On the chaos emanating from Trumpville

Photo illustration/digital “painting” by Jonathan P. Thompson. No AIs were used to produce this image.

😵 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!

The percentage of the population of each state that are federal employees. I omitted D.C., Maryland, and Virginia — with very high proportions of federal workers — because they made the graph all wonky and made it more difficult to compare the other states. One can safely predict that those states with higher percentages will suffer greater impacts from the DOGE firing spree. Which helps explain why Sen. Lisa Murkowski is one of the only Republicans in Congress speaking out against the nonsense.

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The administration’s actions go way beyond firing employees. There’s also the withholding of billions of federal dollars that had already been allocated or promised to states, local governments, nonprofits, and other entities. This includes some $3.2 billion for Colorado utilities and rural electric coops to harden their grids, replace generation lost when coal plants shut down, and to beef up operations and infrastructure to meet expected demand growth. So far no one really knows the status of all of this: The entirety of the funds could be unfrozen tomorrow, allowing projects to proceed as planned. Or they could remain in limbo indefinitely. Or they could be reduced or cancelled for good. In the meantime, uncertainty reigns.

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The red triangles mark pending projects awaiting a US Army Corps of Engineer Clean Water Act permit that were given an “energy emergency” status. More details below.

A similar uncertainty swirls around Trump’s “unleashing energy” and “energy emergency” executive orders. We know what they say, but still haven’t seen how they’ll play out in reality. The “unleashing” one makes it sound as if the oil and gas industry were a rabid dog held back only by stringent regulations, and once released from their bonds will go on a drilling rampage and suck infinite levels of petroleum out of the ground. The rabid part may be accurate, but in this case the beast is foaming at the mouth not for more petroleum production, but for greater profits — and those aren’t necessarily the same thing (in fact, too much production could bring down prices, thus leading to lower profits). So, no, we haven’t seen rig counts shoot up since Jan. 20 or a surge in drilling permits issued or anything like that. However, we are beginning to see these orders trickle down to the agencies.

For example, Inside Climate News’ Marianne Lavelle recently reported that the new administration stripped environmental justice and climate considerations from a Permian Basin oil and gas lease analysis. The analysis had been completed under the Biden administration for a sale that took place last week, netting nearly $21 million for parcels on 1,317 acres. Thing is, the Biden Bureau of Land Management had found it posed no significant impacts, so stripping the review of that language was merely symbolic and had no effect on the sale.

And the Army Corps of Engineers reclassified nearly 700 projects awaiting a Clean Water Act permit — to cross a stream with a pipeline, for example — under a new “energy emergency” status, presumably meaning they will be fast-tracked in some way. The New York Times indicated they were mostly fossil fuel-related projects, but I wanted to see for myself. Luckily, the Center for Biological Diversity obtained a list of the proposed projects and mapped them. It turns out that of the projects in the West, roughly half are for fossil fuel pipelines; the rest are for other things, such as transmission lines, geothermal, and even solar projects. Here’s a partial list of Western projects that have been granted “emergency” status:

• A pipeline proposed by Red Cedar Gathering, a Southern Ute Tribe-owned oil and gas firm, near the Piedra River in southwestern Colorado;

• The Hunter Battery Energy Storage System in Emery County, Utah. This is part of a massive solar-plus-storage installation under development there;

• The Stibnite Gold Mine in Valley County, Idaho. The U.S. Forest Service approved its operating permit in January, but it still needs permits from the Army Corps;

• NorthWestern Energy’s Florence natural gas distribution line at the Bitterroot River in Montana;

• Marathon-Snake River pipeline replacement in Washington;

• Western Area Power Administration’s transmission line rebuild project in southeastern California;

• Controlled Thermal Resources Hell’s Kitchen production facility. This is for one of the geothermal power production and direct lithium extraction projects at the Salton Sea in southern California.

• The Lassen Lodge Hydroelectric project in Tehama County, California.

• Lincoln Solar LLC in Polk County, Oregon.

• Burg Solar LLC in Linn County, Oregon.

At this point we don’t really know what this means. Is the Army Corps, now under the leadership of Fox News pundit Pete Hegseth, just throwing words around? Or are they actually expediting these permits? And how can they expedite permits if they don’t have adequate staffing to review them because they fired everyone?