How federal funding cuts are affecting conservation efforts in Oregon

This fall, the U.S. Department of the Interior canceled nearly 80 grants to organizations that focus on habitat restoration, species conservation and other ecological work. According to a social media post from the Department of Government Efficiency, the cuts were made because the organizations supported diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

More than a third of the grants canceled were awarded to the Institute for Applied Ecology, based in Corvallis. The nonprofit received 30 termination notices on Sept. 23, totaling more than $3.5 million. The Lomakatsi Restoration Project, based in Ashland, also lost $2.4 million across eight grants.

Tom Kaye is the founder and chief scientist at the Institute for Applied Ecology. He joins us to talk about how the funding cuts will hinder conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. This fall the U.S. Department of the Interior canceled nearly 80 grants to organizations that focus on habitat restoration, species conservation and other ecological work. The government announced these cuts publicly in a tweet, noting that they were made because the organizations supported diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

More than a third of the canceled grants had been awarded to one Corvallis-based nonprofit. The Institute for Applied Ecology lost more than $3 million for 30 different projects. Tom Kaye is the founder and chief scientist of the institute. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Tom Kaye: Thanks, Dave. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the breadth of the work that the Institute for Applied Ecology does?

Kaye: We’re a nonprofit organization that does a lot of nature conservation. We work with endangered species of plants, butterflies and birds, etc. And we do a lot of habitat restoration on the ground, as well as a lot of educational activities with schools, or at correctional facilities actually.

Miller: What projects in the Pacific Northwest specifically were impacted by these cancellations?

Kaye: Well, it’s quite a list. As you said, we had 30 grants canceled in one day. But some examples include grants that were for recovering an endangered butterfly species called the Taylor’s checkerspot. This is the species that’s in decline all throughout its range in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. We’ve been working with another butterfly called the Fender’s blue butterfly in Oregon. We’ve done decades of work to restore habitat for that species and really bring it back from the brink of extinction, to the point where the Fish and Wildlife Service recently downlisted it from endangered to threatened – the only butterfly in the U.S. that’s ever been downlisted.

So we’ve been using the same model of habitat restoration and, in this case, moving butterflies to new habitats, to expand the populations and get the species more stable.

Miller: I want to hear about some of the other examples, but this is an important one. We’ve talked about the Fender’s blue success story, such a rare success story that’s been written about a lot in beautiful essays. So just for that one project of 30 that were canceled, what work that was about to happen or that was in the works had to stop?

Kaye: So for the Taylor’s checkerspot, we had a very large grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do multiple activities. Some of those included restoration of sites, getting the vegetation into a condition where it would support the butterfly. And other aspects involved captively rearing caterpillars of the butterfly so that they would be ready for release at some of these restoration sites. Much of that work has ground to a halt.

And I want to mention one aspect of that captive rearing was that a big chunk of it was being done by adults in custody at the Coffee Creek Correctional Institution in Wilsonville, Oregon. The women there ran a butterfly lab to captively rear these butterflies. Now, that program has been ceased.

Miller: OK, so that’s just one, but let’s hear about some others. What were you planning to do for the invasive species, the emerald ash borer?

Kaye: The emerald ash borer is a new invader in Oregon. It’s a beetle, bright green, and it attacks ash trees, Oregon ash trees here. It kills them, and it’s likely to wipe out the species in the Willamette Valley and cause untold environmental harm to our waterways.

What we were doing was twofold: doing early detection to try to understand where the beetle is occurring on Bureau of Land Management properties. This is the only monitoring on BLM properties for that beetle. And then we’re also documenting the baseline conditions. Although this is a really important habitat that this tree is so abundant in, it’s pretty understudied. So we really want to understand what’s there and what will be lost, in order to be able to restore something there after the beetle kills these trees.

Miller: What had you been doing with sagebrush?

Kaye: Sagebrush, of course, is a hugely important base of the food chain in Eastern Oregon and a great part of the Great Basin. What we’ve been doing is, again, working with adults in custody at state prisons in Oregon, as well as Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada and other states we’ve worked in, to establish essentially native plant nurseries for sagebrush that can then be replanted into sites that suffer from wildfire, on public lands. So this was a really innovative project to both restore public lands, but also to restore communities and give incarcerated people vocational training, so that when they were released, they would have a lower likelihood of recidivism, better likelihood of getting jobs.

Miller: What’s happening to those seedlings or little plants?

Kaye: Well, they’re grown on an annual cycle. We were able to act quickly and get most of the plants that have been grown over the last summer out the door. But now the whole program is canceled. Over the life of the program, we’ve been able to literally millions of sagebrush seedlings for planting on public lands. Now, that’s grinding to a halt.

Miller: We’ve only gone through a couple projects; there are literally two dozen more of them that we could go into greater detail with. But just to get to the bigger picture here, how quickly did all of this work have to stop?

Kaye: Well, it had to stop fairly immediately. We have an office in the Southwest. We had seasonals out collecting seeds from the wild, seeds that could be then brought into cultivation and made available for restorations. And the day we received these cancellations, we were told “all work must stop.” So we had to call folks that were out in the wildlands, get them by phone, and say, “you have to stop and come in now.” And those seasonal employees lost their jobs that same day.

Miller: What justification did the federal government give for terminating these grants?

Kaye: Well, the verbiage we received in these cancellations said that the project “no longer effectuated the priorities of the agency.” Essentially, all of the cancellations use the same language – it’s fairly broad, fairly vague. We did ask if there was a way to retool projects so that they would meet the objectives of the agencies. And we were told no, there’s no recourse, and we were not able to pursue that kind of adjustment.

Miller: Based on what you’ve been able to learn, does that justification make sense? Have the priorities of the current administration, with respect to these actual projects, this actual work on the land, changed in a way such that that very short explanation makes any sense to you?

Kaye: No. First off, none of the projects really had anything to do with diversity, equity and inclusion. Although we have seen tweets and news stories that indicate that’s the core reason for why we lost these dollars.

Miller: So am I right that this “no longer effectuates our priorities” came from the Department of Interior, which oversees BLM, and DOGE was the government entity that focused on DEI, and that was picked up by the conservative publication The Daily Caller? So, DOGE did bring up your equity plan from four years ago, but not the Department of Interior. Am I right about that?

Kaye: Well, the Department of Interior retweeted the same DOGE tweet. So I’d say yes, they participated in that messaging.

Miller: But this is where we are now, trying to discern administration policies based on retweets.

Kaye: Right. To get back to your point, have the priorities of the agencies changed? I don’t think so. In my understanding, the missions of these organizations remain the same, and conserving endangered species is still part of the mission of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – that hasn’t changed. In some cases, we received requests that if we were producing seed agriculturally for some of these plants, that we make those seeds available immediately to the agency. Well, if they need those seeds, then apparently it’s a part of their need and it is relevant to their mission.

Miller: I do want to dig a little bit deeper into the DEI piece of this. As I noted, DOGE tweeted out a kind of celebratory tweet quoting a line from your equity plan from 2021. This is the line: “We are passionate about inclusion across gender, race, age, religion, identity and experience.” How central would you say that those priorities – diversity, equity and inclusion – are to your conservation work?

Kaye: Well, they’re certainly central to our human resources, how we hire people and how we engage our employees. That’s what those policies were written for. It’s just how we treat the people who work for us. It’s about being fair and about being open, honest and embracing our differences. Nothing more than that.

They’re really not about the work we do on the ground. Although when we work with our human communities, we want to treat them with the same respect we would our staff, so those values extend across the people we work with. But when it comes to, say, implementing conservation for a butterfly, it’s really tangential.

Miller: What impact have these cuts had on the farmers that you’ve partnered with, who, say, grow native plant seeds? Or ranchers who rely on viable and healthy public lands?

Kaye: The impacts to farmers are significant. The loss of funding means that there are four farmers in Oregon, plus ourselves because we’re farming also, that are no longer receiving these funds to produce these plants for restoration. In the Southwest it amounts to 13 farmers there. And these are people with livelihoods that are affected by these cuts. Now, we’re scrambling to try to find alternative funds. But it’s hard to fill the void that the federal funds are leaving.

Miller: And just briefly, as reported by High Country News, the same day that you received notice about your grant cancellations, the Mid Klamath Watershed Council found out that seven of their federal grants have been terminated. The Lomakatsi Restoration Project, who we talked to when we were in Southern Oregon for some of their projects there post-Almeda Fire, they found out they were losing eight grants. What legal recourse do you all have?

Kaye: Well, that’s a good question, and I think we all have the right to explore legal recourse by suing the government or something. It’s something we can all look into. But as we know, the government’s a big beast and we’re hopeful that policies adjust through public pressure on government agencies. But legal avenues are open, so we’ll keep that in mind as well.

Miller: Tom, thanks very much.

Kaye: Thank you very much. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to be on your show, Dave.

Miller: Tom Kaye is the founder and chief scientist of the Institute for Applied Ecology. Earlier this fall, the federal government canceled grants for 30 of the Corvallis-based nonprofits’ programs.

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