Trump's Proposed Budget Cuts Leave No Refuge for Wildlife Refuges
Gutting agencies that protect refuges and wetlands would imperil wildlife and jeopardize the $7.7 trillion in benefits wetlands provide
Bald eagles descended to pose on the banks and boulders on the mudflats. Shorebirds bobbed in shallow pools. Great blue herons, great egrets and snowy egrets snapped up fish along the water’s edge. Bullfrogs burped from creeks. Fox kits poked their heads out from underneath logs and darted in and out of openings in the brush.
Amid this frenzy in May in the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, I asked Refuge Manager Oscar Reed what he appreciates most about this place. The first thing that came to his mind was not the fine feathered friends, frogs, or foxes that virtually all the other visitors—like me—had in the sights of their cameras, scopes and binoculars.
“The marsh,” Reed responded. “In the fall, I just love the amber color in the sun and watching it wave in the wind.”
“In one word, how would you describe it?” I asked.
“Tranquil.”
In appreciating the marsh’s serenity, it was as if Reed was channeling Rachel Carson, the great environmental writer whose 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” helped inspire the modern environmental movement. Two decades earlier, in her first book, “Under the Sea Wind,” she wrote that “to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh…is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
I came to this wildlife refuge in Delaware for the birds. But Reed—and Carson—reminded me that without coastal wetland marshes, so much of what is essential for this thriving ecosystem would be dramatically diminished. In the past, Congress and Democratic and Republican administrations alike going back to the 1980s have agreed, mandating a report every 10 years on the status of wetlands in the contiguous United States.
In a report to Congress last year, the Interior Department and its U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that wetlands are vital to as many as half of North American bird species, more than 80 percent of threatened and endangered birds, and about half of all the animals and plants covered by the Endangered Species Act.
Today, however, with Donald Trump back in the White House and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on the loose, wildlife refuges and wetlands across the country—as well as the flora and fauna that depend on them—are facing an existential threat. Trump’s proposed fiscal year (FY) 2026 budget would lay waste to the federal agencies that protect them.
Wetlands’ priceless natural gifts
If Carson were alive in this epoch of climate change, she likely would have added that the breath of marsh mist should stir the soul to remember how priceless a wetland is. According to a 2022 study by researchers at Resources for the Future and Columbia University, wetlands are worth between $1.2 trillion and $2.9 trillion in flood mitigation value alone, which has grown more critical with sea level rise and the increased frequency and intensity of storms and wildfires.
Then add crab, lobster, scallops, salmon and shrimp, which are among the nation’s most valuable seafoods. They all spend a portion of their lives in wetlands. The marshes further clean the water for recreational fishing. Commercial and recreational fisheries support 1.7 million jobs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Add in other benefits, including filtering pesticides and fertilizers from agricultural runoff before they contaminate rivers and lakes as well as bird watching and other recreation opportunities, and wetlands’ annual benefits soar to $7.7 trillion, according to the Interior Department’s 2024 report—a backbone of the nation’s $30 trillion economy. “The ecosystem services provided by wetlands,” the report stated, “are unmatched by any other habitat except coral reefs.”
This unmatched value has been recognized in the past on a bipartisan basis. Congress overwhelmingly passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, and Republican President George H.W. Bush signed into law an updated Clean Water Act and the North American Wetlands Conservation Act in 1989.
When Bush, a hunter and fisherman, signed the wetlands act, he said he was “disturbed” that the fall flight of ducks was near an all-time low in a nation that had lost more than half of its original wetlands. He went so far as to make a “no net loss” wetlands pledge. He declared in a 1989 speech to Ducks Unlimited: “It’s time to stand the history of wetlands destruction on its head. From this year forward, anyone who tries to drain the swamp is going to be up to his ears in alligators.”
Bush’s “no net loss” pledge resulted in only one recorded period of slight net wetland gain, from 1998 to 2004. But his rhetorical goal pumped the brakes on wetland loss just enough to see what could happen if there were increased investment in conservation instead of total exploitation.
Budget cuts would threaten progress
The 2022 State of the Birds Report compiled by more than 30 government agencies and conservation organizations found that wetlands were about the only habitat that showed signs of thriving. While bird populations declined dramatically in most habitats across the country, the report found that wetlands experienced major increases in ducks, geese, swans, and such water birds as pelicans. The report credited the funding triggered by the North American Wetlands Conservation Act in facilitating a “model conservation success story.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), one of the agencies that helped write the 2020 report, said that since 1991, the wetlands law spurred conservation of more than 32.6 million acres of habitat in 3,300 projects, which was funded by nearly $7 billion in grants and partner contributions. A joint report in December 2024 by USFWS and NOAA found that the rate of wetland loss in coastal watersheds from 2009 to 2019 was less than the rate of loss from 1998 to 2009, indicating “progress toward reducing net wetland loss.”
This progress was partially a result of USFWS cobbling together enough partnerships to protect species despite declining congressional funding for its refuge system over the last decade and the resulting loss of staff. A Congressional Research Service report in January of this year found the number of employees had dropped from about 2,750 in 2014 to about 2,300 in 2023.
The National Wildlife Refuge Association, the leading advocate for the refuge system, says the number of full-time USFWS employees is now down to 1,750 due to early retirements, unfilled positions, and departures when Donald Trump regained the White House and created DOGE to eliminate jobs.
Bombay Hook is part of that erosion, now down to eight employees from 10. That loss makes continued progress, let alone the elusive goal of no net loss, highly uncertain. The joint USFWS-NOAA report said that without “strengthening” conservation efforts, the loss of inland and coastal wetlands alike may grow due to a combination of local land development, commercial agriculture, sea level rise, and the ever-more severe storms triggered by climate change. “Scientists and decisionmakers around the world are concluding that coastal wetlands are critical landscape features that help drive and sustain economic prosperity,” the report said.
Unfortunately, too much of the last decade has been dominated by a Washington that dismisses science. The Supreme Court, now with a conservative supermajority thanks to Trump’s appointments in his first term, has rolled back many air, water and wetland protections on behalf of industry and developers, handcuffing the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect the public from pollution and the natural world from habitat loss.
The second Trump administration is going for the jugular, choking conservation itself. In its FY 2026 budget, it has proposed to slash USFWS’s funding by 32 percent, from $1.68 billion to $1.14 billion. The budget would eliminate several USFWS conservation funds, kill its Science Applications program, which coordinates large-scale conservation planning across jurisdictions, and cut the wildlife refuge system by 22 percent. The FY 2026 proposal also would cripple key USFWS partners. The U.S. Geological Survey, for example, would have to make do without its ecosystems research division, take major hits to its core science programs, and suffer a 38 percent budget cut.
There are innumerable other proposed cutbacks across government agencies in the Trump budget that could imperil wildlife refuges because of the interconnected conservation science, pollution prevention, and climate change data they collect. Among the most notable are proposed budget cuts of 54.5 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency, 55.8 percent at the National Science Foundation, and 27 percent at NOAA.
Trump should be “up to his ears” in protest
Such drastic reductions would dramatically impact what I have witnessed over the years in the Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge was established in 1937 and developed from 1938 to 1942 by a segregated African American Civilian Conservation Corps team that cleared swamps, built dikes and causeways, and created freshwater lakes.
The fruits of their labor were immediate, with the refuge manager writing in 1940: “Every night the croaks, squawks, and hoarse guttural screams of Great Blues, American Egrets, and Black-crowns [herons] can be heard as never before on any section of the refuge. This is something entirely new, and very much a spectacle to us as well as to our Natural-History minded friends.”
I’ve heard those croaks, squawks and hoarse guttural screams during several visits. One year, tens of thousands of snow geese honked in the marsh. When they were spooked by something overhead, I could feel the concussive power of them taking off all at once, so tightly packed that it was as if I were looking at a white sheet. On another trip, a river otter cruised along a creek shimmering with the orange, yellow and red reflection of fall foliage. On another, gorgeous, rusty-red headed avocets foraged in the shallows.
During this last visit, Oscar Reed drove me around, telling me how none of what I saw was an accident. We spoke on the condition that the discussion was solely about the beauty of the place and not about politics. The refuge has one of the largest tidal marshes in the Mid-Atlantic, with a low tide that exposes mud flats as far as out as the eye can see. High tide turns the area into what looks like a series of lakes, but the water in many places is only 18 inches deep.
Reed, 60, oversees a delicate manipulation of this environment, raising and lowering water in impoundments to provide the best feeding conditions for shorebirds, wading birds and ducks. The work can be backbreaking. Sometimes Reed and his staff have to wade into the marsh with a potato rake to clear beaver logs that hinder water control structures’ effectiveness. “The logs are so well knitted together,” he said, “it takes everything to dislodge them.”
The reward for the refuge staff is a parade of sights that never stop surprising them. Populations of threatened piping plovers have inched up. This spring. uncommon birds for Delaware, including sandhill cranes and a roseate spoonbill off course from its Gulf Coast climes, found this place a haven. And the number of bald eagles cruising through in the spring to feed on fish has swelled over the years to as many as 50 in a single day.
These are the sights that attract 100,000 visitors a year to the refuge to see, as Rachel Carson would say, creatures far more eternal than us. Eagles, for instance, started evolving around 36 million years ago. The oldest fossils of great blue herons, which look like prehistoric pterodactyls to many, are 1.8 million years old. Homo sapiens, conversely, have been around for only 300,000 years.
As we passed eagles, herons and sandpipers, Reed said, “Some of the best satisfaction I get is when I look at the guest book in the visitor center and I see lots of exclamation points.”
The best exclamation point of all would be if the nation rose up to remind the Trump administration—to borrow from George H.W. Bush—that anyone who tries to drain the wetlands and murder the marsh is going to be “up to his ears” in protest. With their simultaneous tranquility and cacophony, the nation’s 573 national wildlife refuges arguably remain our nation’s greatest places, as Carson said, “to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) fellow, a former columnist at the Boston Globe, and author and photographer of “Project Puffin” (Yale University Press, 2015) and “The Puffin Plan” (Tumblehome Books, 2020) on the restoration of puffins in Maine. A version of this article originally ran on The Equation, UCS’s blog.
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