There's a downside to Congress having decided to stop funding government with continuing resolutions and come up with an actual budget. While an actual budget means fewer government shutdown opportunities, it also means that all those existing government programs that just kept being funded as always are now vulnerable to getting the axe. And that's what the Trump administration is wielding. For example, the Biological Survey Unit which has existed for more than a century and has a measly $1.6 million annual operating budget is going to disappear. It's not alone.
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.
In the case of the Biological Survey Unit, one of the researchers who has relied on it says it "makes no sense." "They've made a decision to mothball a reservoir of basic research, much of the baseline information on the fauna of the United States," said David Schmidley, a former president of the University of New Mexico, Oklahoma State University and Texas Tech University. The Unit maintains a collection of plant and animal specimens (kept in a climate-controlled vault at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum), field notes, and studies. In addition to providing a resource to researchers everywhere, the 6-person staff has "conducted vertebrate surveys at military air bases to determine which species may endanger aircraft, for example, and which animals can serve as disease vectors in Afghanistan and Iraq."
But hey, this is just science, right? Science that provides a window into evolution, into global warming, in to potential extinctions that could come as a result of human activity—not just climate change but habitat destruction. So of course that's got to end. Science is far too inconvenient for the current regime and its funders.