Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Ranking Member of the Interior-Environment Subcommittee on the Senate Appropriations Committee, released the below statement following the release of President Trump’s ‘skinny’ budget for Fiscal Year 2026.
“This budget is exactly what we expected from this administration: abandoning critical programs, slashing essential government services, and backtracking from delivering the resources Tribal nations and native communities need to thrive. Projects such as constructing Tribal schools, maintaining drinking water and sewer systems, improving wildfire risk reduction, and sustaining the National Park System need continuous streams of funding to ensure communities get the resources they need. These proposed cuts are devastating and will leave lasting scars in communities across the country.
“As Ranking Member of the Senate Budget Committee and of the Interior-Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, I will do everything I can to make sure this budget is never enacted,” said Ranking Member Jeff Merkley.
Specifically, President Trump’s ‘skinny’ budget proposes the following cuts in the Interior-Environment titles:
- Cuts $911 million to core Tribal programs that uphold the federal government’s obligation and court-ordered trust and treaty responsibilities to Tribal nations. This overall 24 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. The proposal also claims to focus on law enforcement while cutting law enforcement by 20 percent in a time of desperately needed increases in law enforcement officers and equipment across Indian Country.
- Cuts $900 million, or 30 percent, from the National Park Service operation to abandon national parks, which the Administration says should be transferred to the states. The budget doesn’t propose any funding to states to manage this new unfunded mandate, burdening states and clearly 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.
- Cuts $1.386 billion, or 22 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 2,000 National Forest System 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 $198 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 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, starving states of longstanding federal funding provided to pay for state work enforcing federal laws, and decimating funding for cleaning up toxic Superfund sites. 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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