Editor’s Note: This headline has been updated.
After President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his administration aggressively downsized a wide range of federal government agencies with the help of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its then-leader, Tesla/SpaceX/X.com head Elon Musk. Democrats warned that the cuts — which targeted everyone from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) to the National Weather Service (NWS) to the Internal Revenue Service (IRA) — would have painful results in the red states that voted for Trump in big numbers in 2024, but Trump claimed that he was only targeting "waste, fraud and abuse."
In an article published by Politico on December 15, Montana-based journalist Cassidy Randall details some of the negative effects that Trump Administration/DOGE cuts are having in her state — which Trump carried by roughly 20 percent in 2024.
According to Randall, "DOGE cuts to public lands agencies" are "hitting rural, conservative communities — one of this administration's strongest voting bases — the hardest." And the result, according to Politico, is a "revolt" that threatens to "wake a sleeping political giant" in a deep-red state.
"Starting in February," Randall reports, "an estimated 5200 people have been terminated from the agencies that manage the 640 million acres of federal public lands in the U.S. That number doesn't include the many who took the (Trump) Administration's buyout or early retirement offers also meant to cut staff. Further, Trump's 2026 budget proposes more budget cuts and a reduction of nearly 18,500 more public lands employees."
Terry Zink, a 57-year-old hunter who lives in Montana, voted for Trump in 2024 but is now criticizing the effects that Trump Administration/DOGE cuts are having on rural public lands.
Zink told Politico, "You won't meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didn't vote for this…. We have to listen to our wildlife biologists. We have to be strong advocates for those people."
Zink said of rural areas, "You cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, and water restoration, and healthy forests."
Read Cassidy Randall's full article for Politico at this link.
