2026-04-02 19:30:00
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
On March 31, the US Forest Service announced plans to move its headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City, Utah. It will also close or repurpose all nine of its regional offices, create 15 state offices, and shutter research and development facilities in more than 30 states. According to a news release, the plan is intended to make the agency more “nimble, efficient [and] effective.” Forest Service leaders told staff on a call after the announcement that no changes will be made to fire and aviation management programs or field-based operational firefighters.
Since first announcing its intent to reorganize the agency last July, the Trump administration has marketed the plan as a way to streamline Forest Service operations, with a focus on boosting timber production and communicating more closely with local communities. But during a congressional hearing and public comment period on the subject last summer, more than 80 percent of the 14,000 public comments submitted were negative, with many tribal representatives, conservation groups and former Forest Service staffers opposing the move.
A US Department of Agriculture summary of public comments included concerns that relocating Forest Service staff and further cuts to its budgets “could compromise ecological management, public access, and employee morale.” The current plan incorporates many elements of the original proposal, including the move to Salt Lake City and the closure of regional offices. “Nobody is asking for this,” said Robert Bonnie, who oversaw the Forest Service as a Department of Agriculture undersecretary during the Obama administration. “None of the farm groups want this. No one in conservation wants this. Nobody.”
To Bonnie and other former Forest Service staff, the plan, which will uproot thousands of employees, looks like it will only make the agency’s existing troubles worse, especially given the past year of deep cuts and chaos. “This is not going to strengthen the Forest Service, it is going to weaken it,” Bonnie said. “It’s not about solving problems, it’s about blowing things up.”
Mary Erickson, a retired Custer Gallatin National Forest supervisor, had more questions than answers after the announcement. “I’m not going to say if it’s good or bad at this point,” she said. “It’s just such a sweeping change with no real analysis about if there would be cost savings.”
Under the new proposal, some states will have their own offices and others will be lumped together, similar to the organization of the Bureau of Land Management. This will be a new approach for the country’s 154 national forests, which have long been managed by the nine regional offices that will be shuttered or repurposed. Now, forests in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, and Idaho will each be managed by their own state office. Forests in Nevada and Utah, however, will be managed together, as will forests in Colorado and Kansas.
Some Forest Service research facilities, including the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Fort Collins, Colorado, will stay open. Others, including the research station in Portland, Oregon, which is responsible for critical work on species like spotted owls, will be closed. Losing local leadership “is not going to improve the programs,” said former Forest Service wildlife biologist Eric Forsman. Forsman, who retired in 2016, studied spotted owls and red tree voles at the agency’s Forestry Sciences Laboratory in Corvallis, Oregon, which will remain in operation. “It may help budgets,” he added, “but it won’t improve the quality of the research or the amount of research that gets done.”
Erickson and others were also concerned about the plan to move high-level bureaucrats out of DC, where the nation’s law- and policymakers reside. “I would push back on this idea that moving out of DC is moving closer to the people you serve. That’s not the role of the national office,” Erickson said. The national office, she added, is supposed to coordinate and create guidance based on national policy. “Forests and districts have always been the heart of local communities and local delivery.”
After talking with current and former Forest Service staffers following Tuesday’s announcement, she also worries that, at least in the short term, disarray created by the reorganization will hamstring the agency’s ability to address the complex and worsening challenges that modern forests face. Those include tree disease outbreaks, the growing wildland-urban interface, and climate change-induced drought. The Forest Service is already reeling from the loss of thousands of employees during the last year, through the terminations and deferred resignations effected by the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The reorganization may also lead to states playing an even bigger role in forest management, said Kevin Hood, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, who retired in 2025 after decades working in the Forest Service throughout the West. While local coordination isn’t bad in theory, he said, he’s concerned the new structure will be a step toward ceding the management of national forests and other public lands to states.
Tribal representatives, several of whom declined to comment for this story, voiced concerns during the July public comment process that the reorganization would lead to losses of expertise and fractured relationships. Mass staff relocations, one representative wrote, would “destroy irreplaceable knowledge about Treaty rights, forest conditions, and working relationships built over decades, and new staff unfamiliar with the land will make mistakes.”
For many people in conservation, the Forest Service reorganization feels like déjà vu, or even a recurring nightmare.
In 2019, during Trump’s first term, his administration announced a plan to move nearly all Bureau of Land Management staff out of the agency’s DC headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado—then a 66,000-person city located hundreds of miles from a major airport. As with the March 31 Forest Service announcement, the administration said the change would put high-level staff closer to the mostly-Western lands they manage. Instead, many of those staff left the agency altogether, said Tracy Stone-Manning, who directed the BLM under President Joe Biden and is now president of The Wilderness Society.
In fact, by the time the Grand Junction office opened in 2020, only 41 of the 328 BLM employees expected to move West chose to do so, according to a High Country News investigation. For many, moving meant uprooting their entire family, and required a spouse to find a new job in a much smaller market.
The reorganization cost taxpayers $28 million. And the Biden administration ended up moving many high-level positions back to DC, though it did keep some agency leaders in the Grand Junction office, which it renamed the agency’s “Western Headquarters.” John Gale, who headed the office for two years under Biden, sees merit in searching for ways to improve public-lands management. But restructuring and relocation need to be done thoughtfully and carefully to be effective, he said.
That’s because agencies lose irreplaceable institutional knowledge when people with decades of experience are forced out the door, said Stone-Manning. And while that may not have been the first Trump administration’s intention, it was indeed the outcome of the BLM reorganization. She and others expect the Forest Service to suffer the same fate, with even more dire results for the public.
“Our public lands are not being cared for the way they need to be,” she said. “And what that means is ultimately people will throw up their hands and say the federal government can’t manage them, let’s sell them off.”
2026-04-02 07:06:42
Last week, President Donald Trump did what roughly one in three American voters have done in recent elections: He voted by mail.
But while Trump personally used that method to cast his vote in a Florida special election, he also signed an executive order Tuesday night aimed at dramatically tightening restrictions on mail voting for everybody else. Experts and state election officials say the order is plainly unconstitutional and will face court challenges.
“We’ll see the president in court,” says Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is coordinating with her counterparts in other states on a legal response to the executive order.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who serves as the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, tells Mother Jones he expects a lawsuit will be filed in “days.”
“The Constitution is very clear, in plain language, that the state has the responsibility to run elections,” Aguilar adds.
Aguilar is referring to Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution—often called the Elections Clause. “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” the 238-year-old document reads. Congress, the Constitution says, can also contribute to election procedure by passing laws.
But Trump’s new executive order, titled “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” runs afoul of that language. His executive order instructs the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of eligible voters in each state, which the US Postal Service would then use to identify voters who can receive mail ballots marked with special barcodes for tracking purposes. The executive order also grants the attorney general the power of “withholding Federal funds from noncompliant States and localities.”
Bellows says she recently mailed Trump a copy of the Constitution. “Clearly, he needs to read it,” she says. “You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand the states—not the president—are in charge of elections.”
She is far from the only top state official or expert who says Trump does not have authority over how elections are run.
“Where the Constitution might need interpretation in some areas and might be vague in other areas, on elections, it’s extraordinarily clear the President has zero power with regard to elections,” says David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, and a former senior trial attorney in the DOJ’s voting section.
Purportedly, Trump signed the executive order to reduce voting fraud. “The cheating on mail-in voting is legendary. It’s horrible what’s going on,” Trump said Tuesday, repeating false allegations that he and other Republicans have made for years. Data resoundingly supports that mail voting is extremely secure. A 2025 report by the Brookings Institution, for example, found that the prevalence of mail-voting fraud is forty-three millionths of one percent. In other words, fraud was discovered in roughly four cases out of every 10 million ballots cast by mail.
Tuesday’s executive order is just the latest instance of Trump’s incessant efforts to assert control over election procedures in a clear effort to give his party the upper hand.
His strategy to “take over” elections, as he put it a couple of months ago, includes ongoing efforts by the Department of Justice to collect voter rolls from all 50 states. The DOJ has sued more than 25 states for these lists in an effort to create what effectively constitutes a national voter roll, which could be used to wrongly purge eligible voters from the rolls. Courts have thus far entirely sided with the states refusing to hand over their files, which contain voters’ private information, such as Social Security numbers and party affiliation.
Meanwhile, the Trump-supported SAVE Act—which would, among other things, require proof of citizenship to register to vote and would effectively end mail and online voter registration—is currently stalled in the Senate. Trump has so far been unsuccessful in convincing Republican senators to eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold in order to pass the SAVE Act along partisan lines.
Previous efforts by Trump to change election rules include his failed March 2025 executive order requiring proof of citizenship on federal voting forms. A federal judge shot that down, citing the same constitutional provision—the Elections Clause—that would apply to this new executive order.
“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the States and to Congress, this Court holds that the President lacks the authority to direct such changes,” District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her opinion.
Becker says he is “100 percent confident” that courts will rule similarly on the new executive order. “Courts will block this. It not only violates the express terms of the Constitution; it violates existing federal law, where Congress has spoken clearly. It violates the National Voter Registration Act, which prohibits people from being removed from voter lists within 90 days of a major election. It violates the Help America Vote Act, which has similar provisions.”
If Becker, Aguilar, and Bellows are correct in their predictions that courts will quickly and unequivocally block the executive order, the tens of millions of voters who opted to vote by mail in 2024 will have that choice again in the 2026 midterms.
Voting by mail is a “popular, trusted method of voting,” says Molly McGrath, director of national democracy campaigns at the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the Administration over its 2025 executive order. “These are voters from red states, blue states, purple states.”
That, of course, includes Trump himself.
2026-04-02 07:01:29
Today, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over the future of birthright citizenship, the justices kept returning to one name: Wong Kim Ark.
Wong was born around 1870 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the son of Chinese parents who had settled in the United States. As a young man, he traveled to China, and when he tried to come home, he was stopped at the Port of San Francisco. He was denied entry on the grounds that he wasn’t a US citizen because of his Chinese descent and his parents’ status as non-US citizens.
His community in Chinatown pooled resources and hired lawyers. Their argument was straightforward: Under the 14th Amendment, Wong was a citizen. His parents’ immigration status had nothing to do with it.
In 1898, the Supreme Court agreed. And for over a century since, Wong Kim Ark’s case has served as the definitive interpretation of the 14th Amendment: All children born in the United States are automatically US citizens.
That is, unless President Donald Trump gets his way.
Trump has been targeting birthright citizenship ever since his first term. On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order attempting to restrict it, limiting citizenship to children with at least one parent that is a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. Federal courts have blocked the order at every turn, but the Supreme Court agreed to take up the case, and today they did.
So we sat down with Wong’s great-grandson, Norman Wong, a 76-year-old retired carpenter living outside San Francisco. His family has not only fought for the constitutional right to citizenship, they’re painfully aware of what it looks like when that citizenship, once won, can be used against you.
Like his great-grandfather, Norman, 76, was born in San Francisco. He’s a retired carpenter and still lives in the Bay Area with his wife, Maureen. We met initially over Zoom, where he invited me to the monthly veterans meeting of Cathay Post 384 in San Francisco, the oldest Chinese American post in The American Legion.
He, Maureen, and his sister Sandra were invited by Alicia Ponzio, a Post member, former lieutenant in the United States’ Navy Nurse Corps, and professional figurative sculpture artist. Ponzio, upon learning about the story of Wong through a podcast, became inspired to sculpt a bust of Wong as a young man. At the meeting, she revealed the plaster model seen in the video.
This model she shared with us is one of many renderings made ahead of the final sculpture of Wong Kim Ark, which will be cast in bronze and proposed to stand at his birthplace of the original 751 Sacramento Street in San Francisco.
2026-04-02 05:15:30
On Wednesday, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office announced that it ruled the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who was left on the freezing streets of Buffalo by Border Patrol officers, a homicide. Neither Shah Alam’s family, who had waited to meet him outside the facility where he was being held, nor his lawyers, who had been attempting to contact him, were notified of his location. Shah Alam spoke very little English.
The Associated Press reported that the medical examiner’s office did not “reach any conclusions about responsibility” for the homicide and that Shah Alam’s death was “caused by complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration. “
“The designation of homicide does not imply intent to cause harm or death,” Erie County official Mark Poloncarz said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Manner-of-death determinations are neutral, non-legal, and exist for vital statistical purposes only. They do not indicate criminality, which is the purview of the justice system.”
Shah Alam was initially arrested after an incident where he became lost attempting to return home; the Buffalo Police Department approached him as a threat, ostensibly for holding a curtain rod he used as a walking stick. Instead of trying to assist him, officers tased and arrested him. He was incarcerated for a year before his release, when Border Patrol in effect dumped him.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that Shah Alam “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance,” despite being blind and experiencing other health issues. “DHS is lying,” New York Democrat and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded in a quote post.
Poloncarz said that he has spoken to Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane and New York Attorney General Letitia James about the case, and he encouraged questions about criminal investigations to be directed to them.
“I want to express my deepest condolences to the family of Mr. Amin Shah Alam for the death,” Poloncarz also remarked. “It should not have happened. Simple as that. The death was one that we believe could have been prevented.”
James, in a press release, said that her office is continuing to investigate Shah Alam’s death. “Mr. Shah Alam fled genocide to build a life in this country,” James said. “Instead, he was abandoned and left to suffer alone in his final hours.
In a press release, Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who represents the area in Congress, demanded that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Customs and Border Patrol, cooperate in James’ state-level investigation.
“In light of this determination, DHS must fully cooperate with New York State Attorney General James, and newly-confirmed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin must order an independent and transparent investigation,” he said.
2026-04-02 04:00:11
After oral arguments on Wednesday, the Supreme Court appears likely to strike down President Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to newborns without a citizen or lawful permanent resident parent. A loss for the administration would be a setback to the president’s project of creating a permanent underclass of mostly racial minorities. The centrality of this radical scheme to Trump’s presidency was underscored by his presence in the courtroom, the first time a sitting president attended Supreme Court oral arguments.
Though there is much to be relieved about after hearing skepticism from most of the justices, the very fact that the court is contemplating revising what it means to be an American citizen is chilling. Even if the government loses—and it almost certainly will—Trump will have moved the goalposts about respectable debate and muddied the clear rules that establish a society of equals. Ultimately, the biggest winner may be Chief Justice John Roberts, whose unpopular court would be able to boast that it reaffirmed the promise of birthright citizenship, accruing legitimacy to an institution that has under his leadership wielded its power to erode American democracy.
The case will likely prove to be an example of Trump going too far, even for this court.
The first sentence of the 14th Amendment is clear: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Drafted by Congress after the Civil War and ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment put an end to the shameful era of inherited status that defined slavery. In its place, not only would formerly enslaved people and their children be citizens, but so too would the children of all immigrants born on US soil. That way, never again would politicians or judges be able to turn a disfavored group into a permanent underclass. The only exceptions were the children of ambassadors, invading armies, and sovereign Indian tribes—because those newborns would not be subject to American laws in the same way that everyone else is.
The arguments against this plain reading of the text and history are bad arguments; they distort the history and misread the precedent to create a nonsensical rule. To defend Trump’s executive order, Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the meaning of the term “jurisdiction” implies an allegiance that can only be obtained through citizenship or permanent residence, what he called domicile. Sauer’s argument also relied on a misreading of a landmark 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the Supreme Court affirmed that the 14th Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States, and that the understood exceptions were the only ones.
Sauer’s argument ran up against the incredulity of many of the justices. When Sauer cited Wong Kim Ark as evidence that the children of undocumented immigrants couldn’t be citizens, Justice Neil Gorsuch cut him off. “I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark,” he cooly said. Gorsuch was also skeptical that there was evidence backing Trump in the congressional record of 1866 debates over the Citizenship Clause. “In none of the debates do we have parents discussed,” he said. “We have the child’s citizenship and the focus of the clause is on the child, not on the parents, and you don’t see domicile mentioned in the debates. The absence is striking.”
Sauer’s points were often at odds with each other, and he attempted both to argue he was right about the original purpose of the Citizenship Clause and to raise modern utilitarian reasons that a broad understanding of birthright citizenship is dangerous. “We’re in a new world now, where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a US citizen,” Sauer argued. Roberts was unconvinced. “Well, it’s a new world,” he replied. “It’s the same Constitution.”
The only justice who clearly seemed to have bought Sauer’s chaotic and contradictory arguments was Samuel Alito. Justice Alito seemed convinced that the narrow exceptions to birthright citizenship could be widened if the political branches see fit. And he agreed with Sauer that Wong Kim Ark, because the case was about a person whose parents were domiciled when he was born, only affirmed the citizenship of the children of domiciled immigrants. Alito launched multiple lines of questioning with ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang, who argued against the executive order on behalf of a class of children who would be denied citizenship. But he never landed a blow.
In one remarkable exchange, Alito posited that the ruling in Wong Kim Ark might have mentioned the term “domicile” many times because it was trying to differentiate between the children of domiciled and assimilating Chinese immigrants, like Wong Kim Ark’s parents, against the exploited and disfavored Chinese workers building the transcontinental railroad. These laborers “were overwhelmingly men, there wasn’t an indication that they would stay here, they could stay here, they didn’t have permanent homes,” Alito said. “And the opinion is drawing a distinction between those two categories of people who would have been well understood at the time when Wong Kim Ark was decided.”
Wang began to disagree but was interrupted by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who saw an easy explanation for Alito’s question: that the court emphasized the status of Wong Kim Ark’s parents not to restrict birthright citizenship, but to smooth the public’s acceptance of its ruling at a time of intense anti-Chinese sentiment. “One could imagine that it was important, from a standpoint of helping people accept this citizen rule under these circumstances, to emphasize that these particular people in this case were in Justice Alito’s first category,” Jackson suggested.
In a second exchange with Wang, Alito asked whether the child of an Iranian man born in the United States but still a subject of Iran and expected to serve in the Iranian army, would be a US citizen at birth. “Is he not subject to any foreign power?” Alito asked, using language from the 1866 Civil Rights Act, a precursor to the 14th Amendment. The question seemed like a Fox News talking point, and was not difficult for Wang to answer. “That would have meant that the children of Irish, Italian and other immigrants…would not have been citizens either,” she said. “Because, if the only test is whether that US born child is considered a citizen by another country under their jus sanguinis”—inherited citizenship—“laws, then no foreign nationals’ children” would get birthright citizenship. Alito conceded this point, saying that those children could naturalize if and when their parents did. “Well, in all of those cases, the parents could be naturalized, and then the children would be derivatively naturalized when the parents were naturalized.” It was a shocking statement because it was an acknowledgment that birthright citizenship wouldn’t actually exist under Alito’s and the government’s conception of allegiance. Wang, sensing that Alito had just proved her point, didn’t respond, letting Alito’s words hang in the air.
Though it received little attention during oral arguments, one of the reasons Trump is likely to lose is that the effects of a win would be so enormous. Even though the executive order is constructed to apply prospectively to people born after it was issued, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Trump—or another president, or Congress—could apply it retroactively, putting the citizenship of millions of people in jeopardy. Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked whether the children of people trafficked illegally to the US would be denied citizenship, and Sauer seemed to concede they could be. Sauer also conceded at various points that Congress could adjust the meaning of domicile, and therefore who is eligible for birthright citizenship at a given time. Other times, he seemed to suggest that one could appeal a denial of citizenship to a newborn if the parents intended to stay in the country. Either way, he promised to replace a clear, workable rule with a chaotic and ever-changing definition of citizenship.
The Roberts Court has gone out of its way to greenlight most of Trump’s second term agenda. They have repeatedly rescued his illegal and unconstitutional policies from lower court orders blocking his actions. Only in a small number of cases has the majority contradicted him, including striking down many of Trump’s tariffs. This case will likely prove another example of Trump going too far even for this court. If Trump’s presence on Wednesday was meant to intimidate the justices, this time it didn’t appear to work.
2026-04-02 01:47:14
Somewhere, paid for with your tax dollars, are $12,540 worth of three-tiered fruit basket stands. It’s a symptom of a much larger problem.
Buried in the way Congress funds the government is a “use it or lose it” rule that forces federal agencies to spend whatever’s left in their budgets before the fiscal year ends September 30 or hand the excess money back to the Treasury and potentially lose it in the next year’s allocation.
This happens every year, and every administration does this. But last September shattered every previous record, according to a report released in March by Open the Books, a nonpartisan government watchdog that tracks federal spending.
The Defense Department spent $93.4 billion in September, with $50 billion of that spent in the last five working days. To put that in perspective, only nine countries on Earth have an annual military budget that large.
The shopping list included luxury items like $6.9 million for lobster tail, $15.1 million in ribeye steak, and $2 million for Alaskan king crab, as well as musical instruments ($21,750 for a custom handmade Japanese flute), ice cream machines ($124,000), sushi prep tables ($26,000), and $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands. This is the same administration that created DOGE—an entire department whose sole purpose was to eliminate government waste.
The month after the September splurge, the government shutdown left 42 million Americans—1 in 8—briefly cut off from SNAP food assistance. A federal judge eventually ordered benefits restored, but the disruption was immediate and real for millions of families.
And it may get worse. In July, President Donald Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act restructured SNAP with new work and eligibility requirements and shifted part of the cost to states. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates as many as 4 million people could lose their food assistance permanently as a result.
Trump is now pushing to increase next year’s Defense Department budget by 66 percent, to $1.5 trillion, the largest increase since the Korean War.
