Interior Appropriations Subcommittee Ranking Member Merkley: Cuts in Trump’s Budget Request to Leave Lasting Scars on Public Lands, Tribes, and Human Health

Washington, D.C. - U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Interior-Environment Subcommittee on the Senate Appropriations Committee, released the following statement after the release of President Trump's budget request for Fiscal Year 2027:

"This budget request from President Trump and his Administration once again fails to meet the real needs of people in Oregon and across the nation who expect the federal government to tackle the greatest problems facing our environment, health, lands, air, and water, and not serve the President's personal and petty agenda. This budget request for the federal agencies within the Subcommittee's jurisdiction abandons critical programs, slashes essential government services, and backtracks from delivering the resources Tribal nations and native communities need to thrive.

"All Trump's budget does is explode the Department of Defense's budget to an eye-popping $1.5 TRILLION while Trump continues to spend billions of dollars a day on his illegal war with Iran that is putting servicemembers at risk and jacking up energy prices here at home. It's an out-of-touch plea for more money for guns and bombs, and less for the things that matter to our communities, like taking on the environmental challenges that lead to wildfire and smoke threats, modernizing communities' water infrastructure to ensure the basic need for clean water, acknowledging the threat of climate chaos, and fulfilling our trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribes. This proposal is dead on arrival.

"As Ranking Member of the Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee and of the Senate Budget Committee, I will push my colleagues to reject this budget, work together in a bipartisan manner, and enact legislation that protects our public lands, waters, and outdoor-driven economy and responds to the needs of Tribes and local communities across the country," said Ranking Member Jeff Merkley.

Specifically, President Trump's budget proposal includes the following cuts in the Interior-Environment titles:

• Cuts $1.1 billion to core Tribal programs that are in place to uphold the federal government's obligation and court-ordered trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribal nations. This overall 29 percent cut would decimate core programs including road maintenance, housing, and programs for children and families. It includes a near elimination of funding for construction and maintenance of Tribal schools, where the current school conditions are severely dilapidated, often threatening the health and safety of children.
• Cuts more than $1.1 billion, or 35 percent, from the National Park Service, devastating America's beloved national parks. The request proposes to cut an additional 3,000 park rangers and other staff, coming after the previous cut of 2,500 staff. The administration again proposes for park unit responsibilities be shouldered by the states without proposing funding to manage this new unfunded mandate, burdening states and incentivizing them to sell off our public lands to the highest bidder. The devastating results would erase history, shut down recreation, collapse the economies of gateway communities, degrade unique and treasured natural areas, and damage threatened and endangered species. The request also proposes to add $111 million to continue partisan funding from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that funded 300 new Park Police officers, which the Administration has said was designed to establish its own premier law enforcement agency operating throughout Washington D.C. and not only focused on federal parks. Amassing this massively scaled up police force is an existential threat from an administration with a track record of intimidating protestors, threatening free speech, and desensitizing Americans to excessive police and military presence on the streets.
• Cuts $323 million, or 19.6 percent from the Fish and Wildlife Service, decimating the fish and wildlife recovery and habitat restoration work critical to protecting important watersheds like the Klamath Basin, and eliminating important grant programs like State and Tribal Wildlife Grants that would critically harm state wildlife recovery plans that are meant to guide voluntary conservation actions to prevent species extinction.
• Cuts $183 million for Bureau of Land Management conservation programs, which includes presidentially and congressionally-designated national monuments and other special areas, removing protections and resources from archaeological sites, highly-utilized recreation areas like the Wave in Arizona, the Rogue River in Oregon, the Bonneville Salt Flats and Moab in Utah, the Snake River in Idaho, and the Rio Grande Gorge in New Mexico, and critical habitat management areas for threatened and endangered species.
• Cuts $1.571 billion, or 25 percent, from the Forest Service, which includes gutting all research and associated staff essential for improving wildfire risk reduction and creating innovative wood products and gutting all state, private and Tribal assistance grants essential for states to offset the costs of wildfire preparedness, support volunteer fire departments, provide private landowners with tools to fight pest and disease and benefit financially from their lands. This proposal eliminates the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration program, which is responsible for advancing major timber sales and fuels reduction projects across the West, and cuts at least 5,000 Forest Service staff positions, which will negatively impact the Administration's stated goals of improving forest management and increasing domestic timber production, as well as reducing the public's recreation opportunities on their public lands.
• Cuts funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by more than half by abandoning state and Tribal programs that build and maintain drinking water and sewer systems, and starving states of longstanding federal funding provided to pay for state work enforcing federal laws. The request would also effectively eliminate entire lines of public health research like clean air and would fire scores of chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other research professionals.

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