Updates from Explorer staff, as we keep track of what’s happening
We’ve been following news coming out of Washington and how those federal policy decisions will impact the Adirondacks. Looks for short updates here, as they happen. Send your tips to [email protected].
Trump’s budget contains cuts to funding for rural airports
President Trump’s budget proposal would cut funding for the federal Essential Air Service (EAS) program by half. This program provides federal support to bring air service to underserved and rural communities, including all five of the North Country’s major airports.
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U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D,NY) in a press release stated that all five of the airports in New York that rely on EAS are in the North Country and help support flights critically important to the local economy, including:
- Ogdensburg International Airport: round trip flights to Washington’s Dulles International Airport
- Massena International Airport: round trip flights to Boston-Logan International Airport
- Plattsburgh International Airport: round trip flights to Philadelphia International Airport
- Adirondack Regional Airport: round trip flights to Boston-Logan International Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport
- Watertown International Airport: round trip flights to Philadelphia International Airport
Trump’s budget proposal calls for slashing the EAS program by over $300 million next year, 50% of the program’s budget.
-Melissa Hart
Wild Center loses AmeriCorps members
The federal government ended the AmeriCorps program that employed eight people based at the Wild Center in Tupper Lake on Monday, the natural museum announced.
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The AmeriCorps members were among 1,200 people in 40 programs in New York who were terminated, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by dozens of states, including New York, against the federal government in opposition to the eliminations of programs nationwide.
AmeriCorps describes itself as “the federal agency for national service and volunteerism.” Its members receive a stipend to pay for living costs and are eligible to pay for education after their term is over in exchange for their work. Their duties range from environmental stewardship to assisting seniors to disaster relief.
The Tupper Lake members were part of the AmeriCorps for School-Community Partnership Program. They worked with local schools, arts organizations and libraries to meet the needs of Tupper Lake students and the community at-large, according to a description of the program.
According to the statement released by the Wild Center, the eight members have served over 8,400 hours in the past seven months, working in classrooms, libraries and gyms.
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“Committed volunteers are near impossible to find. Small communities and departments like ours rely on volunteers to support all of our youth sports and programming,” said Laura LaBarge, Town of Tupper Lake recreation director.
She said the AmeriCorps program allowed the town to “increase the size of our youth XC ski program, provide safety and admissions support at BrewSki and ADK Tour de Ski, host community events like PJ movie nights, family dances, community garden projects, fundraisers, etc. Our newly developed Tupper Teens program and Harry Potter Book Club will not exist without them.”
The Wild Center has had an AmeriCorps program since 2023.
The Wild Center said it is “actively pursuing potential options to ensure this important work doesn’t disappear permanently.” But it said it is “nearly impossible to find $70,000 in replacement funding of this magnitude in such a short period of time.”
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—Mike Lynch
FEMA cancels pre-disaster grant program
Federal officials canceled a grant program aimed at bolstering infrastructure resiliency to storms ahead of, rather than in reaction to, a disaster.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program had sent more than $5 billion to projects across the country that help strengthen infrastructure to withstand growing storms expected as the climate changes.
The Trump administration earlier this month ended the grant program and cancelled all applications for fiscal years 2020–2023. Money not yet distributed to states and local communities will be used in response to future disasters. The current award cycle had just recently opened to applicants.
“The decision to dismantle FEMA’s largest pre-disaster mitigation program is beyond reckless,” Chad Berginnis, executive director of the national Association of State Floodplain Managers said in a statement earlier this month.
In New York, the cancellation threatens $325 million in project awards, mostly centered in New York City. No Adirondack projects had won the grants, but a project to reduce ice jam flooding on the Mohawk River near Schenectady is now at risk.
— Zachary Matson
NEH grant canceled for local nonprofit OurStoryBridge
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency has canceled a grant to OurStoryBridge, a nonprofit founded in the Adirondacks to tell the story of its people and places, and preserve them for posterity.
From the Adirondacks, the organization has gone nationwide and supports 42 partner projects in 16 states, helping them collect oral histories, which are then made available to the public in the form of three-to-five-minute audio files accompanied by related images, posted freely accessible online.
In addition, OurStoryBridge also produces a Teacher’s Guide, recently updated, which contains stories from Partner Projects to aid educators in use of stories.
According to OurStoryBridge Inc. founder and president Jery Huntley, the award would have implemented a project titled “Interpretive Capacity Building for Short-Form Oral Histories with OurStoryBridge Inc.,” which was to focus on identifying new and effective ways of using and distributing the more than 1,000 stories that have been collected. This grant would have included a collections review, audience research, and building a strategic plan to identify public programming opportunities for the stories.
NEH has typically supported projects that promote education and research in the humanities, but in early April, DOGE gutted the agency, cutting its funding and laying off the majority of its staff. Grant money, it announced, would be pulled and diverted to “the president’s agenda.”
–Tim Rowland
Dam safety advisory board vacated
All members of the National Dam Safety Review Board, an advisory panel focused on monitoring national dam safety and state dam programs, were dismissed earlier this year.
The committee, housed at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was effectively vacated in January as part of a broader order eliminating all advisory committees under the control of the Department of Homeland Security.
“Every day the work of this panel is interrupted and its existence left in limbo puts human lives and property at risk,” Heather Taylor-Miesle, vice president of conservation at the nonprofit American Rivers, said in a statement. “As a non-partisan advisory committee, it cannot and should not get caught up in politics.”
RELATED READING: Explorer investigation spotlights safety needs of Adirondack dams
American Rivers reported in January that a member of its staff that served on the advisory had been dismissed. The board consisted of experts from other federal agencies, state dam safety officials, and private sector and nonprofit representatives.
Another panel that advised FEMA on improvements to flood risk maps was also dismissed in the broader sweep.
– Zachary Matson
Immigration policies impact North Country students and migrant workers
The Trump administration’s immigration policies have impacted foreign-born residents nationwide. During the past few months, the sobering reality of deportations and visa revocations have played out across multiple North Country communities.
In February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) officers detained nine Tupper Lake Pine Mill employees, who were not authorized to work in the U.S. and are set to be deported. Reports of dairy farm worker deporations in St. Lawrence County have created a culture of fear across the region’s dairy indutry, where its estimated that unauthorized workers could make up around 40-60% of the workforce.
International students attending universities across the North Country are also at risk of being caught up in immigration enforcement. Across the U.S., about 1,300 international students have had their visas revoked or federal immigration records terminated, including a student studying at SUNY Plattsburgh. Alexander Enyedi, the university’s president, said decisions regarding student visas are not something SUNY can control.
“The federal government makes the decisions on its student visas’ validity or whether it has been revoked,” he said. “So essentially, this is a decision that’s made far, far from this campus.”
– David Escobar
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service appointment draws opposition
The nomination for director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is being opposed by a coalition of 125 wildlife and environmental groups. They say Brian Nesvik, who formerly led the Wyoming Fish and Wildlife Department, has “spent years openly opposing the Endangered Species Act and attempting to undermine it at every turn.”
“Nesvik won’t conserve our nation’s wildlife, but he will work overtime to help industry exploit and destroy the wild places that imperiled animals need to survive,” said Rachel Rilee, a policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Trump continues to nominate individuals who are ideologically opposed to the mission of the agency they’e being entrusted to run. No one should doubt that once Nesvik becomes director, he’ll move quickly to gut protections for endangered wildlife and dismantle the nation’s wildlife refuges.”
Read the coalition’s letter to the Environment and Public Works committee.
In the Adirondacks, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife has been instrumental in fish restoration efforts in the Lake Champlain watershed. That includes working to help salmon reclaim their natural spawning habitats on the Saranac and Boquet rivers. It has also played a role in the successful return of lake trout to Lake Champlain as we reported on this week.
– Mike Lynch
Please keep in mind that the federal government is in deep debt and getting deeper by the minute. Substantial cuts to federal spending must be made or we will be in real trouble.
As far as the illegal immigrant workers who broke the law by entering the USA the wrong way, they amd their employers should have understood the potential ramifications of their actions. The fact that it too so long to catch up with them is the amazing part.
And the Trump Tax impact on Canadian visitation and tourism in the North Country continues and gets worse:
“As it continues to monitor local cross-border tariff impacts, the North Country Chamber of Commerce has announced that border car crossings at the Champlain Port of Entry were down 31 percent in March. / “We also cannot define the relative degree to which three factors are all affecting cross-border travel,” [Chamber President Garry Douglas notes]. “But it is a combination of a poor exchange rate for Canadians, a broad sense of hurt among Canadians, and the 25 percent surcharge imposed by Canada at the border as part of retaliatory tariffs.” (The Sun)
” in early April, DOGE gutted the agency, cutting its funding and laying off the majority of its staff”. Not sure this is accurate. DOGE has no authority to do either. That has to be done by the administration with a recommendation from the “department”. The agency would be “NEH” I guess, whatever that is? The acronym is undefined in the story.
It looks like the Trump’s goal is to eventually cut 240K government positions. That is 200K less than the 440K positions that were cut under the Clinton/Gore administration (the did it over 3 years). That is the only time in my lifetime that we have ever had a balanced US budget. It is good in the long term, the problem here is execution, don’t do it in a way that harms the economy in the short term.
I’m sensing a change in the past few weeks, where people everywhere are sounding the alarm about Trump’s lawless actions — from Cory Booker on the Senate floor, to rallies of tens of thousands led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to smaller protests in rural towns across America, including our Indivisible group, to federal court judges excoriating Trump’s disregard for peoples’ rights, to Senator Van Hollen traveling to El Salvador to defend Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and to Harvard University telling the Trump administration to go pound sand.
Many independent and swing voters who went for Trump in 2024, but are not part of the MAGA cult, are starting to abandon him. These are the voters who got Trump over the finish line. Their disillusionment with Trump portends badly for the 2026 mid-terms for Republicans.
I don’t know where this resistance will lead, but it’s going in the right direction — standing up, bearing witness, and not backing down.