Cuts to federal agencies include Biological Survey Unit
WASHINGTON — The four muskrats last roamed free on Nov. 20, 1908, near Farmington, when Charles Birdseye trapped, skinned and delivered them to the nation’s capital.
The naturalist would go on to become famous as the father of the frozen food industry. But on that fall day, Birdseye worked for one of the most prestigious scientific divisions in the U.S. government, a place now known as the Biological Survey Unit.
More than 100 years later, the historic division is targeted for closure, part of a sweeping budget-cutting campaign by the Trump administration.
With lawmakers poised next month to approve new priorities for agency funding for the first time since the president took office, the bureaucratic bloodletting can officially begin.
The Biological Survey Unit is hardly the only entity facing extinction. Dozens of long-standing programs are slated for termination, and every agency, large and small, has submitted a plan to the White House for reorganization.
At the Education Department, an “initial agency reform plan” obtained by
The Washington Post calls for eliminating the Office of the Under Secretary, which coordinates activities related to postsecondary education, career-technical education and federal student aid.
The Agriculture Department would curtail the Rural Business-Cooperative Service, which since 1994 has offered business development counseling and job training for rural Americans.
And the U.S. Geological Survey aims to end its whooping crane restoration program, which over half a century has helped save the species. Some cranes have already been shipped to nonfederal facilities.
Until now, the administration has been largely prevented from making such moves because the government has been operating under a series of continuing budget resolutions. Those generally require agencies to maintain funding for existing programs.
“The executive branch can’t just say, ‘We’re going to close down this part of government that has appropriated dollars,’ ” said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Budget.
The ground is about to shift, however. Having cut a deal earlier this month to increase agency spending over the next two years, lawmakers expect in March to approve formal appropriations bills that will allow them to re-order agency priorities.
Once the legislation passes, a House Appropriations Committee aide confirmed Friday, the U.S. Geological Survey will be able to shutter both the crane program and the Biological Survey Unit.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said he believes President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress are prepared to fundamentally change the way government operates.
“A simple battle cry is that we need to move at the pace of technology, not the pace of bureaucracy,” Gingrich said. “And for every place that moves at the pace of bureaucracy, we need to overhaul it.”
In that sense, the Biological Survey Unit would appear to be a ripe target. Established in 1885 as the economic ornithology branch of the Agriculture Department, it set out to survey, study and catalogue plants and animals across the United States.
Today the office has an annual budget of about $1.6 million and six researchers.
Gingrich, a passionate naturalist, said he does not know whether it makes sense to eliminate the Biological Survey Unit. Cutting the $1.6 million program, he acknowledged, would hardly make a dent in the nation’s $4.4 trillion federal budget.
But “if every six-person office is sacrosanct, then nothing can be done,” Gingrich said. “If this collection is that valuable, there are probably 20 billionaires that could endow it.”