If you're tired of hearing new stories about how Donald Trump's incompetence continues to damage efforts to respond to a dangerous health crisis, here's a little break for you: a story about how the Trump team's rampant corruption continues to endanger everything else.
Last November, Democratic Reps. Debbie Stabenow and Raul Grijalva requested a USDA inspector general probe into whether a $2 million State Fire Assistance grant to Alaska was "misused" by the state to instead promote the timber industry. That investigation, reports The Washington Post, is now underway.
The grant looks dodgy. It just does—there's no way around it. The state of Alaska requested the $2 million State Fire Assistance grant, money intended for wildfire suppression and preparedness. The state, however, sought the money to help coordinate efforts to exempt the Tongass National Forest from the federal government's "Roadless Rule," a preservation measure aimed at keeping wilderness areas intact but which the forestry, oil, and mining industries oppose vociferously.
By granting the money, the Trump-run federal government essentially gave the state of Alaska $2 million to fight a federal regulation that both Trump's allies and state Republicans want to see lifted from the Tongass National Forest so that timber harvests and other resource extraction could be increased.
Alaska state officials then turned around and gave $200,000 of those funds to the Alaska Forest Association, a timber industry lobbying group.
This is not in itself the biggest issue, though. The biggest issue is whether timber industry lobbying counts as fire assistance for the purposes of a federal grant intended for fire assistance and specifically labeled Fire Assistance. The cooperating state and federal governments appear to have used one of the hoariest of Republican justifications, an argument that the best way to stop forest fires is to go in and cut the trees down. That'll show the fire who's boss.
Stabenow and Grijalva want a second opinion on that, and have asked the inspector general to give them one. That probe is now underway; we shall see if it gets any further than the dozens of other recent probes that Trump's team has simply ignored outright.