Last month, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced it had partnered with the Department of the Interior to cut $14 million worth of environmental grants, including $2.5 million for New Mexico.
The Institute of Applied Ecology, based in both Oregon and here in New Mexico, is one of the organizations that had a large swath of its funding cut.
“We work with native plant materials development,” said Katy Silbert, the assistant branch director of the institute’s southwestern branch. “Which means that we are collecting seeds from the wild to then grow those plants and put them back on the landscape.”
In addition to replanting, the institute does experimental research and monitoring of rare plants in partnership with private landowners, and a slew of federal, state, and local agencies across seven states.
Silbert said that the funding cuts seemingly came out of nowhere, with some of their staff learning about them while out in the field.
“One of our ecologists was doing a planting with our Bureau of Land Management partners and were finding out [about the cuts] at the same time that we were,” Silbert told KUNM.
The cuts were spearheaded by DOGE, and the Trump administration claimed on the social media site X (formerly known as Twitter) that these grants, which make up over half of Silbert’s budget, were “wasteful” because their DEI-esque hiring initiatives weren’t aligned with agency “priorities.”
The now-cancelled awards came from a slew of agencies under the Department of the Interior – from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service, to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Land Management for initiatives for delivering on the ground conservation or building conservation capacity.
“Real action = real savings,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum wrote on social media. DOI is also currently preparing to implement another round of agency-wide layoffs.
Overall, the Institute for Applied Ecology received 30 federal award cancellation notices on Sept. 23 from Department of the Interior agencies totaling somewhere around $3.5 million. Silber said $2.5 million of that was specifically for conservation in New Mexico.
Other organizations that lost funding include the Bird Conservancy of the Rockies and the Lomakatsi Restoration Project.
It’s common for these types of awards and grants to be reimbursed after organizations have spent their own personal funds for a project, which is then paid back by the federal government after a review process. These agreements can span several years.
This means that Silber’s team has already spent money that they might not get back.
“It can be a challenge to balance that when we have some of these larger expenditures – because conservation, while very important, isn't always cheap, but it's always worth it,” Silber said.
Silber pointed out that their habitat restoration efforts are broadly beneficial for many New Mexico species – including the lesser prairie-chicken, chestnut-collared and thick-billed longspurs, and the monarch butterfly.
“There are these massive ripple effects of having fewer resources on the landscape,” she added.
While some of these projects will still go forward and others reevaluated, the slashes are having an immediate effect, forcing the institute to lay off two seasonal youth field crews and four other regular positions.
These cuts come in the midst of a systemic push to overhaul agencies under the executive branch, where President Donald Trump is broadly attacking popular conservation policies and public lands in the name of energy exploration and economic development.
