La Jicarita

By JEANNE GREEN

Alert: There is still time to comment on the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) proposing an increase in nuclear weapons at LANL. The deadline for written/e-mailed comment is July 16th.

You may not have heard about this, even though Taosenos live within about 50 miles of the nation’s only nuclear bomb factory at Los Alamos. The NNSA—National Nuclear Security Administration—is proposing an increase of production of 200+ plutonium pits/year for new nuclear weapons, 80 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and 125 at Savannah River, South Carolina.  Plutonium pits are the core triggers for nuclear bombs. This proposal disregards the fact that there are over 15,000 reusable plutonium pits sitting at the decommissioning plant in Amarillo, Texas. These are verified reliable for at least 100 years. There are 1,200 nuclear bombs, ready to deploy a mile from the Albuquerque airport and around 4,000 deployed across the country in silos and submarines, many on hair-trigger alert.

During the Cold War, the U.S. and Russia amassed 70,000 nuclear warheads, fueled by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD.) Due to nuclear arms control treaties, 48,000 of these were retired. Now NNSA plans to trigger a new global nuclear arms race with new nuclear weapons that would require testing.

Officially, at least 2,056 nuclear bombs were exploded globally before treaties were established. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty forced testing to go underground due to concerns over radioactive fallout. LANL attributes local findings of radioactive materials, including plutonium in homes, soils, fruits, to global testing. This doesn’t even take into account that the first test was detonated right here in New Mexico, without warning to locals and no accountability for the vast numbers of cancers resulting in local populations. The Center for Disease Control’s LAHDRA report also delineates the historical multitudinous releases of radioactive and hazardous materials by LANL into the air and waters of NM.

The NNSA’s PEIS (Programmatic Environmental Impact statement) required by law, gives short shrift to their justification for producing new nuclear weapons. On page 5, their mission is: “2. maintaining and enhancing the safety, reliability and performance of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, including the ability to design, produce and test, in order to meet national security requirements.” But no future production maintains the safety and reliability of the existing tested stockpile. The 2009 JASON (an independent group of elite scientists) report for NNSA verified the longevity of the stockpile until 2080.

NNSA’s mission number 4 is “promoting international nuclear safety and non-proliferation.” In fact, new nuclear pit production conflicts with the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The 1970 NPT, Article VI obliges the U.S. to “enter into serious negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament.” Despite this international treaty, the PEIS states its “missions are conducted fully consistent with current treaty obligations.” No—a new nuclear arms race and testing is the opposite of non-proliferation. Non-proliferation program funding is also being cut in the PEIS. The U.S. is a non-signatory to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons signed by 191 countries.

Pope Francis states that “possessing atomic weapons is a crime against humanity and the future,” and “relying on the fear of annihilation poisons relationships between nations and obstructs real dialogue.” Who would not question the morality of killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in seconds, for what?

LANL, in recent years, has managed to produce one pit per year due to safety infractions, radiation exposures, contamination, criticality incidents, and an aging 48-year-old production facility, the PF-4. Rocky Flats, the previous nuclear bomb factory near Denver, was shut down in 1989 by the FBI for environmental crimes. The massive contamination was imploded down and covered, but it’s still there. This is indicative of the damage we can expect to see in New Mexico with mass production.

Production facility PF-4, containing significant amounts of plutonium, is situated between two fault zones and on top of a fragile layer of volcanic tuff, within 2,000 feet of the nearest fault zone. This has been analyzed by the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB) and declared unsafe. In their recommendation 2009-2 to the Secretary of Energy they report that “the critical NNSA assumption that the upgrades addressing seismic issues are adequate is flawed. . .  A major deficiency in the facility’s safety basis exists.” In the late 1990s cautionary upgrades were judged to be cost-prohibitive.

The DNFSB also cites the probability of post-seismic fires which would result in widespread contamination throughout New Mexico and beyond. We have already seen massive fires come within a mile of the Lab boundaries, where 10,000 barrels of radioactive waste sit atop the mesa.

Please send comments to: PitPEIS@nnsa.doe.gov with subject #DOE/EIS-0573. More information is at https://pitpeis.com/

 

Ding dong the witch is dead, the wicked witch is dead.

Senator Lindsey Graham died Saturday night of an apparent heart attack. Another horrible human being bites the dust. As Mehdi Hasan said it in his Zeteo column, Graham “never met a Middle East County he didn’t want to invade.” And in those invasions he wanted to “level” Gaza and kill as many brown, mostly Muslim, people as possible. The consummate opportunist, when it seemed impossible that Donald Trump would get the 2016 Republican nomination for president, Graham called him “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” By 2026, when Graham was well entrenched in Trump’s inner circle, Trump became “the greatest president of all time. . . Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.” Such great people as Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky rushed to say what a “wonderful friend” and “true believer of freedom” Graham was. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee he helped pack the Supreme Court with the rightwing justices we have today and made sure federal justices were groomed by the Federalist Society, whose goal is to turn the country into a presidential autocracy. In Britain, Lindsey would be what they call a “reverse ferret.” In the U.S., we can just call him a blood thirsty monster.

I want to tell a little story about how Congress came to be filled with people like Lindsey Graham. I recently read most of Rick Perlstein’s massive (914 pages) Reaganland: America’s right turn, 1976-1980. In his chapter “What is an Orrin Hatch?” Perlstein lays out the history of what became known as the “New Right,” or as Paul Weyrich, one of its main proponents put it, “radicals working to overturn the present power structure in this country”—meaning liberal elites. Rather mind boggling, this is where the notion of the Republican Party being the party of the working class originated, a notion that Missouri Senator Josh Hawley recently proclaimed while leading the charge that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Another of these proponents, Kevin Phillips, a former Nixon justice department official, wanted to build “a cultural siege-engine out of the populist steel of Idaho, Mississippi, and working class Milwaukee, and then blast the Eastern liberal establishment to ideological-institutional smithereens.” Also mind boggling is that these guys thought Barry Goldwater was too much a member of the establishment. Ergo, Orrin Hatch, the political neophyte elected senator from Utah in 1976 would be the torchbearer for the New Right. He represented the fundamentalist Christian coalition (he was a Mormon) that would soon come on board while the Heritage Foundation think tank would provide the intellectual underpinning. In 1973, University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize, signifying that his “trickle-down economics” would become the economic bible of the New Right. The election of 1976 also saw the rise of the neoconservatives from the flames of the Old Left: as Irving Kristol (Commentary magazine and the American Enterprise Institute) described them, a “liberal mugged by reality.” He was joined in the movement by all our favorite neocons of the George W. Bush era: Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Richard Perle.

There’s a lot of history between then and now—Newt Gingrich’s reign of terror in the House of Representatives, George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” the Tea Party rebellion—that led to Trumpism and the failure of the left to be the alternative. This, unfortunately, gives some credence to the critique of journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi that our obsession with the election of Donald Trump was more detrimental to journalism than it was to democracy. Theirs is a broader critique that our obsession with him distracted us from examining much else that needed examining: what the so-called “deep state,” i.e., the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, etc., are doing to spy on us, foment regime change abroad, murder people with drones, or any of the nefarious things they’ve been guilty of for years without legislative oversight. Lindsey Graham and his senatorial cohort (we can’t really tell if that includes Mitch McConnell anymore despite his picture from the hospital) are our “Orrin Hatch.” Donald Trump is their God.

 

By KAY MATTHEWS

Editor’s Note: Robin Collier of KCEI radio 90.1 recorded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) July 7 meeting on the Questa Chevron Superfund site where the Kit Carson Electric Coop’s (KCEC) proposed hydrogen facility will be located. He sent La Jicarita the transcript, which I read and am reporting on in this article. The EPA provided detailed information that I can’t adequately cover in this article, so I’ve focused on the agency’s relationship with Chevron, the company responsible for the clean-up at its former molybdenum mine, and how that may affect the proposed hydrogen facility. Kudos for Robin for recording almost all the community meetings held to discuss this controversial proposal.

Representatives of the EPA (Region 6 based in Dallas), the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), and New Mexico Minerals and Natural Resource Department introduced themselves and after their presentation on the Chevron Superfund site agreed to take questions. They explained how a situation becomes a Superfund site, when an assessment that contamination is present then leads to what type of contaminants are present and what options are available to clean up that site. Those options are ranked and then a NEPA-like process ensues with a proposed plan presented for public comment. An ROD (Record of Decision) is then released. The Chevron Questa ROD was filed in December of 2010. The Chevron molybdenum facility closed down in 2014.

What followed was a detailed explanation of the risk assessment period that tries to identify risks to human health and the environment at the Superfund site. There was also a lengthy presentation by a representative from the Department of Health who stated that the Town of Questa municipal water system has to meet federal drinking water standards but there is the possibility of future private wells being contaminated. People can request tests of their wells that would provide updated information to the state.

An EPA representative went through the cleanup activities that are being overseen by that agency. The site was divided into five different areas to address the remedy for each one, whether it be the groundwater or the soil that have contamination. The first area was the mill, where the PCB contaminated mining material was removed. At the mine site, there are 300 million tons of waste rock material. These piles of rock were regraded to a slope that’s stable and doesn’t potentially have the ability to move should there be an earthquake or other types of activity. They are then revegetated. Seepage interceptor systems are in place to rout the water away from the waste rock material. There are also groundwater extraction systems, located inside the mine area that handle the water that’s in the underground workings. At the tailings facility the ROD calls for the material to be covered and revegetated. There are also provisions for seepage collection and groundwater extraction. She then discussed what has already been achieved in the clean-up up process, what is next on the agenda, and the various agreements that Chevron has agreed to.

Finally, there was an announcement that a public meeting for the issuance of the Chevron Questa National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit will be held at the VFW in Cerro on July the 23rd.

Public comment then ensued and the moderator quickly got to the heart of the matter with this statement: “ . . . okay, I hear you, are we shilling for Chevron?” People wanted clarification on the EPA’s relationship with Chevron, and who was responsible for the clean-up. The moderator explained that the EPA doesn’t use taxpayer dollars on a clean-up when they have a responsible party “that made the mess and can afford to clean it up.” The EPA does oversee some Superfund sites that break the terms of settlement agreements, but so far, Chevron has been cooperating.

This raised the issue that if KCEC) disturbs the tailings area where the hydrogen facility is proposed, will it be the responsible party. Under the consent decree Chevron is required to provide the EPA with a 60-day notice of intent to lease or sell any land on the Superfund site. There are deed restrictions placed on the property that includes the clause that if the new owner or lessee encounters tailing material on that property, they are to immediately notify Chevron of that. They also have to notify the state and the EPA to further investigate those areas.

A member of the audience then asked if the agencies knew that the Village of Questa had rezoned the tailings area for heavy industrial use. The representative responded that the ROD lists the use as light industrial. She went on, “We don’t have a lot of power over the hydrogen plant unless it messes with our remedy at the tailings facility. And if we find out it’s going to mess with the remedy, EPA has a lot of power.” She made it clear that KCEC never notified the EPA Superfund that it was going to construct the facility and that they have no record that it will occur on the tailing facility. The solar array is not on an actual tailing site, but people asked about dust from the tailings that could blow onto those acres. The EPA position is that it’s not harmful for people to breath that dust.

The NMED is going to investigate whether there are any permits for the solar array that’s currently under construction. They’re now looking to see if in fact Kit Carson has applied for necessary construction permits that are covered under the construction general permit. If someone is disturbing an acre or more, they’re required to submit a notice of intent for coverage under the construction general permit. As a part of the permit, they have to provide a stormwater pollution prevention plan and they have to identify any type of critical species that are identified. EPA will coordinate with NMED on this.

The transcript of this presentation will eventually be on the Chevron Questions website.

 

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Editor’s Note: This story was originally produced by Daily Montanan, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Source New Mexico, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. It was republished by Source New Mexico, where I found it. It’s hard to say how much this massive reorganization is going to affect Carson National Forest or our local ranger districts, but it’s wise to suspect that any decisions made by this administration are politically motivated, which is expressed by some commenters in this article.

Chief Tom Schultz details, defends largest Forest Service reorganization in a century ByMike Koshmrl–July 6, 2026 8:21 pm

 U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz discusses resource sharing with states at the Western Governors’ Association conference on June 30, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile) 

PARK CITY, UTAH—The U.S. Forest Service received roughly 300 applications for the 15 new state director jobs created during a major agency reorganization that’s dissolving regional offices the agency’s first chief, Gifford Pinchot, created nearly 120 years ago.

That’s 20 applications per job, on average, for well-paying “senior executive service” positions at a federal agency that employs roughly 30,000 staff.

It’s a figure that, to many, suggests stunningly little interest in the jobs and a reminder that it remains a tough time to be a Forest Service employee tasked with managing 193 million acres of the United States.

But U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz on Tuesday sounded upbeat about the 300 applications, a datapoint he offered without prompting. Applicants are a mix of Forest Service veterans and outside candidates, and there are more than he needs to fill the state director jobs and restructure. Schultz’s team has already narrowed the pool of candidates and is starting to arrange for interviews, he told WyoFile from a boardroom at Park City’s Deer Valley Resort.

“I expect [interviews] to begin within the next couple weeks,” Schultz said.

The Trump administration’s pick to lead the Forest Service took a break from the Western Governors’ Association conference and sat down with WyoFile to discuss the status of the agency’s workforce and looming structural changes that were signaled in summer 2025 and formally set in motion this spring. The University of Wyoming graduate spoke just over the Wasatch Range from Salt Lake City, where he’s planning to live and work after relocating the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C. Nearly five dozen research and development stations may also be shuttered, and their staff will be clustered at more centralized operations instead.

(U.S. Forest Service)

All these changes are coming quickly.

Schultz says he will wait until after the already deadly, active wildfire season dies down before reassigning regional personnel and opening the doors on state offices.

“Sometimes toward the end of October, early November is when we’d be looking at getting those offices operational,” the Forest Service chief said.

Wyoming’s office is coming to Cheyenne, though the building has not been selected. The state offices in the Equality State and elsewhere will house an estimated “six to eight” staff, and will include positions specializing in communications, legislative affairs, tribal affairs and other “liason-type” roles, Schultz said.

“The intent is not to replicate the regional model,” he said. “It’s to have those positions supervise the forest supervisors, and also to be a liaison with states, with counties, with tribes.”

A former Idaho Department of Lands director, Schultz moved to the private sector and was an executive with an Idaho logging company before U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins hired him away in February 2025. Restructuring the Forest Service will concentrate resources and decisionmaking in the states and communities where national forestland is part of the landscape, he said.

“What we’re trying to do is basically bring the Forest Service closer to the people that we serve,” Schultz said. “The change from regional offices to a state director role is to really empower folks closest to the ground — district rangers and others who make decisions.”

It won’t be immediate, but eventually national forests like Wyoming’s Bridger-Teton, Shoshone, Bighorn, Medicine Bow-Routt and Black Hills should experience an increase in staffing and money as resources are diverted away from regional offices in places like Denver and Ogden, Utah, Schultz said.

“That is the intent,” he said.

Yet, the reorganization is also immensely controversial. Partly that’s a product of the administration spearheading the changes.

President Donald Trump’s second term started by bringing a wrecking ball to the federal government. The face of the aggressive, abrupt job cuts, now-trillionaire Elon Musk even wielded a chainsaw on stage to signify the actions of his now-defunct “Department of Government Efficiency,” which trimmed the Forest Service’s workforce by about 18%.

Skepticism and support

Many Forest Service employees are unsettled by the structural changes afoot. Retired White River National Forest supervisor Scott Fitzwilliams, who took a buyout during the DOGE era, criticized how hastily the reorganization was decided and implemented.

“This is turning over 100 years of organization,” Fitzwilliams said. “This is not thought out. And it’s chaotic.”

The Forest Service rolled out its plans in the absence of public review, Fitzwilliams pointed out. Except for stakeholders like the timber and fossil fuels industries, he said the reorganization wasn’t vetted and caught almost everyone off guard.

“I know for a fact, ranking members of resources committees on the Senate side and the House side, they learned about it when you and I learned about,” Fitzwilliams said.

But Schultz argues the concept of restructuring has been kicked around for nearly two decades. There’s been talk of redesigning the Forest Service to a state-focused system since 2008, and the effort became more formal in August 2024, he said.

Retirees who are formally organized have also voiced concerns.

Bill Avey, who chairs the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, told WyoFile that he feels the reorganization is “not in the best interest of the public or the national forests or the Forest Service itself.” He worried that the new structure will lead to the Forest Service becoming beholden to state politics.

“These are national forests, they aren’t state forests,” said Avey, who supervised the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. “The forests are going to be much more influenced by the politics of the state, when they should be managed for the people of the nation.”

The Forest Service state directors will be hired into career positions, and are not political appointees, according to Schultz.

But those assurances didn’t allay the concerns of Avey, who pointed to how state offices and directors function at the Bureau of Land Management.

“State directors are very political positions,” Avey said. “We’re worried about increased politicization of the Forest Service.”

Steve Ellis preceded Avey in chairing the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. His career started at the Forest Service but crossed over to the BLM, where he became the Idaho state director and then deputy director for the whole agency.

“So I know both the structures,” Ellis said. “Democratic and Republican governors in the West, my observation is they always liked the BLM model better.”

Two weeks ago, the bipartisan Western Governors Association pledged its support for the Forest Service restructuring in a letter.

“This state-based model will ensure strong communication between the agency and states and territories, and promote coordination on forest and rangeland management, recreational use, and wildfire mitigation and response,” Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox and Hawaii Democrat Gov. Josh Green wrote.

SLC HQ

Delivering the keynote address at the Western Governors Association conference this week, Schultz told the crowd that he’s “thinking about” giving the states more national forest management control. And he argued that there will be benefits to the coming headquarters move to Salt Lake City and the broader Forest Service restructuring.

“I currently have 26 direct reports,” Schultz said. “Under this new model, I’m going to have six reports. We’re going to align much like a normal corporate structure.”

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz delivers the keynote address at the Western Governors’ Association conference on June 30, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Moving Forest Service headquarters to Salt Lake City has been criticized partly because of the first Trump administration’s 2019 reorganization of the BLM, which included moving its headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, a mid-sized city about the size of Casper. That effort failed spectacularly. Less than 13% of the 328 employees whose jobs were moved chose to relocate and only three employees ended up moving to Grand Junction, according to High Country News. In fall 2021, the Biden Administration Interior Secretary Deb Haaland moved the office back to Washington.

Schultz is hopeful the Forest Service’s 2026 headquarters relocation will go differently. Salt Lake and Grand Junction are “two fundamentally different communities,” he said.

Asked if the Forest Service has goals for retention during the transitions, Schultz didn’t specify. He pointed out instead that only about 1% of the workforce will be asked to move throughout the entire reorganization.

“There could be fewer than 300 people that have to physically relocate,” the chief said.

Although the headquarters is officially changing locations, most of its employees will actually remain in Washington. Although the Forest Service’s fact sheet about the reorganization indicated that two-thirds of the National Capital Region positions would be relocated, the numbers shared by Schultz looked much different.

Out of the 750 people who are assigned to the Washington office, more than half are already remote, he said. That leaves roughly 350 employees who show up to the brick-and-mortar office on Independence Avenue.

“We’re expecting probably less than 50, at this point, may have to relocate out of the DC area,’ Schultz said. “Some of [the headquarters employees] are going to go to Maryland.”

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz meets with Wyoming State Forester Kelly Norris and partners from the Black Hills National Forest on March 18, 2026 to discuss timber harvesting, thinning, and prescribed burning on the Bearlodge Ranger District. (Preston Keres/U.S.Forest Service)

Forest Service whistleblowers who wrote a letter to Congress have argued that leadership is underestimating the disruption and that mandatory relocations could impact as many as 1,900 employees.

Some 6,500 Forest Service employees were informed in a letter that their job would be affected by the reorganization in some capacity.

“It basically said in that letter that you may have a different supervisor, you may have a different structure, you may have a different job,” Schultz said.

As of last week, those 6,500 employees haven’t been told what’s specifically changing.

“It’s still being worked on,” Schultz said.

Unions for Forest Service employees have called leadership’s communication style “engineered vagueness.”  In early June, six congressional Democrats from Colorado wrote Agriculture Secretary Rollins a letter urging the Trump administration to disclose more information about the plans.

State of staffing

At the moment, the Forest Service has roughly 30,000 employees, Schultz said. The agency lost nearly 7,000 staff last year, according to Office of Personnel Management data. The great majority, 6,500 of them, accepted one of the “deferred resignation program” offers, he said.

“So it’s been largely voluntary,” Schultz said.

Current staffing at the Forest Service is at about the same level as it was in 2018, according to the chief. The workforce swelled in 2020 and 2021 due to funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but the Forest Service’s base appropriation didn’t grow enough to support the larger workforce, and in 2024 under the Biden administration the “ball had already started rolling” of how to right the books.

“Decisions had to be made on how to get the budget straight,” Schultz said. “We can’t overspend what Congress has authorized.”

In 2025, the Forest Service went without non-fire seasonal staff because of the budget crunch. That’s changed, however, and the Forest Service so far in 2026 has added more than 1,600 employees, OPM data shows. Most new staffers are seasonals doing recreation work, Schultz said.

While that fits with Schultz’s goal of bringing more resources to forests and ranger districts, the Trump administration’s proposed Forest Service budget for fiscal year 2027 goes in the opposite direction. Proposed funding levels for the National Forest System would fall by $438 million, or 24%, and research, operations and maintenance line items are cut even deeper. Some $620 million for the “forest and rangeland research” and “state private and tribal forestry” would be zeroed out completely.

In a May 13 budget-focused Senate hearing, Schultz did not put up a fight or ask for more funds.

Fitzwilliams, the retired White River National Forest supervisor, struggled to see how Trump’s Forest Service budget fits Schultz’s vision of beefing up resources at forests and ranger districts.

“More resources on the ground, I think we’d all agree that’s really important,” Fitzwilliams said. “You can’t say that and then stand behind the president’s budget proposal, which he does.”

Turmoil in the federal government over the last 18 months has caused the workforce’s job satisfaction to outright plummet, according to a survey of 10,000 workers. At the Forest Service, the depleted staff and the agency’s reorganization has been cause for plenty of bad vibes.

“They’re stressed,” Fitzwilliams said, “and morale is horrendous.”

Sitting down with WyoFile, Schultz spoke to his workforce’s spirits and anxieties, which he said vary over time and by forest, ranger district and program.

“I’m not going to sit here like some Pollyanna and say, ‘Oh, morale’s great,’” Schultz said. “Do people have mistrust in some cases? You bet they do. Are they concerned for their job security? Some of them, very much are.”

The Forest Service’s chief also sensed that many of his employees are eager for the reorganization and change on the horizon. They’re ready to “rip the Bandaid off,” he said, and move on with their lives.

“People may mistrust me in the organization,” Schultz said. “But what they care about is the public that they serve. They care about the job that they do.”

That commitment, he added, “is what carries them through the uncertainty and the disruptions.”

This story was originally published by WyoFile, which is a partner organization of the Daily Montanan and its parent organization, States Newsroom. WyoFile retains editorial independence.