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Floor Speech
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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, we may not be in a quorum call, but I can tell you this, we are in the midst of a 1,200-year drought in the American West that challenges us in extraordinary ways--from vast new insect and disease outbreaks to catastrophic wildfires. Instead of having fire seasons, there are many people now who observe that it has become trite, I would say, to observe, as the fire season lasts all year.
Our national forests in Colorado and throughout the Rocky Mountain West are the headwaters of America. In those forests is the origin of the streams and rivers that flow to the rest of the Western United States. In the case of just the Colorado River Basin alone, 40 million people rely on it. It is the lifeblood of the American West, the lifeblood of the Western United States, and of every town and every community no matter how big and no matter how small. In Colorado and on every farm and ranch across the American West, they depend on this water, and they depend on the forests where this water stops. The critical aspect of this, I think, is that everybody who is downstream from us needs to care about the health of our forests and also our public lands.
As many people know, since COVID ripped through the United States of America, our public lands have become a place for the American people to find refuge, for the American people to be able to get away from each other, for families to have the time to also be together on America's public lands. And as many people now say, our public lands are being loved to death. We have had Americans from all over the world come and discover the public lands in Colorado and throughout the West, but it has created new pressures on our communities, new pressures on the lands themselves and also on the communities that are surrounding them.
Now, when we find ourselves in a place where we are facing these challenges and where we have done a little bit of work just over the last few years because of the money we were able to get into the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it is not the forests that we are thinning; it is the Forest Service staff that has been clearcut by what the Trump administration is doing and has proposed to do.
Even before the Trump administration began their across-the-board cuts on the Forest Service, the Forest Service had 30 percent less of a workforce than it had 30 years ago. Think about that. While the stresses and strains have grown, while the effect of that 1,200-year drought and climate change has grown, now we find ourselves in a place where the Forest Service is getting whacked by the administration.
Last year, even before the Trump administration came back to town, I met with Forest Service employees in Colorado--actually, not just the Forest Service but the other western public land Agencies from the Western Slope of Colorado to the Eastern Plains of our State--who told me that they can't hire anybody to work for these Agencies because Federal pay has not kept up with the cost of housing.
They were the best jobs in our communities years ago. You could live on one person's salary. You could have a household. You could raise kids in a community. You never had to leave the community you grew up in if you had one of these jobs. Today, nobody can afford housing in Colorado. That is a huge problem for America, not just for my State, but it is certainly true of the public employees in the Forest Service. To add insult to injury, it takes months and months and months of bureaucratic nightmares to hire people.
Now, Donald Trump has come here without any understanding of the needs on the ground of the American people and of our States and of our watersheds, and he has decided to impose across-the-board cuts that, I suppose, he is going to use in the end to try to justify the $4.6 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. You heard that right. At a time when we have had the worst income inequality than we have had since the 1920s, Donald Trump wants to extend his tax cuts for the wealthiest while he is doing things like cutting the Forest Service across the board. Forty-five percent of the benefit of that bill goes to the top 5 percent of Americans. I never understood the priority the last time he cut taxes for the wealthiest people and claimed it was a middle-class tax cut, but I especially don't understand it when he is slashing the Forest Service.
This isn't about the Forest Service employees, although I think they should be treated better; it is about the people whom they serve. They are public servants who are doing the work we need them to do in our forests. It is already challenging enough to do it without these cuts. To level an across-the-board cut--terminating 3,400 employees, including at least 90 in Colorado--is the wrong thing to do.
These unfounded layoffs are just the latest offense to an Agency that is already working, struggling to keep up with the demands of the American people and the reality on the ground.
In the last few days, my office has heard from a number of Forest Service employees who were fired last week. We heard from a Forest Service program manager whose first Forest Service job was as a wildland firefighter at just 19 years old. That is a very, very common way for people to come into the Forest Service. And she recently returned to the Forest Service to manage high-priority recreation and restoration projects for one of the busiest national forests in the United States and help the management plan process for the Camp Hale National Monument, which honors our World War II veterans.
I have also heard from a 40-year career civil servant who has worked for multiple Agencies in rural Colorado, including over 25 years in the Forest Service. As a result of her vast experience and years of service, she was recently promoted which put her in probationary status, not because she was a new employee but because she was--with all of her vast experience, she had been elevated, she had been promoted. But she was, nevertheless, a probationary employee because of the way the bureaucracy works. Over the weekend, she was let go; and she worries that she will never have her well-earned position. These people have done absolutely nothing wrong.
We heard from a lifelong Coloradan who is a national leader for forest conservation and deeply respected in our community. This person moved across the State for a position with the Forest Service. Their work informed local efforts to reduce wildfire risks and restore forest health, creating a safer landscape for wildland firefighters to work in when a fire does break out, which, by the way, is almost all the time these days.
Ironically, the administration fired a member of a Colorado National Forest leadership team--get this, Mr. President--who was actually involved in planning for staff reduction. But it wasn't the across-the- board reduction that came from Washington, DC; it was the thoughtful reduction that you can only do if you are close to the local level.
Our forests look nothing like Central Park, and I am not sure President Trump understands that.
This person was responsible for teams of people working on energy production, wildfire prevention, and the responsible use of our public forests. And there are countless other stories already of people who recently signed up for seasonal work to help manage recreation, rangeland, and wildlife habitat who are now unemployed.
Trump and Musk's actions aren't about increasing efficiency or repaying American taxpayers. These cuts don't root out fraud or government waste, but these actions do place an immense burden on the citizens of Colorado, on the citizens on the West. We are hanging out communities to dry all over--all over--the American West.
I am glad my colleague from Oregon is here, the former chairman of the Finance Committee, who also has had to watch these crazy tax cuts-- which by the way, Mr. President, I will say to my colleague: That is not even a speech I was supposed to give. It is about the across-the- board layoffs of people in our forests who already are totally undermanned and aren't able to keep up with the demands of the public. But, really, for what? So you can pass a tax bill--not you but these guys on the other side--where 45 percent of the benefit goes to the richest people in America, or more?
Cutting staff that put out unattended campfires, that manage timber sales and support wildland firefighting efforts means that our communities will face much more wildfire risk come spring.
These cuts undermine businesses that require permits to operate on our public lands--from outfitters and guides to oil and gas companies-- and mean fewer boots-on-the-ground staff to manage visitation--from clearing trails to cleaning bathrooms. That means we the American people risk losing our access to our most cherished public lands. Our Federal workers have devoted their careers to making our communities and our country better. They put the American people first, and I am grateful for their service.
Does that mean they couldn't do their job better? No. Does that mean they couldn't do it in a more efficient manner? No. In fact, that is one of the reasons why we have fought to put more money in the budget for fighting fires themselves, because waiting until the fire happens is the most expensive way you could possibly deal with it; but the second most expensive way would be to lay off the very people who help prevent the conditions from arising that are going to lead to those fires, which, by the way, cost $50,000 an acre to fight.
The Forest Service employees throughout the West are fundamental to our economy and to our communities in Colorado. In fact, the fact that it has been hard to hire them has compromised our communities in really fundamental ways, and we ought to double down on the Forest Service's mission, investing in wildfire resilience, watershed health, recreation management, rooting out waste, and cutting redtape to make the Agency a better partner for rural communities across the country. That is what we would be doing.
Instead, President Trump and Musk's actions to eviscerate the Federal workforce take a torch to that approach and tear at the fabric of our communities. It is an insult to Colorado and all Americans. There is no reason they should do it, and they should rescind these cuts.
With that, Mr. President I thank my colleagues for their indulgence.
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