An Important Arm of This Agency Could Vanish Next Week If Trump Has His Way

All 1,200 scientists and staff at the U.S. Geological Survey’s biological research arm are on edge this week as they wait to learn whether they’ll still have jobs come Monday.

For weeks, the biologists who work in the division, known as the Ecosystems Mission Area, have watched two parallel threats unfold. Most immediate is the expected firing of most division staff as soon as next week, if federal courts allow agencies to complete — without congressional oversight — the mass layoffs President Donald Trump has demanded. On May 9, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the imminent layoffs of more than 100,000 employees from at least 17 federal agencies and departments, including USGS. Illston this week is considering a longer-lasting injunction, but if the court does not order one, the pause will expire Friday. The White House, in the meantime, has asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

The second threat is even more serious: If the White House has its way, its proposed 2026 budget would eliminate the Ecosystems Mission Area, or EMA, altogether. An April leak to Science revealed that Trump plans to ask Congress to erase the entire $307 million division from USGS’s $1.6 billion budget. The president’s public-facing proposal, published May 2, is not as specific, but includes a $564 million cut to all of USGS, which he claims would eliminate “programs that provide grants to universities, duplicate other Federal research programs and focus on social agendas (e.g., climate change).”

The termination of these scientists — a plan straight from the Project 2025 wish list — would end programs that form the bedrock of American conservation work, fish and wildlife management, environmental health and wildlife disease monitoring, climate adaptation, and much more. The loss would be felt at nearly every other agency under the Department of the Interior, as well as the many state agencies, nonprofits, tribes and universities that partner with USGS or make use of their biological research.

Unlike the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service or Environmental Protection Agency, which are charged with managing or regulating public land and resource use, USGS was designed to be a separate, unbiased research agency that supports them all.

“I can’t understate how important that is,” Noah Greenwald, the Center for Biological Diversity’s endangered species director, said. “It allows them to do their work without political interference.”

The elimination of the EMA would have profound consequences, a dozen agency partners and beneficiaries told High Country News. It would erase bipartisan and widely respected programs that, for example, monitor waterfowl populations for game agencies, track contamination in drinking water, convene time- and cost-saving collaborations between agencies, universities and nonprofits, and foster the next generation of fish and wildlife professionals.

The Trump administration has implied that all this work could simply move to other agencies. Project 2025 recommends shifting it to universities.

But agency partners told HCN that EMA’s work is not replicable by either. Federal agencies have competing mandates, for example, while states and universities are often ill-equipped for multi-state studies, long-term monitoring or interagency collaboration. USGS excels at this sort of work: Its Bee Lab inventories all the nation’s native bees; the Bird Banding Lab and Breeding Bird Survey do much the same for birds, and their cutting-edge population models are also now used for non-avian species worldwide. Their work on greater sage-grouse, including a national monitoring framework, has brought siloed federal, state and university experts together to protect a politically fraught species that for decades has been kept off the federal endangered species list.

“It is incredibly shortsighted and ignorant to think that it’s just redundancy when the contributions are so obvious,” said a lead biologist at a national conservation nonprofit, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. They and others added that recent deep cuts to research grants and other agencies mean that no one else can quickly pick up EMA’s work.

EMA scientists also monitor toxic chemicals in water, and are one of the only groups looking in private wells. Although most rural households rely on them, private wells are unregulated, leaving homeowners on the hook for testing. To help communities and other agencies, EMA scientists “created national maps showing where contaminants are showing up, often before anyone else is looking,” said Alexis Temkin, a toxicologist at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.

“It is incredibly shortsighted and ignorant to think that it’s just redundancy when the contributions are so obvious.”

Other EMA biologists monitor wildlife disease, including the ongoing avian influenza epidemic that has killed millions of wild and domestic birds, raised egg prices nationwide and infected dozens of farmworkers across the West. Even in California, one of the few states with its own wildlife health lab, biologists sometimes send specimens to EMA’s National Wildlife Health Center for testing, said Krysta Rogers, who leads bird death investigations at California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And USGS plays a critical role in maintaining a pipeline of young biologists, according to numerous leaders who work with the agency’s Cooperative Research Units, which have installed agency scientists as faculty at more than 40 universities. These biologists work with state agencies and graduate students on research that states have prioritized, such as chronic wasting disease at units in Wyoming, Washington and Montana.

“I keep thinking about the new graduate students I was going to bring on this fall, who I’ve had to tell, ‘I can’t offer you this role because my funding is disappearing and I might disappear, too,’” a mid-career faculty member at one cooperative unit told HCN, speaking anonymously for fear of further threatening their job. “My students feel like the ground is falling out beneath them.”

Oregon State University, which has one of the largest units for fish and wildlife research, stands to lose four faculty that it cannot afford to replace, along with support for 30 graduate students, postdocs and research staff, said Selina Heppell, who heads OSU’s Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Sciences department. Already, due to uncertainty, she said the department has admitted 40% fewer grad students to next year’s cohort.

“The American public cares about fish and wildlife. They’ve shown that again and again,” Heppell said. But the Trump administration, aided by Congress, is “pushing things through without full debate. It’s a different scenario than it’s been in the past. We’re preparing for the worst.”

This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.