“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.” Because the US is a Russian ally (or satellite?) now I guess.
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Entries for February 2025
Trump Ejects Zelenskyy From White House
Trump just kicked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House after berating him for being “disrespectful” in the Oval Office.
The astonishing turn of events could scramble international affairs in Europe and around the globe. During his visit with Trump, Zelenskyy had planned to sign the deal allowing the U.S. greater access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, then hold a joint news conference.
Instead, Ukraine’s leader left the White House shortly after Trump shouted at him, showing open disdain. Untouched salad plates and other lunch items were being packed up outside the Cabinet room, where the lunch between Trump and Zelenskyy and their delegations was supposed to have taken place.
The White House said the Ukraine delegation was told to leave.
“You’re gambling with World War III, and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country that’s backed you far more than a lot of people say they should have,” Trump told Zelenskky.
My god, Trump and Vance are just total fucking assholes. The US is openly aligning themselves with Russia against Ukraine and Europe, a major shift in international relations that dates back to the 1940s. I am so embarrassed to be an American right now.
Update: The NY Times has some key excerpts from the meeting in the White House.
Vance: And do you think that it’s respectful to come to the Oval Office of the United States of America and attack the administration that is trying to prevent the destruction of your country?
Zelensky: A lot of questions. Let’s start from the beginning.
Vance: Sure.
Zelensky: First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future.
Trump: You don’t know that.
Zelensky: God bless, you will not have a war.
Trump: Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.
Zelensky: I’m not telling you.
Trump: Because you’re in no position to dictate that. Remember this: You’re in no position to dictate what we’re going to feel. We’re going to feel very good.
Zelenskyy’s English is obviously not super strong but Trump sounds like a 4-year-old in full “you’re not the boss of me” mode here. So glad he has control of America’s armed forces and nuclear arsenal!
Elon Musk, Apartheid, and America’s New Boycott Movement. An excellent piece by Clara Jeffery on how boycotts can work to combat evil and the lessons we can take from the 80s boycott of South Africa.
Re: fighting back against this criminal & corrupt administration: AOC sent a letter to the US Attorney General asking whether she’s under investigation for “educating her community about their constitutional rights”. I love that she CC’d Trump.
Dana Milbank responds to the WaPo’s pivot to focusing on “personal liberties and free markets” with a piece *in the Post* calling Donald Trump “the single greatest threat to ‘personal liberties and free markets’ in the United States today”. 👏
From Zeynep Tufekci, a reminder that people who get the measles “lose much of their immune memory”, which leaves them “more vulnerable to many other diseases for years afterward”.
More good reporting from Wired on white nationalist Stephen Miller’s role the ongoing coup. “Miller is carrying out the daily work of governance while Trump serves as head of state, focusing on the fun parts of being president.”
How Elon Musk Executed His Takeover of the Federal Bureaucracy
This is excellent reporting by the Times (although at times it makes Musk’s actions sound heroic rather than unconstitutional, criminal, and treasonous) on how Elon Musk took over a huge chunk of the US government, which he still controls today. It began at a Republican fundraiser in September of 2023:
Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.
Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?
Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.
Musk, motivated by the Biden administration’s regulation of his companies, went to work:
Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.
Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.
They would call it the U.S. DOGE Service, and they would not even have to change the initials.
They began their move on the digital service unit earlier than has previously been reported, The Times found, while President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was still in office — giving them the ability to operate on Mr. Trump’s first day.
And now here we are, an unelected private citizen in charge of the US government:
The team is now moving faster than many of the legal efforts to stop it, making drastic changes that could be hard to unwind even if they are ultimately constrained by the courts. Mr. Musk’s associates have pushed out workers, ignored civil service protections, torn up contracts and effectively shuttered an entire agency established by Congress: the U.S. Agency for International Development.
A month into Mr. Trump’s second term, Mr. Musk and his crew of more than 40 now have about all the passwords they could ever need.
His swift success has been fueled by the president, who handed him the hazy assignment of remaking the federal government shortly after the billionaire endorsed him last summer. Flattered that Mr. Musk wanted to work with him, Mr. Trump gave him broad leeway to design a strategy and execute it, showing little interest in the details.
Read the rest of it for how it was all hurriedly planned out ahead of time.
From Rolling Stone, a list of 20 essential movies starring Gene Hackman. The French Connection, The Conversation, Superman, No Way Out, Mississippi Burning, The Royal Tenenbaums. Phew.
Touch Grass is a screen time limiting app for iOS that requires photographic evidence of you actually touching grass to unblock apps on your phone. (Is there a “touch snow” option?)
How to Persuade the Vaccine Hesitant
I loved this short thread from Andrew Miller about how his pediatrician wife helps parents who are skeptical of vaccinating their children change their minds.
So my wife is a pediatrician and works in some hospitals with high vaccine and intervention hesitation (suburban ones). She has found *tremendous* success by just letting the families know she will have to document the higher risk of specific, and often fatal illness, in the chart of their child.
She explains that if their child goes to the ER, the ER might not think to ask about routine newborn care that the parents opted out of, so by putting it in the chart she might be saving the child from this very specific thing. But just as important it makes it feel REAL to the parents.
She identifies and describes the specific thing that their child is now more likely to die from. In detail, including symptoms to watch out for. It’s not abstract. It’s visceral.
In What We Trust?
The central point of Dr. Brooke Harrington’s essay about the destabilization of “basic systems we count on to make our society function” over the past month is bang on:
This promises to be a tough way for Americans to learn a critical fact too often overlooked: that one of our country’s greatest and least-appreciated assets has been public faith and trust in a variety of highly complex systems staffed by experts whose names we’ll never know. In fact, high levels of trust used to be one of our superpowers in the United States: specifically, that meant trust in our government to operate with reasonable competence and stability and without the kind of corruption that has hobbled other societies.
In this video, David Lynch talks about the effect of depression on creativity:
It stands to reason: the more you suffer, the less you want to create. If you’re truly depressed, they say you can’t even get out of bed, let alone create. It occupies the whole brain, poisons the artist, poisons the environment; little room for creativity.
But his assertion can be easily extended to how instability in one’s life leads to an inability to live fully. Stability and lack of corruption allows people to live their lives, make art, engage in commerce with each other, build families, and strive to be their best, authentic selves. The US has never been completely stable or uncorrupt, but we’re at real risk of losing something incredibly valuable here…and it’ll be difficult to get it back when it’s too far gone.
What Makes for an Effective Boycott?
From Choose Democracy and Build the Resistance, Boycott Central is a fledgling resource about boycotts. I found this checklist of requirements for effective boycotts really interesting & useful:
- a target (who is supposed to change behavior)
- a demand (so the target knows what they have to do to get the boycott to stop)
- boycotters (a lot of people who used to be customers refusing to be customers anymore)
- leadership/negotiation committee (people who can show the target they’re hurting their bottomline and negotiate over demands)
- a way to communicate with the boycotters (a structure and massive social reach!).
They go on to note that most of the recent boycotts, including the Feb 28th one, do not meet these criteria — but that we shouldn’t despair: “boycotts take some time to organize well”. As others have noted, the activism & organizing muscles of many Americans have atrophied in recent years, and it will take time to get ourselves into shape. Boycotts are like anything else…you need to practice in order to get better.
See also The Complete History of the Famed Delano Grape Strike. (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)
When Social Security checks stop showing up because of gov’t employee purges, millions of Americans will finally understand what’s going on. “It is no exaggeration to say this will kill people — mainly people who are elderly, disabled and/or poor.”
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” Wasn’t a Warning; It Was Our End Goal. “When it comes to choosing whether or not to resist authoritarianism, I believe Snyder meant to write, ‘Do not! Obey in advance!’”
DOGE’s Chaos Reaches Antarctica. “If the Antarctic program budget is cut, then they’ll…get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open. If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up.”
“The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else”
From David Wallace-Wells, a reminder that those who were considered alarmists at the beginning of the pandemic were ultimately proved right — it actually was an alarming situation.
Today, the official Covid death toll in the United States stands at 1.22 million. Excess mortality counts, which compare the total number of all-cause deaths to a projection of what they would have been without the pandemic, run a little higher — about 1.5 million.
In other words, the alarmists were closer to the truth than anyone else. That includes Anthony Fauci, who in March 2020 predicted 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths and was called hysterical for it. The same was true of the British scientist Neil Ferguson, whose Imperial College model suggested that the disease might ultimately infect more than 80 percent of Americans and kill 2.2 million of us. Thankfully, the country was vaccinated en masse long before 80 percent were infected…
I’m also going to point out that those who were labeled alarmists about the impact of Donald Trump’s presidencies were also “closer to the truth than anyone else”, certainly closer than all those centrist “pundits”. I’m particularly thinking of those who knew when they woke up on November 9th to a Trump victory that Roe v Wade was toast and that Americans’ civil rights would be taken away and were called “hysterical” (there’s that word again) for saying so.
Women Are Scared And Scrapping Their Baby Plans Under This Administration & For Good Reason. “I don’t want to die trying to have another baby. I don’t want to leave my own living child motherless.”
The February 28 Economic Blackout
A broad range of Americans are organizing a 24-hour economic boycott on February 28th to protest the ongoing actions of the Trump administration and to send a message to corporate America. From The People’s Union USA website, here are the details:
- The boycott runs all day on February 28th.
- People are urged to not make any purchases that day. No online shopping or in person.
- Do not spend money on: fast food, gas, or at major retailers. “No Amazon, no Walmart, no Best Buy.”
- If you need to buy essentials (food, medicine, emergency supplies), do so at small, local businesses and try to pay cash.
The idea is to show corporate America, using the thing they best understand (money), how much power Americans have when collectively organized. Organizers have billed this as an initial move (“if they don’t listen…we make the next blackout longer”) and have planned follow-up economic actions.
Awesome rabbit illustration by Martha Rich.
FDA cancels meeting to select flu strains for next season’s shots. “Deciding on the strains in the spring gives vaccine manufacturers enough time to produce the shots to be ready for the fall.”
The US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at its highest level since 2000 — higher than during 9/11, the 2007 financial crisis, and the pandemic. “It is a mystery as to why credit spreads and equities are still so well-behaved…”
The MacArthur Foundation will increase its giving over the next two years in response to Trump’s actions illegally freezing aid. “This is a major crisis for our sector and it’s a time when those of us who can do more should do more.”
The United States has fallen to a score of 65 (on a scale of 0-100) on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (calculated before Trump’s 2nd term). It’s fallen steadily since 2013 (score of 76), esp. during Trump’s 1st term.
Legendary actor Gene Hackman has died at the age of 95. Hackman, his wife Betsy Arakawa, and their dog were found dead at their home yesterday. “Foul play was not suspected.”
A Son Tries to Rescue His Dad From Conspiracy Theories
NPR’s Embedded podcast has a three-episode series from reporter Zach Mack about a year-long effort to convince his dad that all the conspiracy theories he (his dad) believes are bogus, in an attempt to save his family.
Reporter Zach Mack thinks his dad has gone all in on conspiracy theories, while his father thinks that Zach is the one being brainwashed.
In 2024, after the latest round of circular arguments, they decided to try something new, an attempt to pull each other out of the spell each of them thinks the other is under.
Can one family live in two realities?
You can listen to all three episodes at the NPR website for Embedded or wherever you get your podcasts. This abridged companion article covers the same ground as the podcast.
When I asked my dad whether he feels like the odd man out, he answered somberly, “It’s painful at times. It’s very sad for me.”
So what happens when your family and your friends don’t respect your beliefs? Perhaps you reach for a higher purpose — something existential.
This came up in a conversation with Charlie Safford, a researcher who designs therapeutic techniques for people who believe in far-right conspiracy theories. He believes that conspiracy theories are fundamentally emotional coping mechanisms.
“Even if your father doesn’t put the pieces together, there is some awakening of his own mortality that might be contributing to all of this,” he told me. “One of the ways that you come to terms is to look back and say, ‘Did my life have meaning?’”
See also:
- QAmom (“Sean Donnelly’s mother got sucked into the world of QAnon conspiracy theories, so he made a little video about it”)
- QAnon, Conspiracy Theories, and the Rise of Magical Thinking
- Living in a Conspiracy Nation
- What Can You Do About QAnon?
- George Monbiot interviews a conspiracy theorist
- My Dad, the Facebook Addict
- In Search of a Flat Earth
- Sacha Baron Cohen Says Tech Companies Built the “Greatest Propaganda Machine in History”
Oh and me in a tweet from July 2020:
The appeal of QAnon & conspiracy theories is simple: they turn politics & public health (boring things that happen *to* you) into something active and engaging: your own personal Da Vinci Code hunt for a secret truth.
(thx, tra)
Pedro Pascal responding to transphobia on social media: “I can’t think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist.”
Eyes on the Prize III: We Who Believe in Freedom Cannot Rest 1977-2015
Whoa, HBO has made a third installment of Eyes on the Prize, the landmark series on the American Civil Rights Movement. The trailer is above and you can watch the six-part series on HBO or Max right now.
The first two series, which are amongst the best television ever aired, covered events from 1954–1965 (part one) and 1965–1985 (part two). Eyes on the Prize III covers significant events from 1977-2015, including:
- Community activists in the South Bronx and Philadelphia fighting for fair housing and healthcare during the Carter administration
- Reaganomics and the AIDS crisis
- How the criminal justice system affected the Black community from 1989-1995 in Washington DC and South Central Los Angeles (the LA Uprising).
- The Million Man March in 1995.
- The environmental movement (1982-2011)
- “The complexities of affirmative action policies and how a changing demographic landscape affected school desegregation in new ways.”
- The soaring police brutality of the Obama years.
- The birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Featured participants include Angela Davis, Al Sharpton, congressman Kweisi Mfume, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Al Gore, Black Lives Matter co-founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and dozens of other activists, scholars, and politicians.
In a review for the Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg writes:
Eyes on the Prize III is, as the title suggests, a formal sequel to Eyes on the Prize II, a six-hour exploration of the “aftermath” of the Civil Rights Movement that makes it very clear that the movement has never ended, just as its real concerns were never fully resolved. It’s an emotional, inspiring and righteously angry series of vignettes that looks backward, while very clearly intending to reflect upon and instigate conversations about our fraught current moment.
The series isn’t perfect, but it’s utterly essential, sometimes feeling disheartening for the immediacy of that necessity.
In a post on Bluesky, Fienberg says “nothing you could watch this week is better”.
Jeff Bezos declares opinions questioning “free markets” no longer welcome at The Washington Post. “Months after insisting he would never allow his personal interests to influence the Post’s content…” LOL, the underrepresented capitalist perspective…
A long but very interesting thread about how Trump & Russell Vought have started weaponizing the OMB to illegally impound funding appropriated by Congress (like he did in 2019, leading to his first impeachment).
Plan To Be More Positive Off To Shitty Fucking Start. “Well, I’m not even three days into giving optimism a shot, and it already sucks.” 🙃🫠😭
An unvaccinated child has died in the Texas measles outbreak. And before that, there had been only 2 measles deaths in the past 22 years: one in 2015 and one in 2003.
What do you do after you accidentally kill a child? This is wonderfully written….but also very hard to read.
The Great Resegregation
For the Atlantic, Adam Serwer writes about the Great Resegregation, the attempt by the Trump administration to reverse the civil rights movement.
If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.
Like CRT before it, DEI has become conservatives’ go-to cover for their discriminatory actions:
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
Karen Attiah recently wrote about resegregation as well: The assault on DEI? It’s aimed at resegregation.
Across the United States, in government agencies and private corporations, leaders are scrambling to eliminate DEI programs. President Donald Trump is not only destroying any trace of diversity work within the government: He has ordered a review of federal contracts to identify any companies, nonprofits and foundations that do business with the government and keep their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he has warned that they could be the target of investigations.
Let’s call this what it really is: resegregation.
This Is Not a Drill: How Universities Can Save DEI. “This is not just about education. It is about who gets to participate in shaping the future of this country.”
Let This Radicalize You Workbook. “This workbook is intended as an extension of the book Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba.”
On the lessons of the rise & fall of the KKK. “Fascism always fails. It is destructive and it is awful and not everyone lives to see the other side, but it always, always fails. It takes work. It takes fighting back.”
The War on Cars debuts an ad that extolls the freedom of cycling. “Who’s really more free? People beholden to traffic, gas prices, and the high cost of owning and maintaining a car or those who are able to choose another way?”
Slow Start Today…
It turns out when you get a flat tire after hitting a pothole in the middle of nowhere late at night and you don’t have a spare1 in a state where everyone goes to bed at 9:15pm, you’re just kinda shit outta luck? Huge thanks to Caroline and her sleepy, confused dog for coming to retrieve me. 💞
So yeah anyway, things might be a little wonky around here today because I got very little sleep and I need to see about that flat. 🤷♂️
- I’m gonna head everyone off at the pass here and tell you that I had a portable air compressor and an emergency puncture kit with me that were both useless for this type of flat unfortunately.↩
This weekend, JD Vance is visiting a small VT town near where I live and plans to ski at Sugarbush. The locals are understandably pissed — both at our fascist VP and the local businesses extending their welcome to him. Protests to come, I’m sure.
Trump Administration Litigation Tracker. “The table below tracks legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive orders, as well as cases on behalf of the Trump administration to enforce them.”
As Facebook Abandons Fact-Checking, It’s Also Offering Bonuses for Viral Content. “The upshot: a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, some of them funded by Meta.”
Actress Hunter Schafer’s gender marker was changed to “male” on her US passport due to Trump’s anti-trans passport rules. “This is real…and no one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever, is excluded.”
Inalienable Rights vs. Conditional Privileges
From @existennialmemes on Tumblr:
Listen, if a Bad President can come in and take away our rights and we’re dependent on a Good President replacing them in four years to give us back our rights, then we do not have any rights.
If politicians can take or distribute them, then they’re not “inalienable” and they’re not “rights.”
We don’t have inalienable rights we have conditional privileges, divvied out according to the whims of whoever currently holds the reins.
And if we want to have actual rights, then we must build a system in which no one has the power to take them away to begin with.
I am wondering what a system like that would actually look like… (via @halaylah.bsky.social)
AOC Shows How to Fight Back and Stand Strong. “AOC’s stand for her constituents, and her public refusal to be intimidated, are models of resistance that other Democrats would do well to imitate.”
Andor Season Two Trailer
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to watch an earnest show about an ultimately successful revolution against a fascist government. It will be interesting to see in this political climate whether Disney+ is the place to watch such a thing.
This website is tracking how many people have lost their jobs because of the USAID Stop-Work Order (55K confirmed, 100K+ estimated globally) and documenting other effects (people dying around the world).
From Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, a list of instructions on “how to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to Meta”.
A collection of videos of people fighting back against the Trump administration, incl. Maine governor Janet Mills, former NFL player Chris Kluwe, and AOC. It’s good to see this stuff and to take inspiration from it.
Fired NPS, USFS, BLM Employees Share Their Stories
The Guardian profiled a number of people fired from the agencies that manage federal lands - the US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc. — purged from their jobs by the Trump/Musk administration.
Victoria Winch, US Forest Service wilderness forestry technician, Flathead national forest, Spotted Bear ranger district, adjacent to Glacier national park, Montana:
People come on to these lands to hunt, to feed their families. People are allowed to get firewood. Outfitters, who are a big part of the local economy, use these trails.
But every single field person at Spotted Bear was terminated. Those trails won’t get cleared this year. And it takes less than one season for them to be totally impassable.
Nick Massey, USFS wilderness Ranger, Pisgah national forest, North Carolina:
We were very, very busy with public interaction, conversations, giving directions, educating. I would come up on folks quite often who were either lost or having some sort of emergency, and I’m also a member of two mountain rescue teams in the area.
I really loved seeing so many different people from different walks of life. Being able to be a part of that wilderness experience that people are having was really, truly magical.
Other fired federal land and National Park employees have been sharing their stories with media and on social media, highlighting how little these purges are about saving money and much more about all the services and benefits that Americans will be losing that we paid for. (Their stories also highlight the lies about employees not being fit for their jobs being used as the pretext to fire them. And the lack of due process. And, and, and…) Here are a few of those stories.
Brian Gibbs, Educational Park Ranger at Effigy Mounds National Monument:
I am a father, a loving husband, & dedicated civil servant.
I am an oath of office to defend and protect the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic.
I am a work evaluation that reads “exceeds expectations.”
I am the “fat on the bone.”
I am being trimmed as the consequence of the popular vote
I am the United States flag raiser & folder
I am my son’s “Junior Ranger” idol
I am a college kid’s dream job
Today I lost my dream job as a permanent park ranger in the NPS. I’m still in shock, and completely devastated. I have dedicated my life to being a public servant, teacher, and advocate for places that we ALL cherish. I have saved lives and put my own life at risk to serve my community.
I honestly can’t imagine how the parks will operate without my position. I mean, they just can’t. I am the only EMT at my park and the first responder for any emergency. This is flat-out reckless.
The NY Times published an overview of the firings and their effect on federal land management, including interviews with purged employees:
Arianna Knight, 29, of Bozeman, Mont., the wilderness trails supervisor for the Yellowstone District of the Custer Gallatin National Forest, was let go on Feb. 14 along with more than 30 other Custer Gallatin employees. Ms. Knight said she and two workers under her supervision typically cleared 4,000 downed trees and logs from hundreds of miles of trails each year, often hiking and using hand tools for a week at a time in wilderness areas, where federal law prohibits motorized vehicles and mechanized tools like chain saws.
Now those trails won’t be cleared, Ms. Knight said, adding, “People are going to suffer.”
And:
While it may seem as if the cuts will mean fewer people trampling through the parks, allowing ecosystems to regenerate, some fear the opposite: that less oversight and control over huge crowds may damage the parks for seasons to come.
Adam Auerbach, 32, a former park ranger at Rocky Mountain National Park, said visitor numbers at the park has been climbing consistently for decades, to more than four million in 2023 from 2.6 million in 1990. The park has had to institute a timed-entry permit system to control the numbers.
With the new cuts, he said, “There will be fewer rangers on the ground to enforce regulations and fewer public educators to help the public even understand the regulations and the reasons for them in the first place.”
From a news release by the Association of National Park Rangers:
Rick Mossman, president of the Association of National Park Rangers (ANPR) said, “These actions will hurt visitors and the parks they travelled to see across the United States. If a visitor is involved in an automobile accident in Badlands National Park in South Dakota, or has their car broken into at a trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, there will be a delay in the response by a ranger to investigate — or perhaps no response at all. If a visitor suffers a medical emergency while hiking in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, ranger response could be delayed.”
Mossman went on to say that visitors are likely to experience reduced hours or days — and even closures — of visitor centers and other public-use facilities. Ranger-led educational programs will be reduced or eliminated. Trash and litter may accumulate, and restrooms will be dirtier because of reduced maintenance and fewer custodial workers. There could even be complete closures of some parts of parks to protect visitors and those park resources.
From the National Parks Conservation Association:
In a phone interview, Moxley said she had to walk away from a year’s worth of research and work on wetland restoration, invasive plant documentation and funding efforts to save Harper Ferry’s remaining hemlock trees from a devastating invasive insect called a woolly adelgid.
Adding that she speaks on behalf of herself and not Harpers Ferry or the National Park Service, Moxley said parks — large and small — have behind-the-scenes staff who work to protect natural habitats, historic structures and museum objects and exhibits.
“Visitors don’t usually encounter us, but without us, there would not be sites to enjoy,” Moxley said. “Without staff, the National Park Service will be unable to carry out its 100+ year mission to leave the parks unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. This is a mission my colleagues and I take seriously.”
Following a public uproar, the Trump administration is walking back some of the purges of National Park Service employees.
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