'BradCast' 4/15/2026 (Trump's USDA Takes Chainsaw to U.S. Forest Service; Guest: conservationist Jim Pattiz, More Than Just Parks)

The misinformation in the media. There is no closing of the Forest Service. We are moving it out of Washington, D.C. We are re-headquartering it in Salt Lake City, where it can be closer to the forest that it actually serves and the people that those forests serve most importantly, ensuring that, again, the U.S. Forest Service is there to serve the people that use the forest to manage the timber. The people that manage the timber, A, USDA Secretary of Brook Rawlings? Well, I don't know why I came here tonight. I got the feeling that something right. It is not. I'm so scared.

From Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, this is the broadcast as heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA, and on dozens of other fine affiliate stations on both the public airwaves and the internets around the country and the world, blanketing planet Earth. I'm Brad Friedman, your friendly investigative blogger, journalist, troublemaker, muckraker. An all-round swell fellow says me from bradblog.com. Thank you very much for joining us. I want to jump straight to a bit of good news here, given that my guest set to join us momentarily, we'll be here to discuss an absolutely maddening story. But one that you will want to hear about how the Trump administration is now officially taking a chainsaw to the U.S. Forest Service in an absolutely unprecedented way, no matter what the ag secretary, Brooke Rollins, is out there lying to folks about, as you heard a little bit of at the top of the show there. As my guest will explain, we'll explain all. Yes. And it is, yeah. It is fascinating and infuriating. Yeah. So this is all underway right now and whether it's, you know, unless it is somehow stopped and stopped quickly, because it will cause absolute irreparable harm and it will endanger some 193 million acres. of our public lands in this country. Trust me, you don't want to miss this conversation. But as to the good news, I promised for the moment, speaking of irreparable harm, A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Indiana's ban on using student IDs for voter identification, a victory that will make it easier for students and young voters to cast ballots in the upcoming midterm elections as democracy docket reports it today. In a sweeping decision issued on Tuesday in federal U.S. District Court, Judge Richard L. Young granted a preliminary injunction halting enforcement of Indiana's state Senate bill 10, SB 10, a Republican-backed law that eliminated student IDs as an acceptable form of identification at the polls. The ruling means that student IDs can once again Be used in upcoming elections while the case works its way through court. Judge Young found that the pro-voting plaintiffs count us in. Women for Change Indiana and a voter were likely to win in the case in court, a strong indication that the law may ultimately be struck down entirely as unconstitutional as the plaintiffs are charging.

Just months ago, the same court refused to grant the state's motion to dismiss this case, allowing the suit to go forward. And now, after reviewing evidence, the court has blocked the law outright. At least for now, long enough, at least, for this year's critical midterm elections, unless the injunction is overturned by a higher court. And now it has, for the moment, restored access to the ballot to tens of thousands of students in the Hoosier state. For nearly two decades, Indiana had accepted... Student IDs that met standard requirements for use in voting. SB10 changed that overnight, singling out student IDs as the only otherwise valid form of identification that was banned from the polls. The reason for that, I should suggest, is obvious. Republicans know that students tend to vote for Democrats more than they do for Republicans. The court estimated that roughly 40,000 students could be affected by the law, and for those voters, the consequences would be immediate. Quote, even if defendants are right that SB 10 does not make it impossible for one of the plaintiffs to vote, the moderate burden that it imposes on his right to vote still constitutes reparable harm as a matter of law. Judge Young wrote because an individual cannot vote. After an election has passed, it is clear that the wrongful disenfranchisement of a registered voter would cause irreparable harm. And also, it's just totally illogical. It's not like you cease being you because suddenly they decided that that photo ID is no longer acceptable. No, of course not. And the whole point is just to identify yourself. It's not necessary to have that to vote. Well, actually, the whole point is to suppress the vote. Yes. That's what the actual point is. is here. It has nothing to do with election integrity. As case after case has shown, the notion of polling place impersonation is vanishingly rare. It almost never, ever, ever happens. On the other hand, there are tens of millions of Americans who do not have the type of ID that are required to vote under these restrictive laws. Bingo. And Republicans know it. The court also rejected one of the most common arguments used to defend restrictive voting laws, namely that the courts shouldn't change election rules too close to an election. That's also known as the Purcell principle. Young, Judge Young found the opposite here that, in fact, restoring student IDs would be simple because voters in the state had already used them for years. 20 of them.

Well, Indiana argued that the ban was necessary to protect election integrity. The court found no evidence that student IDs had ever posed a problem. Quote, this ruling is a victory for every student in Indiana who could have lost their right to vote because of Senate Bill 10, said Jalen Radisminsky Hooks, the executive and lead policy director of Count Us In. In a statement, she said, quote, this law was never about election integrity. It was about silencing the voices of young Hoosiers who want to hold their elected representatives accountable at the ballot box. The decision lands amid a broader push by Republican lawmakers across the country to restrict student voting access notes democracy docket often by tightening ID requirements or banning student IDs outright. In Indiana, the Republican National Committee even stepped into this case to defend this law arguing in court that banning student IDs. Was a neutral policy choice. Of course, Indiana was the first state in the union to adopt strict photo ID restrictions like this at the polling place, a law that was allowed shamefully by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008's Crawford v. Marion County, for which liberal justice John Paul Stevens authored the controlling opinion only to later come to express regret about having done so, saying that he, quote, misjudged. the facts in that case and that the court did not have sufficient evidence of the real world consequences of the law at the time. which turned out to be far more burdensome than he had understood and that the court's ruling had since become misused in order to justify ever stricter photo ID restrictions in other states beyond what had been adopted initially by Indiana. So, yeah, what happens in Indiana matters nationally. And a finding that banning student IDs may be unconstitutional could become very good news for the entire nation. So we will continue to watch that case. But good news for now for voters, student voters in...

Indiana. And now with that good news out of the way, just to help you get a little bit angry again before a guest joins us to seal the deal on that, I'm afraid. We'll see. Donald Trump's absolutely ridiculous and deadly and stupid war in Iran continues today while Republicans in D.C. cannot be bothered. to mind their constitutional duties. The Republican-led Senate on Wednesday rejected the latest Democratic attempt to halt Trump's war, which has skyrocketed oil and gas prices globally spiked inflation and put the world on the edge of a global recession for reasons that are still unknown. And all without congressional approval as required by the Constitution. Nonetheless, Republicans in the Senate voting down a resolution again. that would require the U.S. to withdraw forces from the conflict until Congress actually authorizes further action. You know, just like the Constitution says. Maybe it's only us constitutional conservatives who care about that sort of thing. The vote was the fourth time this year that Senate Republicans have... voted to cede Congress's war powers to the president in a conflict that Democrats say is illegal and unjustified because it literally is on both counts, not just because Democrats say so, AP. Republicans say that they will keep faith in Trump's wartime leadership because clearly it is solid up until now. After 60 days, however, according to the War Powers Act, they will have to vote to keep this war going or, well, we shall see when that deadline arrives. I think it's April 29th. For those keeping track of the rule of law and the Constitution at home. Of course, allowing Trump to do anything he wants in this war, despite the constitutional requirements, which say Congress, not the president, get to decide such things. Well, that means that we are getting... Ever closer every day at this point to putting American boots on the ground in Iran for reasons still unknown, as Washington Post reports today.

The Pentagon is sending thousands of additional troops into the Middle East in the coming days as the administration attempts to pressure Iran into a deal that could end the weeks-long conflict there while considering the possibility of additional strikes or ground operations if a fragile ceasefire does not hold. The force is moving into the region, according to U.S. officials speaking to Washington Post. Include about 6,000 more troops aboard the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush and several warships that are escorting it. About 42 others with the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group and its embarked Marine Corps Task Force. The 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit are expected to arrive near the end of the month. The infusion of firepower appears likely to coalesce with warships already in the Middle East just as the two-week ceasefire is set to expire on April 22. The troops will join the estimated 50,000 personnel that the Pentagon has said are already involved globally in operations countering Iran. So tens of thousands of ground troops ready to be deployed. by the self-declared peace president who ran on and was apparently elected on the promise that he would not start any new foreign wars. And I can't remember if he ran on it or not, but... If all of that fails to make you angry enough today, well, he is now taking a chainsaw to the U.S. Forest Service back here at home, despite how the USDA's Ag Secretary, Brooke Rollins, has been mischaracterizing the unprecedented move announced at the end of last month. Here is Brooke Rollins at a recent press conference in D.C. being asked about the plan to shut down... The D.C. headquarters of the U.S. Forest Service, where it has been housed for more than 100 years and move it out to Salt Lake City, Utah, for some reason, while shutting down dozens of regional offices around the country. The. misinformation in the media. There is no closing of the Forest Service. We are moving it out of Washington, D.C. We are re-headquartering it in Salt Lake City, where it can be closer to the forest that it actually serves and the people that those forests serve most importantly. We have spent about a year ensuring that while we're reorganizing the US Department of Agriculture, there is no reason to have thousands upon thousands of people based in Washington when you are the USDA. You're representing agriculture, you're representing rural America, and you're representing the forest. I'm not aware of any offices we're closing in Michigan. There is no one in the upper peninsula of Michigan that's getting reassigned to the East Coast. So any offices that are closing, I don't have that one in front of me, but any offices that are closing, it's usually because

They are, the rent is way too high and there's so much work that needs to be done. And so we consolidated offices ensuring that, again, the U.S. Forest Service is there to serve the people that use the forest to manage the timber. Yeah, the ones that manage the timber most importantly there. But that was Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins, maybe a cow in the background. I don't know. They're in D.C. responding to a reporter who was asking about. An office, a regional office that would be closing up in the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. Right. Brooke Rollins saying she doesn't know the specifics of that case, but that generally they were closing these regional offices because the rent is just too damn high. Which is a lie. What? Because as the new Republic reports, they actually spoke to the head of one of the Michigan universities that actually is a participant in the research offices there. And they said that building. paid for. What? We pay them $1 a year in rent, so the rent is not too damn high. Well, a dollar saved is a dollar earned, Desi Doyen. We will pick up that story and tell you all the truths about it and the utter corruption. of your public lands. Right after a quick break with award-winning filmmaker, conservationist, and fantastic writer Jim Pattis of More Than Just Parks.com. He will be joining us momentarily. I am Brad Friedman and you are listening to the Bradcast.

What the public hears on the public airwaves matters. At the broadcast, we do our best to bring you accurate news and analysis on the issues that actually matter, and we do it all independently without corporate or political influence. But we can't do it without you, now more than ever. Please help us stay on your public airwaves by going to bradblog.com slash donate to help keep us going. That's bradblog.com slash donate. And thanks. Land is my land from California to the New York Islands from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Street Wall That's the theory anyway. Welcome back to the broadcast. Brad Friedman from Bradblog.com. I know there's a lot going on right now, especially with a seemingly delusional, quickly deteriorating president of the United States. Apparently. Hell bent on stumbling his way into World War III or at the very least crashing the world economy to somehow satisfy his twisted broken ego. So there is that. And so much more that we try to do our best to keep up with every day on this program, even as we also try when possible in these. impossible times to keep our eyes on stuff that doesn't find its way onto the front pages of the or the 24-hour cable news networks. Earlier this month, Jim Pattis, award-winning filmmaker, conservationist, and co-founder of the More Than Just Parks.com site and newsletter. attempted to set off a proverbial fire alarm with a five alarm article on the outdoor environmentalist website Hatch magazine. He was and is covering a story that perhaps in any other era beyond the Trump era would itself be at the top of front pages and discussed and debated across hours of cable news and for good reason. We covered it ourselves, if very briefly, recently on one of our Green News reports, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a press release on March 31, headlined innocuously enough, quote, USDA, prioritizing common sense forest management, moves Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City. Today, the USDA wrote, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service announced it will move its headquarters to Salt Lake City, Utah, and begin a sweeping restructuring of the agency to move leadership closer to the forests and communities it serves. For an agency whose lands, partners, and operational challenges are overwhelmingly concentrated in the West,

The shift represents a structural reset and a common sense approach to improve mission delivery. Now, as noted, we covered it on our GNR, but there is only so much one that one can fit into six minutes. Jim Pattis' more alarming and more accurate headline for his coverage on this at Hatch Magazine, quote, Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. Late afternoon with the subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice, Jim writes, the Trump administration announced the most devastating attack on the U.S. Forest Service in the agency's 121 year history. Not a budget cut, not a policy shift, not a, quote, reorganization, an execution. Jim Patis writes, they're ripping the headquarters out of Washington and chipping it to Salt Lake City, Utah, the beating heart of the anti-public lands movement in America. They're shuddering every single one of the 10 regional offices that have governed this agency since Gifford Pinchot built the system over a century ago. And with them, the career professionals who spent entire lifetimes earning the expertise and the authority to push back. When politicians came calling with bad ideas and worse motives, they're destroying more than 50 research facilities across 31 states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science, the kind you literally cannot restart once it's gone. And they're replacing all of it, the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence with... 15 political appointees called state directors, embedded in-state capitals alongside the very governors, legislators, and industry lobbyists who have spent their career demanding that the Forest Service log more, protect less, and get out of the way. 193 million acres of your national forests, an area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country just handed on a silver Graham Platner to the people who've spent their entire careers trying to destroy it. And they did it with a press release on a Tuesday. Let me be very clear about what's happening here. Pat is continues in his detailed, lengthy, really good read of this real life disaster in the making that almost no one knows about and few, if any, are even talking about. Because the press release, he says, is designed to make your eyes glaze over. It's written in the dead language of bureaucratic euphemism, quote, mission delivery.

quote, state-based organizational model, quote, operational service centers. And that's the point. They want you to be bored. They want you to think this is an org chart shuffle. They want you to read the word streamlining and move on with your day. Don't do it, warns. Pat is what this actually is stripped of the Orwellian window dressing is the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history. It dwarfs anything that's come before. Joining us now is filmmaker and conservationist Jim Pattis, who with his brother Will, has spent his career traveling to America's most wild and precious public spaces telling the stories of our public lands. He joins us today to warn about all of them now at risk at this very precarious moment. Jim Pat is welcome to the broadcast, sir, honored to have you with us today. Thanks a lot, Brad. And I just have to say that reading in the article, you read it a lot better than I wrote it. Not true. You wrote it really well. It is really well written on all of this. Like I said, it's long, but it is a great read. I will point folks to it when we post tonight's show at bradblog.com along with your important newsletter site, more than just parks, that I hope folks will sign up for. But I want to sort of touch on at least. What the administration is planning to do, why they're doing it, why you argue that it is brazenly unlawful, and what, if anything, those of us sort of just now learning about this and trying to make sense of it can possibly do to help. So let's start with what they are doing, Jim. Tell me about this so-called reorganization of the U.S. Forest Service, how it's different from what some of us recall from Trump's first term when he's seemingly... similarly tried to gut the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, by moving its headquarters out of D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado, if I recall. You described that as, quote, a knife in the dark, but this as, quote, a chainsaw in broad daylight. How so, Jim? Yeah, well, I mean, I would start with the chainsaw analogy. You know, the chief of the United States Forest Service, you know, as you point out in the intro here, the U.S. Forest Service is a 121-year-old agency. It is a storied American institution. And in that, in the history of the agency, no Forest Service Chief has ever been chosen from outside of the agency. That's just not how it's done. Well, not this time. The current Forest Service Chief, his job...

prior to being chief during this Trump administration was as a logging executive. No forest service experience whatsoever. So there's where the chainsaw analogy really comes into play here. But I think, you know, you mentioned the BLM sort of comparison here. This, they've done this before. In the first Trump administration, they did almost exactly this, but on a much, much smaller scale. So the BLM is a much smaller age. in terms of the employees that it has. And what they did was they moved the headquarters to Grand Junction. What it ended up happening was 87% of the affected staff quit. They walked away. They resigned because they can't. They're not going to pick up and move to Grand Junction. They can't do that. That's not how life works. And the- And that's not because they're objecting to the move or anything. It's just they have lives. They live in D.C. They've been there for decades. They're married. Their wives. Kids are in school. Yeah. Exactly. Houses, everything else. Exactly. It has nothing to do with the politics of it. It has everything to do with the practicality of it. But the thing is, is the Trump administration knows that. That was the point of the BLM move. And that is absolutely part of the point of this Forest Service move is to send people packing. And the reason you do that is to drain the agency of institutional knowledge. And I know I don't have to tell you this, Brad, because look around the Trump administration. I mean, this is what they've been doing to agency. after agency in various ways is draining them of their institutional knowledge. And instead, you know, you hollow out the agency. And then with the skeleton crew that's left, you have, you leave a few, you know, doge employees and, and, and, you know, political sycophants to carry out your rubber stamp for, for your industrial buddies. And that's exactly what the goal is here with the Forest Service. I mean, this is literally a decapitation of the Forest Service's leadership. And the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, who went on a seven-tweet rant about my article, by the way. Congratulations, by the way. A badge of honor. Well, the White House tweeted about it and said, I called it Lies from These Losers. So there you go. But the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, you know, he went so far as to say in one of his statements about the whole thing, you know, he talked about how this is about making people accountable directly to the Forest Service chief. who is a logging executive. So what they've done is they've decapitated the leadership structure within the Forest Service so that everybody is, you know, all of that institutional knowledge, all those people who were able to say, hey, you know what, we shouldn't.

log over here or we shouldn't do this or we can't do that. They're all going to be gone now. They've literally, I mean, the regional foresters, these are some of the highest ranking people in the U.S. Forest Service, they have the ability. They're among some of the very few government officials who actually have the ability to make treaties with Native American tribes. That's how high ranking these regional foresters are. They're gone. They cease to be now. and all of their staff and all of that. And they're being, you know, some of their staff will be told, oh, well, you can move to this far-flung office over there. And, of course, the administration knows that's not going to happen for the vast majority of these employees. And that's why they're doing it. When they move the BLM, how many people moved to the new headquarters? Yeah, exactly three people. Exactly three people reported to the new office. Yeah. And the numbers that we're talking about here, comparing the BLM, a relatively small federal agency compared to the U.S. Forest Service, a huge difference that we're talking about in what was sort of a trial run with BLM now underway with the U.S. Forest Service. Exactly. This will affect somewhere in the neighborhood of up to 5,000 employees. That's a tremendous amount of the workforce. Of a workforce, by the way, that's already lost a fourth. of the Forest Service workforce since Trump has taken, you know, has started this second term after all the doge cuts and everything, literally, I mean, a fourth of the agency, a critical agency that does most of the wildland firefighting in the United States, not to mention obviously taking care of our public lands, a fourth of that agency gone. And now you're talking about an additional... potentially up to 5,000 employees are affected by this. And a great number of them are going to be gone as well. This former president, we live out here in California, from a president who, you know, says we don't sweep our forests enough or something like that. We don't rake the. And meantime, much of the forest land out here is, in fact, federal lands. And I haven't noticed him out here sweeping it. Now, Jim Pat has President Biden eventually moved in the BLM case. He eventually moved BLM, their headquarters, from Colorado, back to D.C. he defeated Trump in 2020, can what Trump is doing now similarly be rolled back, reversed after he is mercifully out of power?

Yes. So it can be undone, but the problem with that is that the damage will be done. There are employees, people who work for the BLM who've gone on the record, who were there at the BLM in 2024 after Biden had moved the agency back to D.C. And they'll tell you right now that the agency has never recovered from that move that they did to Grand Junction. Because the problem is when you send these employees back, you give them basically this notice that says either you move to this far flung place or you're gone or in many cases with this Forest Service thing, you know, several positions are just simply being eliminated altogether. So when that happens, these people have to move on, you know. Like we said, they've got kids in school. They've got, you know, all these things to... to account for. So they go and they take another job somewhere else. And they're not simply going to come back to the Forest Service because a new president asks them nicely. That's just not how life works. And so, you know, With what they're doing, the Trump administration knows that. They know that if they lose control in 2028, the damage is still going to be done. And by the way, that's what they do a lot of the time with these moves. They know that they're illegal. This move is illegal. Congress expressly prohibited this in the most recent appropriations bills. But the Trump administration, they've taken that tech ethos of move fast and break things, right? And that's what they're doing with our public lands and with our government institutions is... is moving fast and breaking things. And by the time the lawsuits work their way through the courts, it's too late. You know, I mean, we've had federal judges who have said, hey, you know, for some of the previous Forest Service firings early on in the Trump administration, they said, hey, you shouldn't have done that. You need to hire those people back. Well, many of them didn't come back, you know, because it was too late at that point. And so the Trump administration, they know that. And I want to, we will get to some of those legal issues here and what can and should be done. But in this case, you know, and the other point you make in your piece here is there's a lot of with the Forest Service, a lot of ongoing, you know, experiments and so forth that have been going on for years. And those can, with this move, come to an end. And you can't just easily put Humpty Dumpty back together again in that case because you lose years. of data in the bargain. Why in this case, Jim, has the administration decided to move the Forest Service to Utah of all places? A state which is currently in the middle of suing the federal government to seize 18.5 million acres of our public lands to get it back from the federal government. Or did I just accidentally answer the question?

pro-extraction and anti-public lands. Their political leadership is very much bathed in the sagebrush rebellion. And so this idea that we need to get the government off of, you know, quote unquote, our lands. And so they, if you look at, you know, who gives money to Utah's political leadership, it's the resource extraction industry and the grazing industry. And so that's who. they're accountable to. They're not, they're certainly not accountable to Utahans who overwhelmingly oppose the transfer of any of their federal lands to the state. That's the poll after poll bears that out. But Utah's goals here are fairly transparent. They want the federal lands for themselves so that they can manage them themselves. And when they say manage them themselves, they mean give them away to their resource extraction partners, either through direct land transfers or through, you know, leasing the hell out of them until, you know, there's nothing left. But either way, you know, the public loses. But that's been Utah's goal. I mean, you look at their elected representatives. That seems to be almost all they talk about. And as you point out, the... The state of Utah makes so much money from the outdoor recreation tourism industry. That's the lifeblood of their economy. But that is not who signs the checks for their legislators. There you go. There's your answer. Now, the new Trump's new Forest Service chief, you mentioned Tom Schultz, I think. First time I guess that they've put someone in charge of the Forest Service who hadn't worked for the Forest Service initially. He says in this press release quote, this is about building a forest service that is nimble, efficient, effective, and closer to the forests and community it serves. Effective stewardship and active management are achieved on the ground where forests and communities are found, not just behind a desk in the Capitol. This is from Tom Schultz, a former extraction industry logging executive. Is that right? That's exactly right. And he then goes on to add, quote, I'm honored to help guide this new chapter for the Forest Service following the vision set forth by President Theater Rossell. And Gifford Pinchot more than a century ago. Why should that statement, Jim, as you argue in your piece at Hatchmag, make our blood boil? Yeah, I mean, as you read it, it makes my blood boil because, you know, that that... is the antithesis of, you know, what the Forest Service is all about. It's certainly the antithesis of Theodore Roosevelt, you know, who...

who made a career out of opposing people like Tom Schultz and people who, you know, this administration has put in positions of leadership. So, you know, it's just absurd to hear this logging executive who has just inexplicably been, you know, installed as the Forest Service chief to hear him, you know, using the name of Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, these towering. you know, men in terms of conservation and in terms of, you know, the Forest Service, yeah, it's enough to make your blood boil because what they're doing is the anathema of Roosevelt and his legacy. And that's why Roosevelt's, you know, descendants have been, you know, going to Capitol Hill and telling them to stop and to stop using his name. And in Pinchot's case, for those people who don't recognize and be founded what would become the U.S. Forest Service initially 120-something years ago, under this reorganization, Jim Patis, quote, more than 50 research and development facilities across 31 states will simply be shut down, you report, and consolidated into one single location. In Fort Susan Collins, Colorado, this is the research facilities. I suspect the argument here is that this is just to help trim the budget, make the work more efficient, right? What does it really mean? What will they really be doing here by shutting down these regional facilities and moving them all to Fort Susan Collins? Yeah, and Brad, this is one of the biggest pieces of this story that really isn't getting talked about is these Forest Service research stations. For those of you don't know, the Forest Service Research and Development Program, it is the largest forest research and development program in the world. It is the envy. of the world. You know, other countries send their scientists to come and get embedded in the Forest Service research stations and learn from our practices. We have, you know, they have over 60,000 peer review studies that they've published over the years. Absolutely critical, critical work. And a lot of it is, you know, is nonpartisan. This is work that is informing us about habitat. you know, restoration. And these are these are the studies that tell us when, you know, an administration or a company wants to put a mine somewhere on Forest Service property, we can then pull up these research, you know, these studies and say, oh, wait a minute, you know, we know what happens when, you know, something like this is done. We know how this is going to affect the wildlife and so on and so forth. And so when you shutter 57 of those research facilities, that

That is absolutely a kill shot to our research program, which is the envy of the world. This is an incredible resource for our country. It doesn't even cost us very much money and for what it puts out. And it's a kill shot. And you can see quote after quote from some of these scientists who work for these research stations, you know, they've been told it's either move or quit. Or in some cases, your position's been eliminated. They don't care, which seems to be the very opposite of the reason why these agencies were established in the first place by Congress. You write a scientist who says, you can't log that watershed without destroying it. is inconvenient. A researcher who publishes data showing that a timber sale will wipe out a salmon run is a problem. A lab that documents the damage from mining runoff or road building or clear cutting is an enemy and enemies get eliminated. That seems to be exactly what they are trying to do in defiance of Congress who created these agencies. You argued in one of your more recent substack articles this week, that the Forest Service reorganization is illegal. You mentioned that earlier. USDA's top lawyer told them to do it anyway. How is what they are doing here actually unlawful? And then we can talk about what can be done about it. Yeah. So Congress in its most recent appropriations bills, they... included language in those bills because actually Congress knew that the Forest Service that USDA was looking at making these changes, was looking at doing this reorganization. So they included language explicitly prohibiting this reorganization without first getting the approval. of Congress. So you can't do it without the approval of Congress. But Stephen Vaden, who is the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, just so happens that he was also the USDA's general counsel under the first Trump administration when the USDA did exactly this on a much, much smaller scale. They moved two of their, you know, smaller agencies. to Kansas City in direct defiance of appropriations bills at the time. And he wrote at the time that those appropriation bills, the language in them, was unconstitutional. And so thereby we can ignore it. That's not how the law works. No. Was there a finding that this was unconstitutional? Absolutely. No, there was a finding of quite the opposite. The USDA's... own inspector general said, no, it is not unconstitutional. And what you did was illegal. And it did defy the law. And they ignored it anyway. Of course, then, you know, the subsequent, the Biden administration undoes those moves. So that was a, you know, a small subset of what we're talking about now. Now this is on a massive scale. And the very same guy, Stephen Vaden, he was given a lifetime judgeship.

by Trump before, and they took him off of this lifetime appointment, a federal judgeship, and brought him back this time to be Undersecretary of Agriculture so that he could do this very same move on a massive scale. And here's this guy who's out here ranting and raving about my article about how it's all a bunch of lies. It's exactly what he's done before on a much larger scale that's already been declared illegal. Wow. So who has the standing to bring a lawsuit here? I mean, presumably Congress does because they are violating explicitly what Congress said as recently as like last year, right? The fiscal 26. Absolutely. Absolutely. But they're obviously not going to be suing, I guess, while they're controlled by Republicans. So who has the standing here to bring a lawsuit and is one underway right now? Or is this like a done deal and there's nothing that can be done about it? It really will all come down to the federal employees unions. So there's a couple of major unions. There's the union for the scientists that are obviously those research stations are being gutted. And then there's also a much larger union that covers a lot of the Forest Service employees. And they'll absolutely be filing a lawsuit. I know that that's underway currently. And so they do have standing to stop this for the exact reasons that we've talked about here because it is in defiance. And they're the... You know, as we know, the Supreme Court's made it harder to get those nationwide injunctions, right? Recently they had that ruling last year that's made it harder. But the Forest Service employees can be certified as a class, and they can get that nationwide injunctive relief. So I would expect that lawsuit to be, you know, coming out any day now. And hopefully they'll be able to put a stop to this before, you know, any more damage is done. We'll see, you know, because the courts at the end of the day, you know, they're very slow. And. And that's what the Trump administration has been counting on, not to mention their backstop in the Supreme Court that believes in the unitary executive theory. This guy, Stephen Vaden, by the way, the Undersecretary of Agriculture or Deputy Secretary, he brought back his deputy now as the general counsels, the guy named Tyler Clarkson. These two are both Federalist Society lawyers, the same Federalist Society that is responsible for every sitting Republican judge. justice on the Supreme Court. And so they all are drinking that same Kool-Aid about the unitary executive theory. So I think the administration is feeling its oats in terms of they feel like they can, you know, the Supreme Court is going to back them up at the end of the day. And when we look at the decisions that are coming out, basically, as long as you don't touch the Federal Reserve, it looks like you can get away with just about anything. Yeah, I mean, apparently the idea here is that Congress can.

you know, give money, appropriate money for these projects, but that it's completely 100% up to the executive as far as how they spend the money, that Congress has no say in it, that you can't even imagine that Congress would, you know, explicitly say something about how this money should be spent. That is totally up to the president. That seems to be the argument that they're making here. Which would upend all of Americans. legislative history. Of course. The idea that Congress can't attach strings to the money that they're, that they're, you know, legislating is absurd. That is what legislating is. You say, here's this money and here is what you can do with it. That is the purpose of legislating across the world. So the idea that, no, you can, you can. say how much money there is, but the president gets to basically do whatever they want with it. It's absurd. And but yet they have, you know, found friendly ears on the Supreme Court. And of course there are strings. Those are literally the purse strings that we are talking about that Congress, not the president, is in charge of. Very quickly, Jim, I got to get out. But is there anything that we, the people can do here in the meantime? These are our public lands after. all. Yep, absolutely. I think the biggest thing people can do is write and call your representatives, your senators, and tell them to stick up for the laws that they wrote. People should know. Democrats didn't. solely include that language about, you know, you can't reorganize the Forest Service. That Republicans had a hand in crafting that language. It never would have showed up in the bill. If Republicans weren't okay with it, the president signed it himself. And now they're defying it. So, you know, one of the Republican senators in Vaden's confirmation hearing asked him point blank if they would work with Congress on any potential reorganizations. And Vaden lied to him. He said, yes, of course. We are at, you know, we're at the back and call of Congress. We're not allowed constitutionally to do anything that Congress tells us we can't do. And then they go and do this. So contact your representatives. Tell them to hold this. Department of Agriculture accountable. You can call your senators and your member of Congress at 202-224-3121.2. You can talk to both of your center or their offices in any event. 202-224-3-1-21. Tell them that you want them to, you know, enforce the law in this case that they passed to stop. as I said, clear-cutting the U.S. Forest Service in this case. Jim, Jim Pattis is the award-winning filmmaker, conservationist. He co-founded the More Than Just Parks website and newsletter with his brother Will. If you would like, as the White House says, more lies from these losers. You can go to more than just parks.com, and you can and should sign up for their substack.

More Than Just Parks.substack.com. By the way, they've got a map. I don't have the words in front of me. What is that? Threatened public lands map. Fantastic resource that is over there. So you can see how they are coming after the land near you, wherever you may live in this country. You can also follow them on the blue skies at More Than Just Parks. Jim Pat has really appreciated to joining us today. Please consider our microphone, yours. Would love to have you back anytime in the future. Thanks a lot, Brad. It was a pleasure. Thank you, sir. All right. Well, I told you that was going to be maddening. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I just want to make a finer point. You guys had talked about the value of public lands versus extraction industries going into those lands. So I just want to say nobody. Public lands like recreational and so forth. Exactly. So nobody visits a dead forest. Extraction industries, they mine or they log the public's resource to exhaustion. They send the profits out of. state and then they leave. They leave the public, the locals with the cleanup bill and with the degraded landscape. And in contrast, outdoor recreation and tourism, those generate billions in sustainable revenue that circulates in the local economy in perpetuity. forever for as long as that landscape is protected. So just want to point that out because I think that's extremely important for people to understand the difference between a short-term extraction industry and a long-term sustainable, perpetual revenue from outdoor tourism and maintaining and conserving our lands. Stephen Miller. What about Stephen Miller? Stephen Miller. That's where he goes on vacation to Dead Forests. So I don't know what you mean. Nobody goes to Dead Forests. He loves camping there. Yeah, he probably does. I think he does. All right. Thank you very much, Desi Doyen. Thanks again to Jim Pattis of more than justparks.com. And thanks to all of you for spending a portion of your day or night with us. If you missed any portion of today's show or any other or you want to share it with someone you know, you love, or you hate, you can do that. all for free at bradblog.com. All we ask is that you consider hitting a donate button while you're there to help us stay on your public airwaves while they're taking your public lands away. We're still fighting for the public airwaves here. You can hit a donate button while you're there. You can go straight to bradblog.com slash donate. All of it helps. We rely on you to stay on those public airwaves. Drop me email if you like. I am Bradcast at Bradblog.com.

You will find me on the social media, especially at Blue Sky, at the Brad blog. We will see you there. Until we see you here next time, hopefully tomorrow, I'm Brad Friedman. Good luck, world. This land is your land, and this land is my land. From the California to the New York Island, and the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me.