No, not those birds and bees, ya randy bastids!

During the 2024 election, I repeatedly POASTED something along the lines of “If Trump wins, he will break things that most people didn’t even know could be broken.” With that as prelude, I give you the birds (boldface mine):

If the Trump administration gets its way, we won’t have much hope of learning more. The White House’s 2026 budget would end the annual North American Breeding Bird Survey and the Bird Banding Laboratory, programs under the U.S. Geological Survey’s Ecosystems Mission Area.

For more than a century, bird studies have operated as follows: Scientists band birds and wait to see what happens to them. Since 1920, the Bird Banding Laboratory has worked with Canadian scientists to run the North American Bird Banding Program. More than 77 million birds have been banded in the United States and Canada; more than 5 million of those birds have been “reencountered,” or found and logged by someone later on.

Bird banding might seem low-tech, but the program has provided some of the best information we have about certain species. It’s how we know about Wisdom, a Laysan albatross that lives on Midway Atoll and is the oldest confirmed wild bird in the world. She was banded in 1956 and still incubating eggs as of last year, at 74 years old. Banding is how agencies track the health of waterfowl populations and set hunting limits and seasons for the birds at sustainable levels. Wood ducks were hunted to such an extent that they were close to extinction when the North American Bird Banding Program started. Today, there are an estimated 4 million of them, and the population is increasing. Hunters are some of the most frequent loggers of banded birds.

Who would want to end such a program? If we don’t track a bird species, we’ll have no idea when it’s in jeopardy. Without the citizen-reported data, it becomes much harder to prove that a marsh where someone wants to build a parking lot or a resort or a golf course is actually vital habitat. The bird-banding program is just one part of the USGS’s Ecosystems Mission Area; the program’s $292.9 million budget in 2025 went to programs that monitor invasive species, track diseases such as avian influenza and look for ways to help ecosystems adapt to climate change. All of this is slated for defunding in the White House’s proposed 2026 budget. Hard to see how that makes America great again.

And the bees (boldface mine):

Droege, a slender 66-year-old who wears his long white hair in two neat French braids, is one of the world’s leading native bee experts, devoted to tracking and identifying the insects and the plants they help maintain. And for the first time in its more than two-decade-long history, the future of the bee lab is imperiled.

The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal calls for the defunding of the bee lab and other federally funded wildlife research efforts. Bracing for these cuts, priorities have shifted for the the lab, which has collected and identified more than 1 million specimens of pollinators, hundreds of thousands of which are slotted away in its modest walls. Active field work is on pause. No new research projects have begun.

Droege studies native bees, the types of pollinators that only live in the wild, as opposed to honeybees, which are farmed and bred for profit. Entomologists stress that honeybees and native bees are different — sort of like farmed chickens and wild birds. But they can be exposed to the same threats, and there are signs that both are in trouble….

Commercial and native bees can fall victim to the same hazards, including pesticides, drought and environmental pollutants, experts said. Droege is one of the only people in the country who can distinguish most native bees from their thousands of relatives — research that helps track the insects and the plants and crops they maintain.

Native bees pollinate an estimated 80 percent of flowering plants around the world, and understanding the pollinators’ behavior helps us sustain the production of our food. Forests, prairies, grasslands, deserts and wetlands rely on bees to maintain their unique biodiversity. The more we track bees, the better we can understand the role different species play in the pollination of crops such as pumpkins in the Mid-Atlantic, apples in Pennsylvania, tomatoes in California and blueberries in Oregon.

Hollis Woodard, an assistant professor focused on native bees at the University of California at Riverside, said the lab is “essentially irreplaceable.” She uses its data for her work researching native bees nearly every day. “If we lose this facility and we lose these people, the hit we’re going to take to tracking bees and trying to conserve them would be absolutely devastating,” Woodard said…

The lab’s budget is small. Droege said it includes his salary and that of his sole employee, a lab manager hired about four years ago. Otherwise, he said, they have received anywhere from $3,000 to $12,000 annually from the government. But it falls under a larger federal biological research effort that the Trump administration has proposed eliminating as of Oct. 1.

The White House wants to eliminate grants and research programs that “duplicate other Federal research programs and focus on social agendas (e.g., climate change) to instead focus on achieving dominance in energy and critical minerals,” according to its proposal, which calls for cutting $564 million from the Interior Department’s U.S. Geological Survey. The agency runs the bee lab and other programs that monitor animals including birds, butterflies and bats…

“Sam’s whole role and the role of that lab is to be in service to the American people,” said Mace Vaughan, the director of the pollinator and agriculture biodiversity program at the Xerces Society, an insect conservation organization. “They’re like a hub in a wheel supporting identification, training, research, data sharing.”

The lab has provided data for more than 800 papers over the last 20 years. It receives and identifies bees from universities and hobbyists alike. It takes the time to write identification manuals and run the sort of tests that Droege quips “will not get you tenure,” such as: Which brand of soap works best in a bee trap?

“Many people who have come through my lab have either been directly trained in bee identification by Sam Droege or have used his lab’s expertise to verify species IDs,” said Scott McArt, who heads a pollinator lab at Cornell and is an assistant professor of pollinator health in the university’s department of entomology.

Is this a crisis equivalent to the slow evolution of ICE into Trump’s personal praetorian or any other number of fascist* policies? No, but it’s still stupid and wasteful, as once you destroy things like this, you can’t get them back: there’s no way to recreate the missing data or expertise, they’re just gone forever.

And, as always, these are just smaller facets of a larger, fascist and totalitarian piece.