All the Stupid Ways Trump Destroys America
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Bird-banding may not seem like the most important casualty of Trumpism and maybe it’s not. But it is a casualty nonetheless and a sign of just how stupid this nation has become:
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.
If you think MAGA means corporate exploitation of everything, it makes all the sense. MAGA baby!