Forest Service Trails Budget Increases by 10% in FY 2026 Budget!

Recently I’ve been looking at some funding flows between foundations and various NGOs.. there’s a great deal of funding out there! My dream would be that some foundation would give funding to hire proven reporters to simply report the news in our area (federal lands) fairly and specialize in it, and make it available to the public. I think the closest we might get currently are some reporters at E&E News, which is not accessible to the public. It seems to me that taking the time to develop trusted sources of info will ultimately lead to more sustainable policy outcomes. More so than funding specific “anti-disinfo” efforts.  As we do in collaboration, go slow to go fast. If anyone knows of any likely funding sources, please let me know.

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It’s so predictable… the Admin proposes a reduced budget, people are rightfully concerned, I quote FDR:

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

Then Congress often, at the behest of interests who pre-date and post-date any given Admin, puts the funding back, or increases it.

Which, if you take it at face value, would be good news, right?

According to a story in E&E News by Marc Heller (as far as I can tell a highly knowledgeable and relatively unbiased knowledge source, but E&E subscriptions price ordinary folks out of the market).  The headline is “Congress bucks Trump to fix decrepit forest trails.”

Lawmakers increased funding for trails in the fiscal 2026 spending package awaiting President Donald Trump’s signature, moving in the opposite direction of what the White House was seeking as the forests’ declining condition makes headlines.

The package, which covers the Interior Department and related agencies, such as the Forest Service, sets trail maintenance at $22 million for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, or $2 million more than in fiscal 2025. The administration had requested $8 million.

So this would be a 9% increase, right?  Not great, but generally a good thing.

Marc brings up the fact that the FS has previously diverted bucks from what Congress intended, most notably from S&PF programs to employee salaries who took deferred resignation.  Apparently USDA defended that but the link to more info is paywalled. So that’s a possibility, but given what the Chief has said about recreation, it seems unlikely (to me).

“Shared stewardship and local collaboration are essential to improving forest health, wildfire resilience, recreation access and conservation outcomes,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said in a column on the agency’s web site on Jan. 16.

Expanding access and improving the visitor experience are major priorities, Schultz said.

Below is the  “it’s always been the case they don’t have enough funding” argument – I believe that this might be the only issue that all TSW-ites agree on.

Groups like the American Hiking Society say they worry that pledges to work together won’t amount to much more than words if the administration’s budget priorities prevail.

“Asking federal partners to do more with flat or even declining financial support will break the system and result in further deterioration of trails,” Ray said in an email.

The administration’s focus was apparent in the budget request for the current fiscal year, released last spring.

In my experience, Congress doesn’t change that much, especially about popular programs with public support.  As I said about the macro land sales bill,  “that dog is very unlikely to hunt.” If they were going to go along with the Budget request, they would have. But OK, bad things could happen. Which makes me think about the ratio of reporting “things” to “bad things that could happen in the future”. There is a finite supply of things, but an infinite supply of “opinions of things that could happen in the future.” And sometimes I wonder if the discipline of print media (only so many things can fit on a page) led us in one direction, while infinite space leads to infinite opinions about infinite future events, the scarier the more clicks and the more money, and so on.  As yet there is no process to assess prediction performance.   But my guess is that Congress will continue to support trails.

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Last December, there was a story about a report that the FS rec folks had apparently shared with the WaPo and involving interview with two recreation retirees.  I covered it here. Interesting that Wyofile wrote about it today as a featured top story. The headline is: “Backlogged and DOGE-depleted: Forest Service report raises alarm over trail health”. It doesn’t seem to mention the budget increase.

What was interesting was that there was no mention of the Biden Admin being responsible for the “lack of seasonal people.” Marc Heller (whose reporting is unavailable to most people) has always pointed this out in relevant articles, but sadly, is not available to most people. It does make you wonder about “free” sources of information. In the Wyofile article:

What Lee observes is insufficient staffing and resources to tackle the amount of work necessary to steward and maintain the resource.

Most concerning, Lee said, “is the lack of seasonal people that do the work on the ground. They’ve been wiped out.”

That leaves permanent specialists without the crews to implement their programs and all but guarantees backlogs build up. “As far as maintenance, it just isn’t getting done because there’s not enough people,” Lee said.

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The story does say that there’s a disconnect between what Schultz says and what they hear from staffers.
Shultz says:

“Expanding that access and improving visitor experience is a major priority,” he wrote. “We’re modernizing trails, campgrounds, and facilities; improving roads and recreation sites; strengthening on-the-ground engagement; and using tools like Recreation.gov to help visitors plan safe, enjoyable trips.”

Then the same thing as we have heard:

Employees are being asked to do work not in their contracts as well as accomplish their normal workload with severely diminished resources, the employee said. In addition, a string of out-of-left-field directives and disruptions has raised stress to unacceptable levels as staffers fear for their jobs.

“It’s just exhausting, it’s not sustainable and there’s no end site,” the employee said. “I think everybody’s just kind of hanging in there because we really care deeply about our work as public servants and the mission of the Forest Service. But it’s also devastating on a daily basis.”

Nelson sees another disconnect. It used to be that the majority of agency staff, regardless of their title, had hands-on experience on a forest. That no longer seems to be the case, he said. Agency brass, he added, increasingly don’t seem to recognize the value of “just being up there” — spending time on and developing intimate knowledge of the land and water by sleeping under the stars, watching wildlife and enjoying the peace.

I don’t even know what this means.. some of our best employees in my last experiences (retired 13 years ago) were PMFs or from the military or had other non-traditional backgrounds (staff of politicians!). That was long before this Admin. And as we have seen, many of the last hired during the Biden Admin were from various backgrounds (whether they counted as brass or not). How many “brass” have the two sources interacted with?

Anyway, I just think the contrast between the E&E News reporting and the Wyofile approach (find sympathetic people and interview them about their opinions) is striking. The headline, of course, was about DOGE. More on that in the next post.