Melanie Stansbury Decries Trump Administration's $1.3 Billion In Cuts To Forest Service

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During a House Natural Resources Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) spoke about proposed cuts to the Forest Service.

Transcript

00:00Mexico for five minutes. All right. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, ranking member. Welcome.

00:05It's wonderful to have you here, Mr. Crockett. I want to start by just saying thank you to

00:11Representative Hurd for bringing this legislation in preparation for this hearing. We did send it

00:16to some of the tribal nations in New Mexico and obviously because we share a border and a number

00:21of forests, we also have a number of tribes for whom these forests are their historic and current

00:26homelands. And there's certainly a lot in this bill that our tribes are very supportive of,

00:33including forest health tools, infrastructure, hazardous fuel reduction. But we'd love to work

00:37with the sponsor to try to improve some of the technical language that protects tribal sovereignty

00:42and some of the legal issues that Mr. Crockett outlined. But do appreciate that and also support

00:48Mr. Huffman. And I'm grateful for the bipartisan effort to address this. You know, New Mexico is

00:54home to 23 sovereign tribes and nations. And for our tribes, they have lived on these lands since

01:01time immemorial. And in my district, in New Mexico's first congressional district, which is central New

01:06Mexico, including 10 rural counties, we have a lot of different forest service districts and a lot of

01:11different national forests and tribal forests, including in southern New Mexico, we have the Lincoln

01:17County forest. And this is the Sierra Blanca, which is the mountain in southern New Mexico. And it also is

01:25the homeland of the Mescalero Apache people. And not only have the Mescalero people have been managing

01:32forests and fire itself for generations, we are Mescalero tribe has also been the birthplace that raised some

01:43great foresters, including the current president, who is a forester, President Padilla, and the former

01:49undersecretary for Natural Resources, Butch Blazer, who is also a member of the tribe and a former

01:54president. So we're proud of the forest stewardship and the leadership nationally that comes out of our

02:01tribal communities and excited to work on a bipartisan basis to bring more resources and more tools to our

02:09tribes to manage their historic lands. And so, deputy, I'd love to ask, I know this has been asked in some

02:16different forms here today, but, you know, you've been at this game for a long time. What do you see as some of

02:23the ways in which Congress can help support better co-management working with our tribes and federal lands?

02:31Thank you for the question. So I would actually start with making sure the tribal voice is brought into the

02:38conversation. So you mentioned, you mentioned sharing the bill with, with your, your members and they had a

02:44perspective on it. I feel like that's where we start because their perspective helps to shape a bill that can

02:53actually be implemented. Obviously, we're going to have a federal perspective on it anytime, anytime a bill comes

02:59forward. But I would start with what you're already doing and bringing in that tribal voice and the tribal

03:05perspective on it. And are there other things that you've seen during your time in this role that would help

03:11support tribes more directly in terms of that partnership? I think continued engagement around

03:17co-management and co-stewardship. We've seen a significant amount of increase from tribes and through the

03:23number of co-stewardship projects, whether it be in fire management or fuels management or salmon restoration or habitat for

03:32fisheries restoration. And all of those ideas, like I said earlier, they generate it from the things that

03:40tribes said were important to them. And then we took those opportunities and overlapped them where we

03:46could on the federal landscape and then had a successful project. So that's what I would name as an example.

03:54Well, I'd love to invite the committee actually to come down to Mescalero-Riodoso and actually see forest stewardship in action.

04:02It's actually quite extraordinary. If you go to the line of where Mescalero's boundary is and the Forest Service

04:09line and see the forest stewardship that they've done, they were actually able to stop catastrophic fire and flooding

04:15in a huge forest fire that ravaged that mountain last year. And you can literally see it in the landscape

04:23through how that stewardship was implemented on the ground. But I would be remiss if I did not use this opportunity

04:30to also point out, as I think ranking member Nagus did, which is you can't do your job if you don't have resources.

04:37And I think Mr. Nagus pointed this out, but I just want to put a finer point on this.

04:43President Trump delivered a budget to Congress three weeks ago that cuts the Forest Service budget by 1.3 billion dollars.

04:52Billion dollars. That's a lot of money. And that included $303 million in this program, state and tribal stewardship.

05:02And people can't do their jobs if they don't have funding. And, you know, I'll just say I know you've been doing this work for a long time.

05:12People are struggling out there in our Forest Service. So in addition to doing the best that you can to manage in a chaotic situation,

05:19just ask that you continue to support our Forest Service folks on the ground because they don't know what's going to happen

05:25and we really need folks out there. So appreciate you and thank you for coming in today. I yield back.

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