Overview:
More than a third of the nation's public land funding is to be cut from federally run agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Cuts to these budgets have happened before, but these are deeper than ever.
It was the type of summer day that makes you wish summer would never end in Central Oregon, so my husband and I decided to go for a hike at Paulina Lake. The thick pine forest encased the shimmering lake in cooling shade. Before starting the 7.5-mile hike, we decided to make a pit stop at the only two restrooms for miles. As seems to be increasingly usual, there was a small line already gathered outside the door of the first restroom. The other restroom door was locked. A sign on it read: “Needs Repair! This restroom is CLOSED for the season.”
Part of the Newberry National Volcanic Monument, Paulina Lake is one of over 200 lakes in the Deschutes National Forest and is run by the U.S. Forest Service. Most outdoor recreation in Oregon occurs on federal property managed by the U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management, which together oversee 53% of Oregon’s land. The Forest Service is part of the Agriculture Department, but Congress funds it through a subcommittee that deals with interior and environmental spending. The Bureau of Land Management works within the Interior Department and manages federal lands nationwide. A study of the Trump administration’s 2026 budget by the Center for American Progress shows that more than a third of the funding is to be cut from federally run agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Chops to these budgets have happened before, but cuts are deeper than ever.
Volunteers struggle to fill gaps
“I feel like the Forest Service has been suffering from death by 1,000 cuts,” said Kit Dickey, a longtime volunteer and trail coordinator for Sawyers with Attitude to Spare in Central Oregon. SWATS volunteers maintain approximately 250 miles of trail annually in the National Forest. Dickey has watched the Deschutes National Forest slowly lose the staff and resources that once kept its trails maintained and campgrounds operational. Bathrooms are going uncleaned, and trails are deteriorating without repair, she explained. Dickey is worried that SWATS, and other similar organizations, won’t be able to pick up the slack much longer. The demanding nature of long weekend shifts, combined with an increasingly older volunteer workforce and the need for extensive training, create significant hurdles for these organizations. With budgets shrinking, volunteer organizations will find it even harder to address these mounting difficulties.
The more visitors there are, the more maintenance is needed. Since 2006, BLM lands have seen a 46% increase in visitors. The U.S. Forest Service has seen a 5% increase in visitors. According to the study by the Center for American Progress, cutting the budget by 30% would leave one ranger for every 16,000 visitors.
An increasing reliance on volunteers
Each year, the Deschutes National Forest has nearly eight million people visit its 94 family campgrounds and 1.6 million acres of high desert, alpine forests and meadows. This summer, three major campgrounds have been closed, not for renovations or improvements, but because the Forest Service can’t afford to make them safe. North Davis Creek Campground shut down for 2025 due to “hazard tree mitigation needs,” according to the Deschutes National Forest’s website. Reservoir Campground closed for the same reason in 2024. China Hat Campground remains closed following the Firestone and Flat Top fires. DNF officials did not respond to requests for more information on local campground closures.
Even for the open campgrounds, nearly one-third of visitors reported that the host was unavailable, found an informal poll by the Source in Aug. 2025. The poll asked Source readers to rate their opinions of campsites, trails and more. The same poll also found that 20% of visitors found bathrooms dirty and 14% found trails unkempt and littered.
President of the Friends of the Central Cascades Wilderness and longtime volunteer, Richard Nix, has seen these effects of funding cuts firsthand.
“It’s been increasingly difficult to help the Forest Service because they had less funds… We saw that the kiosks at the trailheads needed repair. We asked the Forest Service for some money to repair the kiosks. Well, of course, they didn’t have any money. So, then we had to raise funds to buy the lumber to fix the trailhead kiosks.” Nix says that the Forest Service used to have people in various positions to coordinate trail crews, volunteers and work on projects, but that they don’t have those people any longer.
The Deschutes National Forest lost its trails volunteer coordinator position over two years ago when a federal hiring freeze prevented it from filling the vacant role. The nonprofit Discover Your Forest stepped in to provide one regular coordinator and is a partner of Deschutes Trails Coalition. Annually, DTC assists with coordinating nearly 40,000 volunteer hours. The Deschutes Trails Coalition has stepped up to fund a full-time summer trail crew to supplement volunteer work, but even that faces restrictions. The crew is limited to working on specific funded projects rather than general maintenance, creating gaps in overall trail care.
With a small office team of three, the DTC collaborates with more than 30 volunteer groups to manage an estimated 2,700 miles of summer trails. Groups including the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project, SWATS, Friends of the Central Cascades Wilderness and Central Oregon Nordic Club are doing trail maintenance, education and advocacy work that used to be handled by federally paid staff.
The volunteer effort is impressive. A crew of wilderness volunteers with an average age of 72 maintains trails in Central Oregon, says Kit Dickey, SWATS volunteer and trail coordinator.
“There are things we cannot do. We can log out, we can do the brushing… but we cannot do the significant tread and drainage repair or bridge building.” With the Big Beautiful Bill cutting into more than one-third of the budget for public land management, volunteers have become vital to public lands.
Volunteers are well aware of the problems with this dependency. Sue Sullivan, vice president of the Central Oregon Nordic Club, compared it to self-checkout at grocery stores: “Every time you do self-checkout, you are saying, well, we can get by, because they’ll do it themselves. And so you’re actually taking away someone’s job… if we’re doing it, then they can say, well, we can always count on the volunteers.”
The sustainability concerns go deeper than just aging volunteers. Training new people takes years, and the Forest Service no longer provides the coordination and education programs it once did, Dickey explained. “It takes maybe five, seven years for somebody to become really skilled,” said Dickey.
Trump pushes logging, drilling
The majority of Oregonians support protecting public lands like the BLM and Forest Service, reports the Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy Oregon Poll from May 2025. In addition to being used for recreation, these lands also provide regulated wildlife habitats, cattle grazing and timber harvesting.
Courtesy: USDA Forest Service
The Trump administration is pushing to speed up logging, mining and oil extraction on public lands. The One Big Beautiful Act mandates 20-year logging contracts and increasing timber production by at least 250 million board feet annually for the Forest Service and 20 million for the Bureau of Land Management.
Logging has historically funded local critical services like roads and schools. Because counties can’t collect property taxes on federal land, they must choose between funding from the Secure Rural Schools program or a share of timber sale profits from public lands. In general, Oregon counties usually choose Secure Rural Schools because it pays more. But that funding ran out in 2023. The One Big Beautiful Act fails to guarantee revenue, stating, “Any monies derived from a timber sale contract… shall be deposited in the general fund of the Treasury.”
“This has caused considerable angst among counties,” shared Sen. Ron Wyden in a recent press release.
But even logging operations face constraints.
“There’s not a lot of valuable logging left,” said Dickey, who has also served as chairman of the Central Oregon Forest Stewardship Foundation. “The mills are so far away that by the time you cut a log, you have added so much to the cost of the log just by moving it from one place to another.”
Critical environmental protections for forests are being cast aside. BLM land is now being directed by Bill Groffy, formerly of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association. His appointment by the Trump administration is intended to focus on “energy dominance,” not conservation. The so-called “Fix Our Forests Act” would make it easier to bypass environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and Endangered Species Act. “It primarily focuses on cutting environmental reviews in national forests to enable greater levels of industrial logging,” states a press release from the Sierra Club.
Other rollbacks include potentially rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule that protects 58 million acres of backcountry, including 2 million acres in Oregon containing places like Sparks Lake, Hosmer Lake and Tumalo Mountain.
“For decades, the Roadless Rule has protected our wildest and most intact landscapes, and some of Oregon’s most treasured public lands,” said Oregon Wild’s Central Oregon Field Associate Sami Godlove in an email. “Eliminating the Roadless Rule and opening the last of our remaining intact wild spaces to development, road construction and industrial activities is a massive threat to everyone who enjoys our public lands and the freedom of the great outdoors. Oregonians value these places deeply, and now is the time to raise our voices to ensure they remain protected for future generations.”
This article appears in the Source September 4, 2025.
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This is an easy one to solve. Parks of any kind should be 100% funded by user fees. The same goes for recreation facilities and libraries. We are taxed too much. Enough!