Elon Musk's assault on wildfire protection is part of a bigger plan
LA TimesMy boyfriend and I were in our front yard in South Lake Tahoe the other day, enjoying an unseasonably warm afternoon, when a friend approached on his bike. He had finally scored a coveted permanent position last year — part of a Forest Service effort to stabilize the workforce under the Biden administration — but that was gone now. Last month, Brooke Rollins, the newly minted secretary of the Agriculture Department, which includes the U.S. Forest Service, released a statement thanking the agency’s firefighters for their service. The federal land management agencies are a puzzling target in general: The combined budgets of the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management accounted for about 0.2% of federal spending last year. The Trump administration is charging toward this paradigm, having appointed a former timber executive to lead the Forest Service and issued an executive order calling for expanded timber production.
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