Southwest Memorial Hospital in Cortez, Colorado, received more than 59,000 patient visits last year. That’s enough to treat everyone in Cortez and surrounding Montezuma County twice.

Staff call the small hospital a bedrock of both medical care and the local economy. 

But warnings that the Republican-controlled federal government might cut Medicaid funding have community members worried about the facility’s future. 

They are not alone. Nationally, health policy experts warn that any cuts to Medicaid are likely to cause more trouble for rural hospitals than urban ones. That’s due in part because rural residents are more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid

In Montezuma County, 36% of the population is enrolled in Medicaid, which is publicly supported medical insurance for lower-income Americans. Southwest Memorial Hospital, a nonprofit hospital, expects about $20.5 million to come from the Medicaid reimbursements in 2025. That’s nearly a quarter of their expected revenue for the year, according to CEO Joe Theine. 

If that revenue is threatened, the healthcare system would have a hard time adjusting without affecting the services they can offer. 

Theine said that the hospital is planning for growth in 2025. But if Medicaid is cut, the hospital would have to consider their level of services, the same way a family would have to revise its spending if it lost a big part of its income. 

“If [you] had a 25% reduction in household income, you have to make some different decisions other than just around the edges,” Theine said.

Any such changes could affect the community’s level of health services and the local economy.

The hospital employs nearly 500 locals, including employees with young families that support Cortez’s public schools, Theine said. “The ripples of a hospital in a rural community are many beyond just the health and wellbeing of the people we serve directly,” he said. 

Medicaid reimbursement is a crucial part of Southwest Memorial’s funding, despite reimbursing less at lower rates than private insurance. 

“If a patient comes in and has Medicaid as a pay source, even though it may pay less than the average cost for that service, it still is contributing to paying for that fixed cost of having the emergency room open,” said Theine, “If that same patient no longer has insurance and is unable to pay, we still take care of them. But now there’s nothing coming in that’s contributing to keeping all of those services available.” 

GOP Legislation Could Threaten Rural Healthcare Systems

A March 5 letter from the Congressional Budget Office to two Democratic representatives said that House Republicans won’t be able to meet their budget target of $1.5 trillion in cuts without slashing Medicaid and Medicare.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said Medicaid was safe under Republican lawmakers, but the math doesn’t add up with Trump’s determination to drop the national deficit by more than $1 trillion, according to Democrats.

“There have been proposals around reducing or eliminating that federal match for [Medicaid] expansion populations,” said Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer of the National Rural Health Association.

That match was part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which provides federal funds to states to expand eligibility for Medicaid to families that earn up to 38% above the federal poverty line. A later Supreme Court ruling made Medicaid expansion optional. Currently, all but 10 states have accepted federal funding and expanded Medicaid.

According to a 2023 report from the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission (MACPAC), an organization that advises Congress on healthcare policy, hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA don’t have as many uninsured patients as those that didn’t adopt expansion. Medicaid expansion can save hospitals money by increasing the share of its patients who are covered under some form of insurance. 

An analysis of 600 research papers on Medicaid found that expansion led to drops in the uninsured population and economic improvements for both states and healthcare providers. In the fiscal year 2020, the cost of uninsured care represented 2.7% of the total operating expenses in states that expanded Medicaid, compared to 7.3% in states that haven’t expanded. 

Medicaid expansion under the ACA also means states can spend less money on mental health and substance use treatments because federal matches help pay for them. 

“States can come up with a number of different ways that they finance their Medicaid programs, and it varies across the board,” Cochran-McClain said. “They can use specific kinds of fees or taxes to help support the Medicaid program.”

Reducing or eliminating that federal match would leave states with the option to either reduce the number of Medicaid enrollees, or to come up with another method of funding care for the expansion population. But some states might not be able to make up the funds.

Rural Residents Are More Likely to Receive Medicaid

The loss of that federal money would be especially hard on rural health-care providers, Cochran-McLain said. That’s because a greater share of the rural population relies on Medicaid compared to urban and suburban areas.

Nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties have slightly higher Medicaid enrollment rates than metropolitan counties. Nationwide, 24% of residents in rural counties received Medicaid either alone or in combination with another health insurance method in 2023, compared to about 20% of the metropolitan population that year. 

In Colorado, 23% of the nonmetropolitan population and 18% of the metropolitan population received Medicaid in 2023, according to a Daily Yonder analysis of Census data.

Of the 47 states that have nonmetropolitan counties, 43 of them have higher Medicaid enrollment rates in rural areas compared to metro ones. 

“There is a really direct and strong relationship between Medicaid coverage levels and the financial viability of rural hospitals,”  Cochran-McClain said. “In states that have expanded Medicaid, we saw an improved hospital performance, rural hospital performance and smaller rates of vulnerability for rural hospitals.”

Expanding Medicaid to include more low-income individuals saves states money by reducing the cost of providing care to the uninsured. 

States that have not expanded Medicaid leave their rural healthcare systems more vulnerable to financial crises.

“Whether it’s Medicare or Medicaid, it’s a really important revenue source and source of coverage,” said Cochran-McClain.

How Does Medicaid Work in Colorado?

Colorado lawmakers voted to expand Medicaid coverage in 2009, ahead of implementation of ACA. The state simultaneously created a hospital provider fee program that funds the state’s portion of Medicaid. In Colorado,  the federal match rate comes to 63.6%. The hospital provider fees pay the rest..

Many states use provider taxes or fees to fund Medicaid programs at the state level. Colorado taxes hospitals and healthcare providers 5.5% of revenue (the fee cannot exceed 6%) with a program called the Colorado Healthcare Affordability and Sustainability Enterprise (CHASE). That money is then matched by the federal government at 90%, as long as the population falls under the ACA expansion eligibility.

Colorado’s CHASE funds go to offsetting the difference between Medicaid reimbursement and the actual cost of a service. Medicaid typically reimburses a provider around 50% of cost, said Tom Rennell, senior vice president of financial policy and data analytics for Colorado Hospital Association.

Rennell said that CHASE “helps out our rural hospitals more than our urban hospitals. Our rural hospitals pay in less fees and our rural hospitals receive more of the distribution.”

Increasing taxes and fees from healthcare providers  are one funding source that could help bridge the gap if federal funding is cut, said Rennell. 

In Colorado, the state legislature has a constitutional requirement to have a balanced budget. That budget is currently facing a $1.2 billion deficit, some of which is caused by rising Medicaid costs. Colorado’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) restricts government spending to population growth plus inflation, meaning that any additional tax revenue over that formula is returned to taxpayers. 

This means that even if the state has the revenue to balance the budget, it’s incredibly difficult to reallocate those funds to other programs, like Medicaid.  Colorado voters have historically been very protective of TABOR refunds. Raising taxes to fund Medicaid is also not an option in Colorado under TABOR. 

“The state’s already wrestling with a billion dollar shortfall in our upcoming year, and then add onto that potential additional shortfall from this federal funding. And those really start to add up to some real sizable impacts that the state is going to have to deal with,” said Rennell. 

The Colorado Hospital Association estimated that federal Medicaid cuts could cost the state $27.2 billion over the next five years, depending on specific cuts. 

Rennell sees the potential cuts affecting rural hospitals disproportionately. “This funding from the federal government is their lifeline. It is what keeps those rural hospitals operating. And if you cut the lifeline, they will have to make difficult choices.” 

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Four years ago, family practitioner Dr. Jeff Chappell retired from his post as medical director of the Wayne Community Health Center in Bicknell, Utah. He was excited to undertake a new medical mission, through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to South America where he served as area medical director for Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Venezuela.

But when he returned to Utah, then 63-year-old Chappell was not ready to swap his medical career for the life of a retiree.

“I was 61 when we accepted the mission and I thought, ‘Well, if we’re going to do it, this is the time to do it,’” he recalled. “But when we returned, I found out that I was not ready to fully retire.”

Instead Chappell, now age 65, came out of retirement to accept a part time position on the staff of the Kazan Health Center located in the rural community of Escalante, Utah.

“I wouldn’t want to work in a busy ER, but working a couple of days a week works for me,” he says. “Besides, there is a nurse [at the clinic] who is pursuing a PA designation and my being here gives her more hours to do that – also I think the patients are happy to have me here.”

In its March 2024 report, the Association of Medical Colleges predicted that the U.S. is likely to face a shortage of as many as 86,000 physicians by 2036, compounding the dearth of medical services that is already hitting rural communities hardest.

In response, some retired physicians like Chappell are coming out of full time retirement to mitigate the shortage.

Even so, the current shortfall remains critical, says Dr. Nancy Babbitt who is a director for the Wayne County Utah Health Centers, and the Torrey Utah representative to the Robert Graham Center Steering Committee, which provides advice on policy issues facing primary care providers.

According to Babbitt, rural health care centers are particularly vulnerable to problems connected to medical services shortages because those networks can cover communities that are located miles apart, and are likely to serve patients that are older, perhaps requiring more specialized care than urban counterparts.

“For example, our Wayne County Health Centers cover 7,600-square miles, and we are one to two hours’ drive from an emergency room and three hours away from a tertiary hospital [a hospital that provides specialists],” she says. “And a high percentage of rural residents are older and maybe sicker.”

For Dr. Douglas DeLong, 73, those rural realities have been facts of life throughout his medical career.

“I have never practiced in any area where there is more than one traffic light,” he says. “When I was in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, I might be the only doctor in the [Rusk] county on duty at the hospital that night – I saw it all.”

These days, DeLong practices in Cooperstown, New York, population around 1,853. He tried full time retirement but returned on a limited schedule.

“I retired from full time practice when I was 70 years old, but about a year ago, I unretired,” he explains. “Now I work two or three days a week partly to provide access for patients and because I really enjoy being around these bright young people – but most of them are on their way somewhere else.”

That’s a switch from the time when DeLong was beginning his practice and made a conscious decision to practice medicine in a rural setting.

“I wanted to be a family physician because I didn’t know there was anything else,” he recalls. Also, I grew up in rural settings in Pennsylvania and Washington state – it was a lifestyle choice for me – today though, [rural practice] is a tougher sell.”

That’s because there are economic and other personal factors pressing young physicians to either establish their practices in urban settings, or to forgo family practice altogether for specialty medicine.

“These days, young physicians are racking up educational debt in excess of a couple thousand dollars and that’s on their minds, too and they’re wondering ‘how do I lay these mega debts’?” DeLong points out. “Also your wife has to be happy – something that’s not easy if she is an urban planner for instance.”

At the same time, Babbitt believes that young doctors are not even aware that rural family practice is a career option. So she’s heading to Washington D.C. to tell medical students at Georgetown University that rural practice is a possibility and what it means to establish such a practice.

“Of course there are larger issues facing rural medical providers ranging from state funding resources to insurance costs, but many of them have never even considered it because it’s not something that ‘s even considered by [medical] residents,” she says.

She also plans to tell them that while rural practice is challenging, doctors must be prepared to treat patients for everything from broken bones to heart conditions, and that hours are long, there are perks too.

“You are part of a community – you know the people who come into your clinic and you create long term connections,” she says. “I just got a graduation invitation from a kid that I delivered years ago, and I get wedding invitations all the time – you can’t put a price tag on that.”

While Babbitt makes the case for rural medicine to a new generation of doctors, Chappell says he’s happy that his age and experience allow him to do what he does best and help his community, too.

“You don’t have to run after an IRA, we don’t have the debts we had when we were young and I don’t have to work the massive number of hours, and can do what I enjoy,” he says. “Life is good.”

The post Retired Doctors Step Up in the Face of a Rural Health Care Crisis appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

When the Trump administration first announced a freeze on all federal funding in January, farmers across the country were thrust into an uncertain limbo. 

More than a month later, fourth-generation farmer Adam Chappell continues to wait on the U.S. Department of Agriculture to reimburse him for the $25,000 he paid out of pocket to implement conservation practices like cover cropping. Until he knows the fate of the federal programs that keep his small rice farm in Arkansas afloat, Chappell’s unable to prepare for his next crop. Things have gotten so bad, the 45-year-old is even considering leaving the only job he’s ever known. “I just don’t know who we can count on and if we can count on them as a whole to get it done,” said Chappell. “That’s what I’m scared of.” 

In Virginia, the funding freeze has forced a sustainable farming network that supports small farmers throughout the state to suspend operations. Brent Wills, a livestock producer and program manager at the Virginia Association for Biological Farming, said that nearly all of the organization’s funding comes from USDA programs that have been frozen or rescinded. The team of three is now scrambling to come up with a contingency plan while trying not to panic over whether the nearly $50,000 in grants they are owed will be reimbursed. 

“It’s pretty devastating,” said Wills. “The short-term effects of this are bad enough, but the long-term effects? We can’t even tally that up right now.” 

In North Carolina, a beekeeping operation hasn’t yet received the $14,500 in emergency funding from the USDA to rebuild after Hurricane Helene washed away 60 beehives. Ang Roell, who runs They Keep Bees, an apiary that also has operations in Florida and Massachusetts, said they have more than $45,000 in USDA grants that are frozen. The delay has put them behind in production, leading to an additional $15,000 in losses. They are also unsure of the future of an additional $100,000 in grants that they’ve applied for. “I have to rethink my entire business plan,” Roell said. “I feel shell-shocked.”

Within the USDA’s purview, the funding freeze has targeted two main categories of funding: grant applications that link agricultural work to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and those enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked more than $19.5 billion to be paid out over several years. Added to the uncertainty of the funding freeze, among the tens of thousands of federal employees who have lost their jobs in recent weeks were officials who manage various USDA programs.

Following the initial freeze, courts have repeatedly ordered the administration to grant access to all funds, but agencies have taken a piecemeal approach, releasing funding in “tranches.” Even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Interior have released significant chunks of funding, the USDA has moved slowly, citing the need to review programs with IRA funding. In some cases, though, it has terminated contracts altogether, including those with ties to the agency’s largest-ever investment in climate-smart agriculture. 

In late February, the USDA announced that it was releasing $20 million to farmers who had already been awarded grants — the agency’s first tranche. 

According to Mike Lavender, policy director with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, that $20 million amounts to “less than one percent” of money owed. His team estimates that three IRA-funded programs have legally promised roughly $2.3 billion through 30,715 conservation contracts for ranchers, farmers, and foresters. Those contracts have been through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, Conservation Stewardship Program, and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program. “In some respects, it’s a positive sign that some of it’s been released,” said Lavender. “But I think, more broadly, it’s so insignificant. For the vast majority, [this] does absolutely nothing.”

A week later, USDA secretary Brooke Rollins announced that the agency would be able to meet a March 21 deadline imposed by Congress to distribute an additional $10 billion in emergency relief payments.

Then, on Sunday, March 2, Rollins made an announcement that offered hope for some farmers, but very little specifics. In a press statement, the USDA stated that the agency’s review of IRA funds had been completed and funds associated with EQIP, CSP, and ACEP would be released, but it did not clarify how much would be unfrozen. The statement also announced a commitment to distribute an additional $20 billion in disaster assistance. 

Lavender called Rollins’ statement a “borderline nothingburger” for its degree of “ambiguity.” It’s not clear, he continued, if Rollins is referring to the first tranche of funding or if the statement was announcing a second tranche — nor, if it’s the latter, how much is being released. “Uncertainty still seems to reign supreme. We need more clarity.” 

The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for clarification. 

Farmers who identify as women, queer, or people of color are especially apprehensive about the status of their contracts. Roell, the beekeeper, said their applications for funding celebrated their operations’ diverse workforce development program. Now, Roell, who uses they/them pronouns, fears that their existing contracts and pending applications will be targeted for the same reason. (Federal agencies have been following an executive order taking aim at “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs.”) 

“This feels like an outright assault on sustainable agriculture, on small businesses, queer people, BIPOC, and women farmers,” said Roell. “Because at this point, all of our projects are getting flagged as DEI. We don’t know if we’re allowed to make corrections to those submissions or if they’re just going to get outright denied due to the language in the projects being for women or for queer folks.”

The knock-on effects of this funding gridlock on America’s already fractured agricultural economy has Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch, deeply concerned. With the strain of an agricultural recession looming over regions like the Midwest, and the number of U.S. farms already in steady decline, she sees the freeze and ongoing mass layoffs of federal employees as “ultimately leading down the road to further consolidation.” Given that the administration is “intentionally dismantling the programs that help underpin our small and medium-sized farmers,” Wolf said this could lead to “the loss of those farms, and then the loss of land ownership.”  

Other consequences might be more subtle, but no less significant. According to Omanjana Goswami, a soil scientist with the advocacy nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, the funding freeze, layoffs, and the Trump administration’s hostility toward climate action is altogether likely to position America’s agricultural sector to contribute even more than it does to carbon emissions. 

Agriculture accounted for about 10.6 percent of U.S. carbon emissions in 2021. When farmers implement conservation practices on their farms, it can lead to improved air and water quality and increase soil’s ability to store carbon. Such tactics can not only reduce agricultural emissions, but are incentivized by many of the programs now under review. “When we look at the scale of this, it’s massive,” said Goswami. “If this funding is scaled back, or even completely removed, it means that the impact and contribution of agriculture on climate change is going to increase.”

The Trump administration’s attack on farmers comes at a time when the agriculture industry faces multiple existential crises. For one, times are tight for farmers. In 2023, the median household income from farming was negative $900. That means, at least half of all households that drew income from farming didn’t turn a profit. 

Additionally, in 2023, natural disasters caused nearly $22 billion in agricultural losses. Rising temperatures are slowing plant growth, frequent floods and droughts are decimating harvests, and wildfires are burning through fields. With insurance paying for only a subset of these losses, farmers are increasingly paying out of pocket. Last year, extreme weather impacts, rising labor and production costs, imbalances in global supply and demand, and increased price volatility all resulted in what some economists designated the industry’s worst financial year in almost two decades. 

Elliott Smith, whose Washington state-based business Kitchen Sync Strategies helps small farmers supply institutions like schools with fresh food, says this situation has totally changed how he looks at the federal government. As the freeze hampers key grants for the farmers and food businesses he works with across at least 10 different states, halting emerging contracts and stalling a slate of ongoing projects, Smith said the experience has made him now consider federal funding “unstable.” 

All told, the freeze isn’t just threatening the future of Smith’s business, but also the future of farmers and the local food systems they work within nationwide. “The entire food ecosystem is stuck in place. The USDA feels like a troll that saw the sun. They are frozen. They can’t move,” he said. “The rest of us are in the fields and trenches, and we’re looking back at the government and saying, ‘Where the hell are you?’”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Slim margins, climate disasters, and Trump’s funding freeze: Life or death for many US farms on Mar 5, 2025.

Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign led to a surge in rural attention, research, and support over the last decade, but his second presidency could bring that progress to a sudden halt.

The president declared on Wednesday that he would like to see the Department of Education “closed immediately” — just hours after his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced nearly a billion dollars in education cuts.

The first cuts were reportedly aimed at the Institute of Education Sciences, the DOE’s independent research and evaluation arm, with at least 170 contracts shuttered. That could be bad news for rural education researchers who had just started to make significant progress in recent years.

The National Rural Higher Education Research Center just opened in September, after being awarded a 5-year, $10 million grant through the IES. Led by MDRC, which conducts nonpartisan research to improve the lives of low-income Americans, the center is conducting eight major studies in rural areas across 10 states and 25 colleges.

Just two weeks ago, I talked to MDRC researcher Sabrina Klein about the center, which has plans to study a number of education factors critical to Trump’s economic goals of building domestic manufacturing and filling key workforce shortages — from evaluating rural nursing programs in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming to studying dual enrollment in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee.

So far, MDRC has heard nothing from the IES or Department of Education about possible cuts to their funding. But their work provides a glimpse at the kinds of future rural efforts that could be imperiled if federal programs disappear, as both researchers and policymakers take a wait-and-see approach.

Sydney Dickson, the longtime State Superintendent of Utah, told me Wednesday that they were particularly keeping an eye on how Perkins grants — federal funds that support career and technical education (CTE) programs — would be affected.

“We anticipate those programs will be supported, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens to both the dollars and the regulations, because those are things that really impact our rural communities.”

While Dickson said some deregulation may be necessary, what looks like superfluous funding for rural areas could actually be careful resource management. For instance, rural districts sometimes hold federal money in abatement for years. Not because they don’t need it, but because they are saving for a larger purchase.

“They can’t just take the money they get one year and buy the big piece of equipment to train their students on,” Dickson said.

Amid the administration’s war against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, it’s difficult to separate rural work from those conversations. (The Trump administration has also called for a ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the federal level. Universities have already been chipping away at them across the country.)

“With all the pressure DEI is under now in higher education, I see the work to engage rural communities as part of that umbrella,” says Rob Vischer, president of the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minn.

The private Catholic research university has a scholarship program focused on getting new lawyers to practice in rural America. It also offers engineering bootcamps as part of a Defense Department grant to fill manufacturing gaps in Greater Minnesota. Vischer says it’s unclear what programs may be affected by the Trump administration’s actions.

“We’re just trying to get as much information as possible, and provide it to those who could be affected,” Vischer says.

While K-12 research has received significant attention over the years, research into rural higher education is still relatively nascent in academic circles.

University of Mississippi higher education professor Ty McNamee often talks about how a peer professor once told him that rural “wasn’t an identity” at a conference. While he says there is increasingly more awareness of rurality as an identity worth studying, the recent politics at the federal level is creating a new challenge.

“The really hard part is how do I convince folks who are in favor of the Department of Ed being eliminated, that these actions are going to significantly impact rural and low-income communities?” McNamee says.

“Whether people know it or not, the DOE funds a variety of programs and services that positively impact rural, low-income communities — and if you eliminate that, then you are moving to a state model, when you know that states often don’t have a lot of money.”

McNamee is one of what Klein calls “a small, mighty, crew” of new rural higher ed researchers, mostly in their thirties or forties, whose niche focus has had an outsize impact on our understanding of rural communities in recent years.

“We need more champions, on every level, developing that next generation of policymakers and researchers,” says Klein, whose own journey out of poverty is marked by mentorship and community support — from a state-funded college access program to federal grants that helped her attend Rogue Community College, Southern Oregon University and, later, UCLA.

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The post Rural Education Research at Risk Under Trump appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist, BPR, a public radio station serving western North Carolina, WBEZ, a public radio station serving the Chicago metropolitan region, and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Marie Richards sat in her living room in northern Michigan. She was having a hard time talking about her job at the U.S. Forest Service in the past tense.

“I absolutely loved my job,” she said. “I didn’t want to go.”

Richards, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, was a tribal relations specialist at the Huron-Manistee National Forests. In mid-February, she found out she was one of the some 3,400 workers who had been targeted for layoffs — an estimated 10 percent of the workforce — as part of the Trump administration’s move to cut costs and shrink the federal government.

Richards watched as some of her colleagues were laid off on February 14 — the so-called Valentine’s Day massacre, when the Trump administration laid off thousands of probationary employees, generally hired within the past two years. She got a call from her supervisor that Saturday informing her that she had been let go, too. The letter she received cited performance issues, even though she, along with others in a similar position, had received a pay raise less than two months earlier.

“None of us deserved this,” Richards said. “We all work hard and we’re dedicated to taking care of the land.”

The U.S. Forest Service, which stewards 193 million acres of public lands from Alaska to Florida, was in trouble even before Trump took office. Chronically understaffed, the service was already under a Biden-era hiring freeze, all the while on the front lines of fighting and recovering from back-to-back climate disasters across the country.

For now, workers with the Forest Service fear this isn’t just the end of the line for their dream careers, but also a turning point for public lands and what they mean in the United States.

“It’s catastrophic,” said Anders Reynolds with the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonprofit that litigates environmental issues in the southeastern U.S. “We are losing an entire generation of talent and passion.”

The federal agency does more than ensure that Americans have a place to hunt, hike, fish, or paddle. In the South, forest workers played a key role in helping western North Carolina and other communities recover from impacts of Hurricane Helene. In the West, they’re taking on fire risk mitigation and fighting wildfires. They’re also involved in fisheries management in places like Alaska. Across the country, agency biologists and foresters are busy working to strengthen the over 150 national forests and 20 grasslands it monitors in the face of changing climate.

Increasingly, the service is getting spread thin. 

The agency has experienced a steady decrease in staffing over the last decade and the workers that remain are often overworked and underpaid, according to Reynolds.

“That means you’re going to see those campgrounds close, the trails go unmaintained, roads closed, you’re going to feel the effects of wildfire and hurricane recovery work that’s just going to remain undone,” said Reynolds. “Communities are going to struggle.”

The Forest Service has reduced its capacity over many years, causing headaches for staff.

A report from the National Association of Forest Service Retirees showed the agency losing a little over half of staff who supported specialty ecological restoration projects — meaning a whole range of jobs, from botanists to foresters to wildlife and fisheries biologists — between 1992 and 2018. As a result, understaffed Forest Service ranger districts, hemorrhaging staff positions, have consolidated.

Former employees report they saw serious financial and staffing shortages during their time. Bryan Box, a former timber sale administrator with the Forest Service who took some time out of the agency to care for his aging mother, said he found the working conditions unsuitable for a stable, normal life. Box worked for the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Wisconsin, where he said he made so little he biked around on his off days rather than wasting money on gas. While he was working, multiple national forests around him consolidated, causing a downward spiral on organizational capacity.

“We decommissioned buildings, we decommissioned the infrastructure that we had back in the ‘80s and ‘90s when we had this huge staff,” Box said. “And that put us into a position where we couldn’t hire seasonal employees anymore because we didn’t have housing for them. In rural northern Wisconsin, you know, just there’s not any housing available really. I think at one point our firefighters were all living above a bar.” 

Other foresters he knew failed to make rent and were evicted or lived itinerantly, couch-surfing, for the love of the work they did. For Box, the financial realities became untenable. So, too, had the restrictions on his work, which grew as budgets failed to grow.

Box’s program was expensive to run and required travel, often to reduce fire fuels by harvesting timber after an emergency. The program he worked for, Box said, ended up needing to reduce costs by cutting travel funds and ending overtime, making it difficult for him to do his job well. 

Much of their work involves emergency response, not only fighting fires but also picking up the pieces after conflagrations and hurricanes leave potentially thousands of acres of dead timber. 

Matthew Brossard works as the current business representative and organizer for the National Federation of Federal Employees, and was formerly the general vice president for the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Forest Service Council, which represents around 18,000 employees of the Forest Service, 6,000 of whom are probationary, meaning they have either recently been hired or moved to a new position within the agency. Typically, probation — a part of every federal hiring process — is one or two years. Probationary employees were primarily targeted in the layoffs, meaning a generation of hires is potentially interrupted. Brossard said even though the administration maintains they have not fired positions essential to public safety, there’s more to fighting fires than just the firefighters. Support and logistical personnel are essential. “Extra dispatchers, security to close off roads, food unit leaders, base camp managers, all these very important, 100 percent-needed positions. Those people are getting terminated right now,” Brossard said. 

In another instance recounted by Brossard, someone on assignment to help with long-term hurricane recovery in Louisiana was fired while he was there. The employee lived in Oregon and reported having no financial support for his trip home. 

The loss of a seasonal workforce will also be felt, Brossard added. “Without that influx of seasonal workforce, it puts a huge amount of work onto the permanent staff if they’re still employed to do all the work,” he said, meaning not only trailwork and campground maintenance, but also research and other essential work. “So the work that in the summer that should have been done by 15 or 20 people are now going to be done by five or six.”

As workers continue to struggle with the fallout of their abrupt firings, their union is jumping in to protect them, Brossard said. The NFFE-FSC has joined in multiple lawsuits to challenge the firings, including one filed February 12, provided to Grist, that aims to put a stop to the firings and reverse the ones that have already happened, on grounds that the terminations are unlawful. A decision on the lawsuit is still to come, with more potential legal action following, Brossard said. 

“You’re not reducing, you know, the stereotypical bureaucrats,” Brossard said. “You’re reducing the boots on the ground that are going out and doing work.” 

In an emailed statement to Grist, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture said the new agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, supported Trump’s directive to cut spending and inefficiencies while strengthening the department’s services. “As part of this effort, USDA has made the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters.” 

The statement continued, “Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary IRA funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.” 

Back in northern Michigan, Marie Richards, the former tribal relations specialist, crunched down the snowy driveway, pointing toward the Huron-Manistee National Forests where she worked. It spans nearly 1 million acres and covers land tribal nations ceded in two treaties, which the federal government has a responsibility to keep in trust. 

Richards said workers like her are also a vital part of pushing the federal government to meet its trust responsibility to tribal nations. She helped connect the region’s federally recognized tribes with officials and staff at the forest service, set up meetings, and ensured work was being carried out responsibly. 

“It’s not just the damage to that trust relationship with the Forest Service,” said Richards, who left her job as a repatriation and historic preservation specialist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians to work at the agency. “It’s across the board for so many things, and tribes trying to work through that freeze, and making people understand that this isn’t DEI — that this is governmental affairs.”

Richards doesn’t know what’s next; she wants to finish her dissertation (about the impact of the lumber industry on traditional cultural landscapes and Anishinaabe bands and communities) and continue her work. 

“It still really hurts that this dream of mine is kind of shattered, and we’ll see, and find a new dream,” she said. “But ultimately, my career, my livelihood, is in tribal relations for our heritage and I will find a home somewhere.”

Lilly Knoepp contributed reporting to this story.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline US Forest Service firings decimate already understaffed agency: ‘It’s catastrophic’ on Feb 27, 2025.

Jourdan Bennett-Begaye
ICT

WASHINGTON — It’s official: Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan is running for the U.S. Senate.

Flanagan announced her decision and officially launched her campaign on social media on Thursday, Feb. 20, one week after indicating her interest to run when current Sen. Tina Smith said she would not seek reelection.

The lieutenant governor wrote in her formal announcement Thursday that a Native woman has never won a U.S. Senate seat.

“I believe we can change that,” she said.

Flanagan, White Earth Nation, is currently the highest-ranking Native woman in an executive office across the country.

“Growing up, my family relied on government assistance programs like Section 8 and free and reduced lunch — even though my mom worked full-time in healthcare,” Flanagan said in the statement.

“My lived experience has informed my belief that we should wrap our arms around our neighbors in need,” she said. “That’s why on the school board, in the state house, and as lieutenant governor, I’ve championed kitchen-table issues like raising the minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, and free school meals.”

Democrat Paulette Jordan, Coeur d’Alene, gave a try at becoming the first Native American woman as a U.S. Senator in 2020 when she ran against incumbent Jim Risch, Republican, in Idaho. She was unsuccessful.

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, is the second Native American man to serve in the U.S. Senate. Former Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Northern Cheyenne, served two terms after becoming the first Native American to be elected to the U.S. Senate.

Related: Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan teases Senate run

Flanagan has served as the state’s 50th lieutenant governor alongside Gov. Tim Walz since 2019. She helped create the Minnesota Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Office, a first for the country.

Many others are considering running for the seat, including Democrats Walz, U.S. Rep Ilhan Omar, and U.S. Rep. Angie Craig. According to Axios, Royce White and Adam Schwarze, both Republicans, are also expected to run.

If Flanagan won the seat, she would join a group of four Native American congressional members: Mullin; Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole, Chickasaw Nation; Kansas Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids, Ho‑Chunk; and Oklahoma Republican Rep. Josh Brecheen, Choctaw.

Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, kicked off her run for New Mexico’s Governor on Feb. 11, noting that she would be the first Native American woman governor in the nation as well if elected.

Both the Minnesota and New Mexico gubernatorial elections are Nov. 3, 2026.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ICT special interview with Peggy Flanagan

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UPDATED: This story has been updated to include new developments and reactions to the layoffs.

Jourdan Bennett-Begaye
ICT

WASHINGTON — A coalition of tribal organizations issued a sharp response to the ongoing layoffs of thousands of federal employees across Indian Country, expressing “grave concerns” about the “catastrophic” impact to Indian health services, education, law enforcement, fire suppression and other programs delivering services to tribal nations, citizens and communities.

The letter, delivered Friday as the layoff notices were arriving in employee emails, urges the Office of Personnel Management alongside agency heads and the Department of Government Efficiency to provide exemptions for workers providing tribal services that are obligated under treaty and trust obligations.

The cutbacks could have “unintended life or death consequences” for tribal citizens who rely on the services, according to the letter, a copy of which was obtained by ICT.

“Thus far, we have only seen limited exemptions for Federal employees serving Indian Country which do not go far enough to protect essential workers, services, and funds Tribal Nations rely on,” according to the letter.

“When paired with the pauses on Federal funding that affected services Tribal Nations provide to their communities, the loss of Federal employees providing direct services to Tribal communities would be catastrophic,” the letter stated.

The letter was addressed to OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell and signed by 16 tribal organizations and the Navajo Nation.

The layoff notices were going out Friday to probationary federal workers who had been hired within the last year or two and were not yet covered under the civil service regulations that protect other federal workers.

The cuts are expected to cause deep cuts to the Indian Health Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Justice and any tribal offices within federal agencies.

“Tribes who receive direct service will be hit the hardest,” one official told ICT. Programs that fall under so-called 638 contracts or compacts will not be affected in this wave of layoffs, according to the official.

Layoffs were initially expected to include 2,200 IHS workers, of whom 1,400 provided direct patient care, including more than 90 physicians, 350 nurses, at least 25 nurse practitioners, nearly 20 dentists, 43 dental assistants, more than 85 pharmacists, 45 lab technicians, 25 hospital social workers, 45 lab technicians, nearly 130 medical assistants, as well as paramedics, dieticians, behavioral health workers, hospital food service workers, nursing assistants and more than 15 service area chief executives or their deputies.

But the White House issued an exemption Friday afternoon for certain IHS workers that reduced the total layoffs to more than 950, officials told ICT. Details were not immediately available on whether or how many doctors, nurses and other direct-care workers would be affected.

IHS had a call Friday afternoon where federal workers were crying on the call. Laid off employees will receive a notice from OPM late Friday afternoon. “Every tribe will want out of direct service arena,” an official told ICT. 

Nonetheless, the impact would be severe, officials said.

“Such a drastic reduction in force would lead to the immediate cancellation of medical services and procedures,” the coalition letter states. “There are 214 Tribal Nations that receive some of all of their care directly from IHS, and losing probationary providers and staff would mean a loss of health and ultimately mortality. Indian Country cannot afford emergency rooms and clinics being forced to shut down or significantly downsize, eliminating critical access to care.”

Federal employees, civil service and United States Public Health Services Commissioned Officers make up the approximately 15,000 employees at IHS, according to the agency’s website.

The letter notes that IHS has some standing exemptions “but they are too limited to ensure the agency can effectively meet direct care services,” given its 30 percent existing vacancy rate. At any time, IHS has 14 to 18 percent of probationary staff.

In past years IHS has been exempt from staff reductions, freezes, and other personnel action, especially during government shutdowns.

“The Department of Veterans Affairs has provided broad exemptions, and the same should be provided for IHS,” states the letter.

The layoffs are also expected to hit about 2,600 workers at the Department of the Interior, 118 BIA workers, two positions in the Office of Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs and about half the Office of Tribal Justice at the Department of Justice.

The BIE is expected to lose one-third of its administrative workforce, with about 40 employees expected to lose their jobs, sources told ICT Friday.

The deputy bureau director for BIE school operations oversees more than 120 employees who are responsible for the BIE budget, grants management, finance, safety management, facilities and environmental-related issues for BIE-funded schools and two tribal colleges, Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico, according to the BIE website. Of the entire BIE-operated school system, there are about 5,000 administrators, teachers and personnel.

Haskell is expected to lose 24 percent of its staff and could face loss of accreditation, a source told ICT. The workers were told they must be gone by 2 p.m. Eastern on Friday.

Alex Red Corn, who is the associate vice chancellor for Sovereign Partnerships and Indigenous Initiatives at the University of Kansas, works directly with Haskell on shared education programs between the two institutions. The universities signed a renewed agreement in November 2024.

“For those that don’t know, Haskell Indian Nations University has increased enrollments over the last few years and has reinstated some stability with corresponding growth in faculty/staff,” the Osage citizen wrote on Facebook. “Now, many of these new staff are facing layoffs upwards of 20-30 percent of their entire operational staff. Meanwhile, Haskell is still responsible for the education of the same number of students.” 

In addition, employees at the Office of Justice Services housed in the Department of the Interior, social workers, firefighters and police could be impacted, officials said. The Office of Justice Services provides safety to Native communities and upholds tribal sovereignty.

Related: Abrupt federal layoffs expected to hit tribal programs

The cutbacks would “severely impact” critical services, the letter states.

“For example, wildfires across the western United States have led Tribal Nations to request additional staffing for Wildland Fire Management,” according to the letter. “These essential employees, who protect rural communities from fire devastation, would be lost under the current workforce reduction plans. Public safety, law enforcement, social services and emergency response programs would also be compromised.”

Detention and correction programs for 19 tribes in 11 states will also be affected, sources said.

The letter was approved during an emergency meeting by the coalition Friday morning that came after news broke late Thursday about the directive for widespread layoffs from the Trump administration.

“Tribes who receive direct service will be hit the hardest,” one official told ICT. Programs that fall under 638 contracts or compacts will not be affected in this wave of layoffs, according to the official.

The letter said federal jobs and funding are obligations the United States has acknowledged through its trust and treaty obligations, the letter said.

“Tribal Nations’ exercise of our sovereignty and the United States’ delivery on its trust and treaty obligations must not became collateral damage in the Administration’s implementation of its priorities,” the letter concludes.

“We look forward to this Administration ensuring that Tribal communities do not bear the brunt of broader federal policy changes. We stand ready to meet with you and others within the Trump Administration to discuss this urgent matter further.”

A.C. Locklear II, the National Indian Health Board’s interim chief executive officer, told attendees at the National Congress of American Indians Executive Council Winter Session on Wednesday, Feb. 12, that disruption to services can have a devastating impact on American Indians and Alaska Natives, especially when hiring is already a problem in rural and urban tribal communities.

“All those individuals within the Indian health … system are critical, especially right now, because everyone plays a critical part,” he said. “It can have catastrophic results that we saw in the shutdown in 2019.”

Response came quickly from U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska. She spoke on the Senate floor Friday afternoon, highlighting her letter to the Office of Management and Budget and “to make clear to those that are part of the incoming administration … that when we are speaking about Indian Tribes and Tribal Programs and the federal funding that they receive, they do not fall into the category, if you will, of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

She said there has been “a fair amount of confusion… and uncertainty,” causing “undue stress and anxiety” about the executive orders.

“When we are speaking about Indian tribes and tribal programs and the federal funding they receive, they do not fall into the category, if you will, of diversity, equity and inclusion,” she said.

Last week, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs elected Murkowski as chair of the committee, a position she’s held before. 

U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, a Democrat from New Mexico, sent a letter to President Donald Trump late Friday signed by nine other senators asking the administration to halt the layoffs of IHS staff.

“Tribal Nations have a legal and political relationship with the United States, and the federal government has a fundamental obligation to fulfill its treaty and trust responsibilities to Tribal Nations – an obligation that includes providing services such as health care to Native communities,” the letter states.

“Abruptly terminating any IHS employees undermines this responsibility, and we urge you to halt the mass firing of any essential health care workers at IHS to preserve the Federal obligations to Tribes. “

The letter said cutting healthcare services will lead to worse outcomes for patients and ultimate cost the federal government more money.

“The federal government is already failing to meet its trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations, and further reductions in IHS’ workforce will severely impact the health and wellbeing of [American Indians/Alaska Natives] across the country,” it states. “Therefore, we strongly urge you to stop these firings and retain IHS probationary staff.”

The letter was signed by eight other Democratic senators: Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona, Alex Padilla of California, Ron Wyden of Oregon, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. U.S. Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, also signed the letter.

Tribal leaders, organizations, and Native people can get updates and resources on The Coalition Group website.

In addition to the Navajo Nation, 16 organizations signed the letter: Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, American Indian Higher Education Consortium, California Tribal Chairpersons Association, Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council, Great Plains Tribal Chairmans Association, Midwest Alliance of Sovereign Tribes, National American Indian Court Judges Association, National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, National Congress of American Indians, National Council of Urban Indian Health, National Indian Child Welfare Association, National Indian Education Association, National Indian Health Board, National Indigenous, Women’s Resource Center, Self-Governance Communication & Education Tribal Consortium, and United South and Eastern Tribes Sovereignty Protection Fund.

ICT’s Kevin Abourezk contributed to this report. 

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Reading Time: 15 minutes

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and co-reported with NPR.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Carolina Wassmer piloted a gray SUV around the city, dropping off canvassers from the civic engagement group Poder Latinx one by one. It was a muggy day, but the canvassers hopped out with their clipboards and pens, ready to engage in a longstanding American tradition: the voter registration drive.

Poder Latinx’s canvassers were fanning out to help eligible voters in Latino neighborhoods join the rolls or update their registrations. But the work of such groups, which often focus on young voters and voters of color, is getting harder in Florida and around the nation.

Since the 2020 election, at least six states have passed legislation cracking down on voter registration drives. Many groups view the laws — enacted by Republicans in Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee — as an existential threat to their work, and several have shut down operations rather than risk financial penalties or prison time.

“It’s been a nightmare in every way,” said Davis Hammet of Loud Light in Kansas. His group halted voter registration efforts after a 2021 law imposed criminal penalties for impersonating an election official, something engagement organizations fear could be inadvertent. “If you’re [convicted of] a felony, you lose your right to vote. So you could lose your right to vote for registering voters,” Hammet said.

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In Florida, state legislators in 2022 upped the maximum fine a voter registration group could receive from $1,000 to $50,000. The next year, they boosted it again to $250,000. They also limited how and where organizations can return forms, and barred non-U.S. citizens and people with certain felonies from doing the work.

“These are rules that everybody needs to tighten up a little bit,” said Florida Rep. Rick Roth, a Republican who supported the changes. “You have to do it the right way. We don’t want any hiccups.”

Several Florida groups shut down their voter registration drives after the 2023 law. “As a consequence of all these threatening provisions, the League no longer collects paper voter registration applications,” said Cecile Scoon of the League of Women Voters of Florida. The League has registered tens of thousands of Floridians, but a $250,000 fine would be greater than its annual budget in recent years.

“We’re not as effective as we once were,” Scoon said.

State data shows that in the months after the Florida law took effect in 2023, registrations through drives fell by 95%, compared with the same months four years earlier.

Republican legislators in Florida cite concerns about fraud and trust in elections as reasons for the new restrictions. Voter registration groups have missed deadlines for returning applications in some cases, leaving potential voters ineligible for upcoming elections. And six canvassers were arrested in April 2023 after allegedly falsifying 58 voter registration applications in two counties. Yet a state investigator in Florida wrote that the people involved “were not part of an organized criminal conspiracy to corrupt the election process.” And there’s no broader indication of widespread fraud in voter registration drives across the country.

Americans can’t vote without being registered, except in North Dakota, and the registration process represents the largest barrier to casting a ballot for many potential voters. For over a century, voter registration drives have set up shop at parks, churches, grocery stores, campuses and community events to register eligible Americans.

These drives — with a long history stretching back to women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights movement — register some of the nation’s hardest-to-reach potential voters. They are especially key in states, like the six with new restrictions, that do not have automatic voter registration.

Advocates say many of the voters they register would be left out of the elections process otherwise. Black and Latino voters, along with naturalized citizens and people who didn’t graduate from high school, are more likely to rely on third-party voter registration efforts, according to census data.

And Republicans elsewhere are seeking to limit this form of voter outreach. Legislators in at least seven states considered bills this year, according to data from the Voting Rights Lab. The proposed legislation sought to erect new barriers to voter registration drives, create new criminal penalties or, in the case of Indiana, make such drives illegal entirely.

“This is part of a national effort,” said Nimrod Chapel Jr. of the Missouri NAACP.

‘The better democracy’

On a hot Saturday, Humberto Orjuela paced the parking lot of Presidente Supermarket #49 east of downtown Orlando. Friendly and soft-spoken, Orjuela was approaching shoppers and asking if they wanted to register to vote.

“When more people participate in elections, the better democracy we will have,” Orjuela said in Spanish between conversations with potential voters. He typically talks to shoppers while they’re loading up their car with groceries, when they feel less rushed.

Around lunchtime, he approached two women leaving the store. The sisters weren’t on the voter rolls but wanted to be. Orjuela walked each sister through the application, section by section. When Wilmarie Rivera got to the section about political parties, she was stumped about which to register with. Her sister piped in, asking which presidential candidate she preferred.

“Ah, Trump!” she responded with a laugh. “Eres Republicana,” Orjuela noted. He helped Rivera finish the paperwork, and the two sisters climbed in their red Dodge Charger and drove off. 

Orjuela does his outreach work in Spanish. Wassmer, Poder Latinx’s Florida program director, said that makes a difference. “People don’t feel confident. Or they’re not sure how to register, or why to register,” she said. “So the language really helps meeting people where they’re at.” 

But the Florida Legislature wants Orjuela to stop registering voters. A 2023 law, SB 7050, banned noncitizens like him from conducting voter registration drives, even though lawful permanent residents can handle registration applications as employees of Florida’s state or local election offices. The new restriction had been paused by a court, allowing Orjuela to continue registering voters. Wednesday, the same court said the state cannot enforce the provision.

Orjuela did civil engineering work in Colombia before coming to the U.S. He can’t vote himself, so the unglamorous, sweaty work of registering voters in parking lots is his contribution. He considers it a successful day if he can help around 10 Floridians join the rolls or update their registrations. 

But Orjuela said he was concerned about Florida’s law. “It’s a law that seems unjust to me, because if one has the right to work, well, one should be able to exercise that right. It shouldn’t come with so many limitations,” he said.

Legislators also shortened the window for groups to send completed applications to elections officials, from 14 days to 10; they barred people with certain felonies, including elder abuse, sexual offenses and perjury, from registering voters; they required groups to provide a receipt for each application; and they added a mandate that groups re-register with the state after every election cycle.

Additionally, SB 7050 criminalizes retaining the personal information of people registering to vote, now a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. (This has also been blocked by a court for now.) Groups say information like addresses and phone numbers had been a key part of their voter outreach.

The legislation sailed through Florida’s heavily Republican Legislature last spring, with the state’s election director, Maria Matthews, commenting in an internal email that “the bill appears to have the legs of [a] teen cross-country sprinter.” According to deposition testimony, many of the law’s provisions were recommended by Matthews and her colleagues at Florida’s Department of State, which oversees elections. The head of the agency, Cord Byrd, is a former Republican state representative and close ally of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In a statement, Department of State spokesperson Mark Ard said that “Floridians put a great deal of trust in [voter registration groups] to ensure that their voter registration applications are submitted to the appropriate Supervisors of Elections in a timely manner. However, that is unfortunately not always the case.”

The agency’s election crimes unit increased its scrutiny of voter registration groups in 2023, saying in its annual report that issues with these groups “have plagued the state for years.” It noted the agency received “over 50 civil complaints” from county election officials about groups returning applications late.

But Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida, said there are no widespread issues with third-party voter registration groups, sometimes referred to as 3PVROs.

“There are certainly some bad apples with respect to the efforts on the ground. But they are rare,” he said. 

Only 1.2% of voter registration applications submitted by these groups from 2016 to 2023 were alleged by the Department of State to have violated statutes. That’s according to plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging SB 7050. A federal court heard arguments in the suit, brought by civic engagement groups and voting rights organizations, in April. A decision is expected later this year.

Voter registrations way down, fines way up

Smith submitted an expert report for the plaintiffs, finding that more than 2.1 million Floridians relied on these groups to register or update their voter registrations in the last decade.

“Not every individual is the same. Not every individual has the same opportunities to register or re-register. They have various types of barriers. Maybe it’s transportation, maybe it’s information, maybe it’s concern about health, maybe it’s financial,” he said. “3PVROs really fill the gap.”

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Black and Latino voters are far more likely to rely on voter registration drives than white voters. In his report, Smith found that 12.8% of Black voters in Florida had used voter registration drives to register or update their registration since 2012.

That compared to 10.3% for Latino voters, and just 2% for white voters.

In deposition testimony, the state elections director, Matthews, acknowledged that she was aware of data showing voter registration drives disproportionately reached Black and Latino voters.

Republicans reject the notion that race has anything to do with the laws. “This is not targeting anybody. This is saying we are concerned” with how voter registration groups are operating, Roth said. “I am personally concerned.”

Joe Scott, supervisor of elections in South Florida’s Broward County, doesn’t share those concerns. “There’s a segment of the population that really relies on these groups being able to come out and do a voter registration drive in order for them to get registered to vote,” he said.

Scott, a Democrat, said Broward County has seen “a dramatic decrease” in voters registering through drives since SB 7050 became law. That echoes a statewide trend. Just 3,860 Floridians registered through drives in the first three months of 2024. During the same time frame in the last presidential election year, 40,963 voters did so.

That massive drop is driven, in part, by groups that responded to the new laws by stopping their voter registration work. LaVon Bracy’s Faith in Florida is one of them.

Bracy is a longtime civil rights activist. She was the first Black student to graduate from Gainesville High School in 1965 and has personally registered hundreds of voters in Florida.

“The restrictions are unbelievable,” she said in the Orlando church she and her husband founded. Bracy decided to halt voter registration drives last year because Faith in Florida couldn’t afford to pay fines of up to $250,000 per year if something went wrong. “It was a necessary decision, financially. We had to pivot,” she said.

Fines issued to voter registration groups have soared in recent years, according to documents in the lawsuit. They rose from under $4,000 in 2019 to over $64,000 last year.

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To avoid fines and criminal sanctions, Faith in Florida has begun sharing QR codes with potential voters, directing them to the state’s registration website. That means they are not directly registering people, and staff are unable to return applications on voters’ behalf. 

Bracy fears the new laws mean Faith in Florida will reach many fewer voters, including senior citizens who may struggle with the state’s online registration system.

She sees a racial motive behind the bills regulating voter registration drives, particularly following the 2018 gubernatorial election, in which DeSantis won by less than half a percentage point against Democrat Andrew Gillum, who is Black. “The aim is to keep Black and brown people from voting,” Bracy said. “If it wasn’t so important, they wouldn’t come up with all of these rules.”

‘Making it scary to do this work’

Florida is not alone. 

Five other Republican-controlled states have passed laws restricting voter registration drives since the 2020 election. Many of the laws share similarities and have been challenged in court.

“What I see as uniting a number of cases I’ve worked on, both past and present, is making it scary to do this work,” said Danielle Lang of the Campaign Legal Center, pointing to the financial and criminal provisions in the laws. Lang’s organization has been involved in legal challenges in Florida, Montana and Missouri.

The active cases in several states mean that laws can go into effect, then be blocked by courts, only to later be ruled constitutional — the legal sands shifting under the ground of organizations forced to decide if and how they want to register voters.

In Idaho, Sam Sandmire’s BABE VOTE, which seeks to register young voters on college campuses, at music festivals and elsewhere, has been grappling with the fallout from a 2023 law.

Youth registration in Idaho soared in recent years, growing faster between 2018 and 2022 than in any other state, according to a Tufts University analysis.

The law passed by the state Legislature established the types of identification voters could use to register and prove residency, which include a deed of trust, credit card statement or concealed weapons license, but does not include student ID. “That hurt, that forced us to suspend our voter registration drives,” Sandmire said.

BABE VOTE’s lawsuit called the changes “a surgical attack on Idaho’s youngest voters,” but the case was rejected by the state Supreme Court in April. (A separate case in federal court over the law remains active.)

The group’s volunteers restarted registration drives this spring, after a nine-month pause. But Sandmire said the changes to ID requirements have meant the group has to turn away perhaps a third of eligible Idahoans they encounter who are interested in registering.

In Missouri and Kansas, new laws triggered concern among voter registration groups that their work risked criminal penalties.

The Kansas law criminalizes impersonating an election official, in language that civic engagement groups say is so vague that they’ve been forced to suspend operations. (An attorney defending the law for the state said in a hearing that “I will acknowledge that this legislation did not represent the high water mark of legislative craftsmanship.”) Groups say that their staff and volunteers carefully explain who they are but are sometimes mistaken for government employees anyway — and now could face a fine of up to $100,000 and 17 months in prison over that mistake.

“This is me sending young people out, knowing that I might be sending them to get a felony charge that could just wreck their life,” said Hammet, the Loud Light president. “This is not even a misdemeanor, it is a felony charge.” 

His group had been planning an event celebrating the anniversary of the 26th Amendment, which reduced the minimum voting age to 18. But Hammet canceled it after the law passed.

“So we couldn’t register voters on the anniversary of young people getting the right to vote,” he said. 

A legal challenge is ongoing, but the process has dragged on for years. Hammet said his organization has missed out on registering thousands of voters.

Missouri’s law, passed in 2022, has also been challenged in court, with a trial scheduled for August. A state judge there granted a preliminary injunction, meaning aspects of the law are not currently in effect. The NAACP and other plaintiffs say vague provisions leave them at risk of criminal sanctions.

The law bans payment for voter registration work, which the Missouri NAACP has interpreted to include travel reimbursement as well as food and drinks for volunteers. “You can’t give them donuts, you can’t give a volunteer a T-shirt. And so it really gets draconian in that way,” said Chapel, who fears the restrictions could end his group’s ability to conduct voter registration drives at back-to-school events and on Juneteenth.

The law also requires people who solicit more than 10 applications to be registered to vote with the state, freezing out Missourians whose felony sentences bar them from casting ballots. 

“It really brings home what the folks who passed the law are trying to do, which is restrict our ability to register new voters at all,” Chapel said.

In a response in court, attorneys for the state denied the allegations made by the NAACP and other groups. Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s attorney general, told the Center for Public Integrity and NPR that he was “proud to be leading in the fight to ensure the integrity of Missouri’s elections.”

A 2023 law in Montana created criminal penalties for voters who “purposefully remain registered” in another jurisdiction when registering in a new one. Groups that conduct registration drives fear their staff and volunteers could be criminally charged for helping people register, and filed suit. In late April, a federal judge prevented the state from enforcing the provision for now.

Millions of voters register through drives

Voter registration drives have been a fixture of the elections landscape for nearly as long as registration has existed.

“What people understood from the beginning was that there was a role for groups to be engaged in helping people clear that hurdle,” said Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky.

Douglas studied the history of registration drives and found that they assist millions of voters each cycle.

Drives gained force during eras when the franchise expanded. “The big pushes for voter registration were women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights movement,” he said. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 also set off a wave of registration by standardizing application paperwork.

Efforts to restrict these drives have a history, too. A 2012 report from the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded voter access, found that the practice had “come under attack” nationally.

Among the legislation proposed at the time was a 2011 law in Florida that added several new restrictions, including a requirement that groups return applications within 48 hours. A federal judge permanently enjoined many aspects of the law in 2012, but an academic report found that voter registrations among Black Floridians were impacted more than other groups while the law was in effect.

A 2019 law in Tennessee, establishing hefty fines and prison time, met a similar fate: A federal court blocked it.

The legislative attention came one year after the Tennessee Black Voter Project collected over 90,000 voter registration applications. “There is always a backlash to our efforts to claim progress, and to have any sort of semblance of equality,” said Charlane Oliver, a nonprofit executive who was a key figure in the registration drive.

Oliver, a Democrat, was elected to the state Senate in 2022. This year, she watched the introduction of new legislation restricting such drives. Several of the provisions echo Florida’s recent laws, including requiring groups to provide a receipt, establishing fines and barring people with certain felonies from doing the work.

In a statement to Public Integrity and NPR, Tennessee Rep. Tim Rudd, the bill’s sponsor, said he drew inspiration from Florida. He thought Florida’s $50,000 fine for people with certain felonies doing voter registration work was high, though, and proposed a $5,000 one.

Rudd, a Republican, rejected the argument that Oliver and others have made that legislation restricting voter registration drives harms Black voters. He said the bill “has nothing to do with race, but everything to do with protecting Tennesseans from voter registration fraud and elder abuse via reasonable limited guidelines and restrictions. Those opposed to this legislation must not want accountability, plain and simple.” The measure was signed into law by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee earlier this month.

At least seven states besides Tennessee have considered legislation this year to ban or restrict voter registration drives: Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, New York and West Virginia.

“It is a really disturbing trend that these types of bills are circulating nationally,” said Saumya Sarin, a volunteer with Idaho’s BABE VOTE.

Bills in three of those states remain active and could become law, according to the Voting Rights Lab.

Advocates say drives reach many groups beyond Black, Latino and young adults who face barriers to voting. “Voter registration drives are really important across Indian Country,” said Jacqueline De León of the Native American Rights Fund. “Too many Native Americans simply are never asked the question, ‘Would you like to register to vote?’”

Registering online is not a viable option for some Americans. “A lot of our rural communities don’t even have broadband access. So how are they going to get registered to vote online?” said Tennessee’s Oliver.

Small shifts in voter registration could play a key role in what polls show is an exceedingly close presidential election. And the makeup of the electorate is poised to affect the down-ballot races that will determine who serves as governor, mayor, state supreme court justice and more in communities across the nation. In Florida, ballot measures on marijuana and abortion access could come down to small margins.

Not everyone who registers will vote. But anyone who doesn’t register can’t vote.

Voter registration drives “raise awareness,” said Scott, the supervisor of elections for Broward County’s 1.9 million residents. “They’ll be there, they’ll set up a table, and they’ll do their voter registration drive there, for folks who maybe aren’t being exposed to this idea that you need to get registered to vote.”

Correction, May 16, 2024: An earlier version of this story included a quotation in which the speaker said those charged with a felony lose their right to vote in Kansas. A felony conviction would prevent a Kansan from voting while the sentence is in effect.

The post ‘The restrictions are unbelievable’: States target voter registration drives appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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Lead poisoning is often treated as if it’s a problem of the past. But its harmful legacy lingers today, particularly in the soil of urban centers across the United States. 

One in every two American children under the age of 6 tested between late 2018 and early 2020 had detectable levels of lead in their blood. Studies show soil exposure is a major reason. 

The lead pumped out of exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks decades ago can still be found in soil. Lead paint used extensively throughout the first half of the 20th century remains on the interior and exterior walls of many homes, degrading to chips and dust that also end up in soil. And although the U.S. began phasing out lead in automobile gasoline and consumer paint in the 1970s, new lead pollution continues to be dumped on communities every year from industrial sites and the aviation gas used by small aircraft. 

Yet while the threat of lead exposure via paint and water is well documented, soils aren’t systematically tested and mapped to prevent exposure to this invisible neurotoxin.

The Center for Public Integrity and Grist have created a toolkit to help fill these information gaps and arm journalists and community members with the skills needed to do their own testing and analysis. The detailed guide walks readers through how to test the soil, map their results and investigate potential sources, both present and past. 

As part of this effort, Public Integrity and Grist will host several training workshops on the major tools and takeaways from the new guide. For journalists interested in coverage ideas and information about testing, join us either April 23 or April 25, both at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific).

For those interested in learning more about how to tackle soil lead contamination in their communities, join us April 30 at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific). Register here. You’ll also get an invitation to an additional brainstorming session to further tailor these approaches to your area.

Experts say that identifying the environmental sources of contamination is key to preventing lead poisoning in children. Once a child has been exposed, the damage cannot be reversed, which makes environmental testing and mapping imperative. 

Decades of research have shown the lasting harm for children exposed to lead, from brain development impacts — the capacity to learn, focus, and control impulses — to later health risks like coronary heart disease. No amount, scientists say, is safe. 

Our toolkit offers suggestions no matter what stage you’re at in your journey to learn about soil lead contamination. If you’d like to know what existing data indicates, for example, this map referenced in the toolkit shows how common elevated lead levels are in children by census tract or ZIP code in 34 states. Public health agencies fail to adequately test children’s blood for lead exposure, research shows, but existing data can point to potential trouble areas for soil, paint, or water exposure.    

If you’d like to know whether the soil in your city might be contaminated but don’t have the resources to conduct widespread testing, you can start small by testing in your backyard or a handful of properties in your neighborhood. The toolkit includes information about the online portal Map My Environment, an initiative that allows you to send in test samples to be analyzed for free. You’ll also see recommendations on lead interventions.

The post How to protect your community from the toxic lead lurking in soil appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.