then makes moves to fuck up parks and wildlife.
All these fuckers talk about is deficit reduction. We gotta cut social services and stuff people rely on to save money cuz the deficit. But they aren’t trying to save money. They’re trying to give themselves the biggest tax break imaginable and add to the deficit. They just want us to pay for it.
It’s the biggest fucking scam in the world And your representatives are lying to you so they can get rich.
Every dollar given to the IRS yields 5-9 dollars back in recovered taxes.
If I told you you could put a dollar in and multiply that by fivefold in a year, you’d be a fool to not leverage it.
If you were running america as a business, you would failing a fiducial duty by not investing in it.
Now, I wonder why the billionaires in charge of government don’t do it?
Hmm.
All Billionaires are bankrolled by taxpayer subsidiaries.
Capitalism is Communism for the rich.
Representatives aren’t representing you. They represent their rich donors and themselves.
There does seem to be a lot of wasteful spending, do you not agree?
I’d far prefer a minimum income or something along those lines. Or just fund electricity production instead if you’re worried about people not working.
This is where it appears like the progressives don’t actually help the average person, and you get someone like Trump elected.
This is where it appears like the progressives don’t actually help the average person
Another instance of “this is what I believe progressives/leftists/liberals do” and being completely off about it. Lol This is becoming a thing around here, isn’t it. Third time this week.
They don’t support the most useful programs for the poor like universal healthcare, I know that much. I remember when Joe Biden was building entire wings onto for-profit hospitals during Covid as he said he was against universal healthcare.
lol Joe Biden is center right, he is not a progressive
Yes, most Democrats aren’t Left enough. Some are trying to push the party to the Left, however.
I think the confusion here is your blanket “they” is conflating the mainstream Democratic party instead of those of us who are pushing this stuff at the grassroots level, e.g. actual progressives/Leftists etc.
The idea of what they consider to be wasteful and what I consider to be wasteful are very different things. And I don’t want to feed into that narrative. They weren’t worried about government waste till they wanted to give themselves bigger tax cuts. If they cared about actual waste, they wouldn’t remove people in charge of oversight. NIH research isn’t wasteful, CFPB isn’t wasteful. USAID isn’t wasteful. These things pay huge dividends to society. Removing contracts already lined up for other companies and giving it to yourself is the definition of wasteful. Removing the organizations that were investigating your labor practices is cronyism.
So no I don’t agree. So if you wanna talk about helping the average person, maybe point to some changes that have happened that’ll in some way actually help people and not just make the obscenely wealthly a little richer. But you’re unlikely to find any.
Conservatives generally believe in monetarism or Austrian economics, you’re not exactly unveiling a secret conspiracy, they believe tax cuts help the poor and lower the cost of goods. This is what people voted for.
You really can’t find anything in the current DOGE documents outlining waste, something that should be going to actually help the poor instead? I think my point stands that we need to simplify the spending if we want to avoid conservative governance, we all know its not being run efficiently and is rife with corruption.
So let’s get this straight, social services are wasteful and don’t help the poor. So let’s cut them AND raise taxes on the poor while we cut taxes for the rich? Even in that framework it doesn’t make any sense.
I don’t know for a fact that any of the US spending is all that corrupt at the federal level, don’t presume that we agree there. The straws they grasp at as “wasteful” are pennies.
Notice how they don’t touch military, social security or medicare. The latter two paper over social issues that could be addressed but conservatives can’t cut them because it would be massively unpopular. No amount of “simplified spending” can fix the fundamental flaws in these programs. So in the structure of government spending we’re allowed to have, it’s not wasteful. It’s literally all PR and conservative talking points.
It makes sense in the eyes of Milton Friedman and Austrian economist, who believe that it raises the price of goods. Taxing the rich is usually taxing corporations, since the rich aren’t exactly liquidating their holdings every year.
This is the welfare queen argument applied to all of governance and it was a lie then. None of the fraud is adding up and none of this will absolutely help the poor. It’s all gonna go to making billionaires a slightly higher billionaire.
What economic theory do you tend to gravitate towards that says the US should be running outlandish deficits every year, and that it benefits the citizens?
I’d be curious to read more into it.
The economic theory that “cutting” critical services (ie: privatizing or starving the beast) is more expensive than just paying for what’s needed. The only cheap form of government is no government at all, and I don’t think many people would like that in practice.
Well that’s silly, America is still running emergency Covid level deficits. Powell himself said its not sustainable.
The future looking like
What is that image from?
spark outrage
Fucking do something! I am sick of reading how X is upset at how things have be ruined at Y.
Why do you need staff to maintain and preserve the National Parks when you’re just gonna sell them all off to buy a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve?
parks are getting setup to be stripped mined of resources and the areas polluted by the efforts
was happening under the Democrats watch too just with more finesse but since both parties are paid from the same checkbook we as citizens are just forced to watch the strip mining of our country with no way out
Both parties are the same, yet only one of them just fired a bunch of important staff. Exactly the same.
Biden protected 9 Million Acres of land and water, and Trump intentionally laid off national park defenders at the start of his first term to the point that the parks saw unprecedented destruction and that conservationists and the NPCA said it would take hundreds of years to undo the damage, and Trump cleared swaths of protected land for his stupid border wall with high explosives, but they’re exactly the same.
Overall, the Biden administration has conserved 674 million acres of U.S. lands and waters. These protections include 15 new, expanded, and restored national monuments, adding up to nearly 9 million acres.
I am not sure they will get away with that but the national forests I am most worried about. They just appointed a timber lobbyist to head the USFS and I’m assuming we can kiss our nation’s forests goodbye unless there is a serious public effort to preserve them.
Trump’s gone on record as saying he wants to sell off the national parks.
I think the entire government should be privatized. Chuck E. Cheese could run the parks. Everything operated by tokens. Drop in a token, go on the swing set. Drop in another token, take a walk. Drop in a token, look at a duck.
outrage
So that we again will have a few hundred people country wide protest. Color me impressed
spark outrage
I’ll believe it when the populace gets up off their ass and actually does something about it. An “outraged” person takes action. They fight for what’s right. Until they do something, it’s just an apathetic population complaining.
Morons order a turd sandwich then complain that it tastes of feces…
The appropriate time to be outraged was before the election, not after. Now eat up!
Yea, where were the protests before and during the election
issue is the rigged elections
no matter what the checkwriters win in this rigged game that always pays the house
blaming your fellow sick, underpaid, underfunded education systemed citizens for the destruction of the 1% only helps your jailers
Asked this in another thread, but is there a count of the number of people fired/resigned/quit/laid off from government positions and entities?
There’s a running (approximate) tally by department on Wikipedia here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_mass_layoffs#Dismissals_by_agency
Last time I added it up the total was somewhere around 34k
I would wager that even Musk/DOGE don’t have accurate figures for this.
