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‘Hire back park staff’: Visitors feel the pinch of Trump’s layoffs at National Park Service
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The visitors who trek to America’s national parks are already noticing the changes, just months after President Donald Trump took office.
“I’ve been visiting national parks for 30 years and never has the presence of rangers been so absent,” one visitor to Zion National Park wrote in National Park Service public feedback obtained by CNN.
The visitor said they saw just one trail crew at the iconic Utah park. There were no educational programs offered at any of the five parks they visited on their trip.
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“Hire back park staff. We need them,” the visitor wrote.
At Yosemite, another visitor said there were no rangers at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir entrance station, preventing visitors from picking up wilderness permits.
“More staff would be a BIG and IMPORTANT improvement,” that visitor wrote.
America’s most treasured national parks are getting crunched by Trump’s government-shrinking layoffs just as the summer travel season gets into full swing.
Top officials vowed to hire thousands of seasonal employees to pick up the slack after the Trump administration fired around 1,000 NPS employees as part of wide-ranging federal firings known as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Department of Interior officials said in a February memo they would aim to hire 7,700 seasonal workers at NPS, and post listings for 9,000 jobs.
But those numbers haven’t materialized ahead July 4th — the parks’ busiest time of the year. Internal National Park Service data provided to CNN by the National Parks Conservation Association shows that about 4,500 seasonal and temporary staff have been hired.
The levies are also likely to reduce America’s economic output, as has happened before. A 2020 study, based on data from 151 countries, including the US, between 1963-2014, found that tariffs have “persistent adverse effects on the size of the pie,” or the gross domestic product of the country imposing them.
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There are a number of possible explanations for this.
One is that, when tariffs are low or non-existent, the country in question can focus on the kind of economic activities where it has an edge and export those goods and services, Gimber told CNN.
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“If you raise tariffs, you’re not going to see that same level of specialization,” he said, noting that the result would be lower labor productivity. “The labor could be better used elsewhere in the economy, in areas where you have a greater competitive advantage.”
Another reason output falls when tariffs are raised lies in the higher cost of imported inputs, wrote the authors of the 2020 study, most of them International Monetary Fund economists.
Fatas at INSEAD suggested the same reason, providing an example: “So I’m a worker and work in a factory. To produce what we produce we need to import microchips from Taiwan. Those things are more expensive. Together, me and the company, we create less value per hour worked.”
Yet another way tariff hikes can hurt the economy is by disrupting the status quo and fueling uncertainty over the future levels of import taxes. That lack of clarity is particularly acute this year, given the erratic nature of Trump’s trade policy.
Surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business in the US suggest the uncertainty is already weighing on American companies’ willingness to invest. The share of small businesses planning a capital outlay within the next six months hit its lowest level in April since at least April 2020, when Covid was sweeping the globe.
“The economy will continue to stumble along until the major sources of uncertainty (including over tariffs) are resolved. It’s hard to steer a ship in the fog,” the federation said.
Whichever forces may be at work, the IMF, to cite just one example, thinks higher US tariffs will lower the country’s productivity and output.
“We know that the water levels seemed to be higher than they were last summer,” Silva said. “It is a significant amount of water flowing throughout, some of it in new areas that didn’t flood last year.”
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Matt DeMaria, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said storms formed in the early afternoon over terrain that was scorched last year by wildfire. The burn scar was unable to absorb a lot of the rain, as water quickly ran downhill into the river.
Preliminary measurements show the Rio Ruidoso crested at more than 20 feet — a record high if confirmed — and was receding Tuesday evening.
Three shelters opened in the Ruidoso area for people who could not return home.
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The sight brought back painful memories for Carpenter, whose art studio was swept away during a flood last year. Outside, the air smelled of gasoline, and loud crashes could be heard as the river knocked down trees in its path.
“It’s pretty terrifying,” she said.
Cory State, who works at the Downshift Brewing Company, welcomed in dozens of residents as the river surged and hail pelted the windows. The house floating by was “just one of the many devastating things about today,” he said.
During a May 19 town hall meeting with NIH staff members, Jay Bhattacharya, the institute’s new director, equivocated when asked about funding cuts for research into improving the health of racial and ethnic minorities — cuts made under the guise of purging DEI from the government.
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According to a recording of the meeting obtained by KFF Health News, Bhattacharya said the agency remained “absolutely committed to advancing the health and well-being of every population, including minority populations, LGBTQ populations, and every population.”
Research addressing the health needs of women and minorities is “an absolute priority of mine,” he said. “We’re going to keep funding that.” But a study considering whether “structural racism causes poor health in minority populations” is “not a scientific hypothesis.”
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“We need scientific ideas that are actionable, that improve the health and well-being of people, not ideological ideas that don’t have any chance of improving the health and well-being of people,” he said. That comment angered many staffers, several said in interviews. Many got up and walked out during the speech, while others, watching remotely, scoffed or jeered.
Several current and former NCI scientists questioned Bhattacharya’s commitment to young scientists and minorities. Staffing cuts early in the year eliminated many recently hired NCI scientists. At least 172 National Cancer Institute grants, including for research aimed at minimizing health disparities among racial minorities or LGBTQ+ people, were terminated and hadn’t been reinstated as of June 16, according to a KFF Health News analysis of HHS documents and a list of grant terminations by outside researchers.
Those populations have higher rates of certain cancer diagnoses and are more likely to be diagnosed later than white or heterosexual people. Black people are also more likely to die of many cancer types than all other racial and ethnic groups.
Questioned by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill about the low staffing numbers, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has brushed off concerns, testifying in May that slightly less than half of permanent NPS employees work on the ground in the parks, while other staff work at regional offices or at DC headquarters.
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“I want more people in the parks,” Burgum said. “I want less overhead. There’s an opportunity to have more people working in our parks … and have less people working for the National Park Service.”
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But internal NPS data tells a different story, Brengel said, showing that around 80% of National Park Service staff work in the parks. And regional offices play an important supporting staff role, with scientists on staff to help maintain fragile parks ecosystems, as well as specialists who monitor geohazard safety issues like landslides.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska recently pressed Burgum to provide a full list of staff positions that have been cut at the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service since the Trump administration took over. The Interior Department has not provided the list, a Senate staffer said.
The regional offices within the park service are on edge, waiting to see how courts rule on a Trump administration reduction in force plan they fear could gut their ranks, a National Park Service employee in a Western state told CNN.
“If they greenlight the RIF plan, then it’s going to be a bloodbath,” the employee said.
In addition to probationary workers that were fired in February, early retirements are also culling the agency’s ranks, and the continued $1 spending limit on federal workers’ credit cards is making it extremely difficult to do field work in the parks, with a simple overnight trip needing to be requested 10 days in advance, the employee added.
The lack of superintendents and NPS supervisors creates more of a headache, they added.
“These times, when it’s all about fighting for scarce resources, you really need those upper-level people with clout working the system,” the employee said.
Hall, the retired NPS regional director, said losing rangers, maintenance professionals and park superintendents could profoundly alter American landmarks.
“What you’ve lost with all this attrition – you’ve lost all this knowledge that’s going to take years to build back up,” Hall said.
Job losses
But what about the impact of tariffs on job creation? Surprisingly, an increase in import taxes has been found to result in slightly more unemployment across countries.
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An example provided by Irwin at Dartmouth College points to one plausible explanation — and it has to do with the steeper cost of imported goods.
“A number of studies have shown, on net, we lost jobs from the (2018) steel tariffs rather than gained jobs because there are more people employed in the downstream user industries than in the steel industry itself,” he said.
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A study by the Federal Reserve Board found that a rise in input costs resulting from US tariff hikes in 2018-19 led to job losses in American manufacturing. The damage from those higher expenses was compounded by retaliatory taxes on US exports, more than offsetting a small boost to manufacturing employment from US tariffs — at least so far, the 2024 paper said.
Retaliation by other countries is indeed another danger of pulling the tariff lever. Higher tariffs on American exports would typically raise their prices for foreign consumers, hitting demand for the goods in many cases.
When Trump announced new tariffs this year, America’s major trading partners were quick to strike back with their own levies, although the US then agreed a temporary truce with China and the European Union.
Costs of free trade
While economists generally agree that free trade has benefited the global economy in recent decades, they acknowledge that it comes with certain costs.
One is the loss of jobs in communities that are particularly exposed to new competition from foreign manufacturers.
That is similar to the impact of technological progress on workers. “Manufacturing jobs as a share of the labor force have come down everywhere. It isn’t a US-specific story,” said Gimber at JPMorgan Asset Management, pointing to automation.
He drew a parallel between helping workers affected by higher imports and what is known as a just transition — the idea that the drastic changes needed to move toward a greener economy should be fair to everyone and minimize harm to workers and communities.
In both cases, providing workers in impacted industries with new skills or retraining them could be key, Gimber said.
Another potential cost of free trade is dependency on far-flung manufacturers. That took on new relevance during the pandemic, which snarled global supply chains, contributing to shortages of products such as face masks and respirators in the US and elsewhere.
However, economists do not typically see tariffs as a good way to build up domestic manufacturing, Fatas at INSEAD said, noting that subsidies for specific industries are viewed as a better tool “because they work more directly.”
But perhaps the strongest argument in favor of free trade is its importance to maintaining peace between nations.
As Gimber’s colleague David Kelly noted in March, closer trade relations give countries more to lose in any conflict.