Published February 14, 2025
Like many organizations, Lomakatsi has been significantly impacted by the hold that has been placed on some categories of federal funding. Over the past several years, we have scaled up our organization substantially in response to requests from our federal, tribal, state, NGO, and industry partners for leadership in developing and implementing collaborative forest health, fuels reduction, and workforce development initiatives, working across all lands.
Approximately 65% of our current budget is comprised of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding, through over 30 awards and agreements between Lomakatsi and the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and National Park Service, covering thousands of acres of public, tribal, and private land.
We have recently been told by federal agency partners that all BIL and IRA funding is on hold, and we will not be able to receive reimbursement for completed work or work underway until further notice. As a result, we’ve had to halt a large portion of our ecological fuels reduction operations and workforce training programs serving communities throughout Oregon, northern California, and Idaho.
This week, we had to temporarily lay off 15 employees, including crew members, foresters, and wildland fire professionals. We have also had to halt active projects that support hundreds of jobs through contracted forestry service providers and timber operators, along with seven active ecologically based timber sales that supply logs to local mills as the byproducts of forest health treatments. Many of the people impacted serve as wildland firefighters during the summer months, protecting communities throughout the West. Additional impacts are certain if the freeze continues.
Lomakatsi appreciates all who have reached out to us, and our thoughts are with the many others who have been impacted. We are hopeful that this situation will be resolved promptly so we can resume this critical, non-partisan work with tremendous zones of agreement between communities, state and federal agencies, tribes, conservation partners, wildland fire organizations, the timber industry, and many others.
Here’s a recent article from Reuters with more information about the impacts on Lomakatsi and others: https://www.reuters.com/…/trump-funding-freeze-halts…/