The Trump administration ruined what should have been a good spring in the Klamath river basin.
By suddenly putting federal staff and freezing payments for programs and projects already authorized, the administration has replaced a feeling of aspiring in the basin by fear and uncertainty, and has torn the fragile obligations of years in manufacturing among breeders and farmers of the upper Basin, federal, state and local governments, non-organisms and native tribes. In a region where water conflicts simmered for the last quarter of a century, confidence was already fragile. Now it is broken with miller.
In the 21st century, the klamath went from the crisis to the crisis, generally linked to the prolonged drought that hovered over the pool most of the time. What distinguishes the current debacle is that it has no relation to natural phenomena. It is completely artificial – and completely useless.
By without taking into account the needs of ordinary Americans and an apparent desire to eviscerate everything that was defended by his predecessor, Joe Biden, Trump allowed Elon Musk to take an ax of bluntly blunt with federal expenses. The result in the klamath – where voters chosen massively Trump in 2024 – Many people feel fearful and betrayed.
In early October last October, The largest project to remove dams in the worldImplying the dismantling of four obsolete hydroelectric dams from the Klamath river which had blocked the salmon of the upper basin since 1918, has been completed. More than 6,000 salmon – a number that far exceeded the predictions of biologists – swim upstream in front of the damage demolished over the next two months. The tribes of the lower basin, whose crops and diets revolve around the salmon, celebrated.
In collaboration with the elimination of dams, tribes and government agencies have launched programs for Restore the Ravaed River for the Environment After a century of federal management of erroneous water. In the upper basin, where the water shortage induced by drought had led to rare allowances to farmers and breeders, farmers have obtained the support of federal programs who have favored increased water efficiency and improved the terrible quality of water from the river system.
Many efforts have been funded by the Bipartite Infrastructure Act in the Biden Administration Administration. As a general rule, an environmental non -profit organization or a local government organization requested funding to make, for example, a wet areas restore contract or improvements in farmers' irrigation equipment. Once the work was completed, its federal donor was alerted, the funds were released and the entrepreneurs paid and the farmers reimbursed.
In a few days, Trump and Musk broke the system. Now, the non-profit organization or the agency is unable to collect promised funds, and the entrepreneurs and landowners are found with debts for the workforce or the purchases they have paid, up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some non -profit organizations dismiss workers and wonder if they will survive. Federal agencies have been reduced and certain agencies may be forced to leave the basin.
Financing beneficiaries have generally discovered cuts without suspicion of warning. Larry Nicholson is executive director of Upper Klamath Basin AG collaborativeA group of farmers, breeders, government representatives and scientists who provided for the restoration of a key part of the river. Having received a subsidy of $ 6 million from the Bipartite on Infrastructure Act, the collaboration carried out around 40% of project planning, but in February, Nicholson said that his accountant had called him to tell him that the federal government had ceased to make deposits.
“I have never received an email,” he said. “I have never received a phone call. I never had a predilection.
Now the planning is closed and Nicholson is not sure that it will continue. Small bombs of debts like this exploded throughout the pool.
Another example: the klamath is very vulnerable to forest fires and, in 2021, it experienced the fire of Bootleg, the largest forest fire in the country that year. However, the Musk government's efficiency department cheerfully dismissed workers in American forest services who clarified the forests and reduced vegetation around houses and other structures. Consequently, the “hardening” of fire in certain regions has stopped entirely and the procedures for detecting the first-tirs are weakened.
And this: federal funding for the tribes of the basin has also been frozen, leaving the tribal chiefs wondering if they will have to close the crucial departments such as those who follow and support the restoration of salmon.
The question remains: why?
All savings can be made in dismissing federal workers and freezing funds will be almost certainly equaled by the costs of abandoning projects before being completed, and by distributing so much uncertainty that companies, tribes and local government agencies remain paralyzed. These cuts have nothing to do with the move of fraud and waste, which cannot have been discovered by the cost cushions Doge Slash-And-Burn. As a former Inspector General of the Labor Department Larry Turner said recentlyA real investigation into fraud and federal waste takes about a year, not a few days.
Back on February 28, Musk says Joe Rogan and his podcast listeners according to which “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”, as if empathy was something else to shirk, such as river restoration programs. It is an unusually revealing comment in the context of the klamath, where the lack of astonishing empathy of the administration is now in garish display.
Jacques Leslie is the author of “Deep Water: The Epic Struggle for dams, displaced people and the environment”. He works on a book on the Klamath basin.
