Chopping Block

Apart from the devastating airplane-helicopter crash outside of Washington, DC, it seems that the main story in the news has been the sudden efforts to seemingly dismantle the federal government (and those two news stories may very well end up being one and the same).  South African billionaire Elon Musk and his self-styled "Department of Government Efficiency" have been riding roughshod over federal workers, slashing regulations, deleting information, and trying to force long-term civil servants out of office.

Much of the initial ire has been directed at anything seemingly tangential to diversity programs - but the new administration has made it clear that there are other targets in mind.  For example, about 1,100 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have received notice that they are potentially on the chopping block.

There's a lot that's been written about the potential impacts of these slashes elsewhere, but being a zoo blog, I'm obviously looking at how our field is impacted.  As far as I can tell, the Smithsonian National Zoo doesn't seem to be in what we would call imminent danger - though changes may come that negatively impact the facility.  Among these would be hiring freezes, leaving the zoo short-staffed and impacting animal care, freezing of funds needed for renovations and improvements, forcing the deletion of environmental/conservation messaging (i.e., anything pertaining to climate change or pollution, such as the Appalachian salamander exhibit in the Reptile Discovery Center), and more.  I'm more worried about the impact on the Zoo's off-exhibit sister facility, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, VA.  During the G.W. Bush presidency, Bush's Secretary of the Smithsonian announced plans to shutter the facility, which would have crippled breeding programs for many endangered species 

Outside of the Smithsonian?  A lot of federal money goes out to zoos that are providing care for confiscated animals that were being smuggled into or out of the US.  That could dry up.  Many zoos collaborate with US Fish and Wildlife Service on breeding and reintroduction programs.  Support for those programs could be pulled (during the first Trump Administration, the whooping crane program out of Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge was dismantled).  Perhaps most frustratingly of all, federal agencies have been told to stop communicating with outside stakeholders in many cases, including zoos.  I've heard of several meetings and webinars with different agencies that have been halted - I was supposed to sit in on a meeting with NOAA last week to learn about new permit requirements for captive marine mammals, before that was cancelled at the last minute.

Less directly, with all federal law enforcement across agencies seemingly being focused on immigration at the moment, there's less attention and enforcement of other crimes - such as wildlife trafficking.

It's a chaotic time to be sure, and I don't see if getting less chaotic in the near future.  The order to freeze funding from the federal government was quickly reversed, but overall the entire political situation seems unstable, messy, contradictory, and overall poorly planned out.  Until such time as resolution comes, it's going to take every stake holder who cares about wildlife and wild places working their hardest to try and keep the ship of conservation afloat.