Terry Zink has spent 57 years building a life in Montanaās backcountry. The 57-year-old third-generation houndsman from Marionāa remote town nestled deep within the Flathead National Forestāruns a small archery target business serving outdoor recreation workers and guides who, until recently, had steady employment managing Americaās public lands. Contents
Those workers are disappearing. Their jobs are gone. And Zink, who voted for Trump in 2024, is watching his customer baseāand his livelihoodāvanish before his eyes.
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā Zink told Politico reporters as he surveyed the damage. āYou cannot fire our firefighters. You cannot fire our trail crews. You have to have selective logging, water restoration, and healthy forestsā (1).
Yes you did.
Awww is someone having a hard time finding his bootstraps? š
Do people just not understand how voting works, or what the word means? Do they maybe think itās short for Devote?
You did vote for this & you were also warned.
Youāre just a sucker.
'I didnāt vote this." Yes. Yes you did. You didnāt want to hear others tell you what you were voting for. You wanted to believe your own fantasy version. Even now, most MEGA voters want to believe their own fantasy of what Trump will do for America over the truth of what he is actively doing.
thats why they fall for scams quite easily, they trump is just kidding or he suddenly reverses what he does, nope he doesnt. only the 1st term he had people preventing him from doing too much damage, this time no one is going to stop trump and his cronies, conservatives also want to blame democrats, but dems arnt in power anymore.
The workers who lost their jobs werenāt desk-bound administrators. They were firefighters, trail maintenance crews, wildlife biologists, rangers, foresters, and seasonal workers who kept public lands accessible and safe. They were the people who made it possible for outfitters, guides, hunters, ranchers, and tourism operators to do business.
try doing that without desk-bound administrators and see how it goes
The betrayal is particularly acute because these workers werenāt making big government salaries. Forest Service seasonal workers typically earn $15 to $18 per hour. Park rangers make $35,000 to $50,000 annually. These were working-class jobs that supported working-class families in rural communities with few other options.
isnāt this the same group of people who claim that minimum wage is too high?
āYou wonāt meet anyone more conservative than me, and I didnāt vote for this,ā
You consistently voted for this. Every time conservatives are in power they cut services and environmental protections. You voted for it over and over again but this time it actually hurt you and youāre sad.
also cut TAXES for actual rich people, not for poors whom seem to think they will benefit from such tax cuts for the rich somehow.
this time it hurt you in a way that you noticed
These are real jobs held by real people in small towns across Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Arizonaāstates that overwhelmingly voted for Trump.
Whoa whoa whoa, donāt lump Colorado in with those states. We absolutely did NOT vote for that piece of shit - 3 times in a row.
he said ārealā jobs.
Idk how they got Colorado in there
I think I might write this fellow a strongly worded letter.
he submit a draft to SCHUMER AND HAKEEM.
Oh, Terry, you sweet summer child.
What did you expect would get cut when Donald told you he was going to take a saw to our government?
Of course not. He voted for other people to lose their jobs.
Maybe he should reflect on what itās like to be āother peopleā.
If they had empathy, they wouldnāt be conservative.
His situation is a mistake that needs to be rectified, everyone else deserved it.
You wanted fascism, Zinky. Well, you got it. And you better thank Dear Leader and Jesus. You live in the Greatest Country In The World, and God gave you bootstraps!
Quit crying and get a job, weakling. Hail Trump.
Yes, you did. Fucking idiot. Enjoy being homeless.
Especially in a country where criminalizing homelessness is literally a bipartisan issue.
"I believed we were cutting waste in Washington,ā Mitchell said in an interview with local news. āI didnāt think theyād fire the people actually fighting fires and maintaining trails. Thatās not wasteāthatās the actual work.ā
Itās all actual work. The relentless assault on all federal institutions for the last half century had the initial effect of making the vast majority of them the most efficient systems in existence. Both political parties initially agreed they should not be wasteful, and through several rounds of reform they became more efficient than private organizations doing the same job can even theoretically be. But itās never actually been about āwaste,ā and they stated cutting bone by the early 2000s. The only federal jobs left do actual work, and better, more important work than the vast majority of private sector jobs.
The waste is in private contracts that donāt fund public sector jobs. But DOGE didnāt go for those.
I would argue they didnāt become more efficient. They just outsourced everything to private contractors. And private contractors have an overhead of needing to compete for contracts, so theyāre all spending money on staff that writes up the bids. Additionally, they only hire the workers when they win the contract and those contracts usually expire after 5-10 years. This means there is no long term, institutional capacity building. It might be fine for small projects, but for large complex projects, tearing down an organization only to reassemble it under another contractor every 5-10 years is in fact terribly inefficient and produces worse outcomes. Organizations cannot become good at the work. Iāve seen it first hand. There are many contractors that specialize only in federal procurement regulations, but have almost no in house technical knowledge of how to run the projects theyāre bidding on beyond what is they need to say to win. And, most importantly, knowing what to say to win is different than having a mature organization in place to do the work.
Thatās what I meant by āprivate contacts.ā They donāt outsource every single possible federal job, otherwise there would be no executive branch left. So the public sector jobs are highly efficient, and the waste has been outsourced to the private contracts where itās more obfuscated.
We could do those jobs much more cheaply and efficiently by nationalizing them, but then that would be ābig government,ā even though it would be saving tax payer dollars when all the accounting was said and done. So š¤·.
Have you thought about getting consultants in to get their institutional knowledge? They hote lots of recent grads who theoretically know what to doā¦they work them hard and then churn through more, overcharging for their time and underpaying them. Some progress to become senior consultants. Not many.
Itās more than just āgetting consultants.ā Organizations need to have systems in place to manage their work. Consultants might know some things, but they are not systems. Systems usually are born out of experience and become more mature over time. They are complex and interlinked and adapt to nuances in the understanding of their work.
The prevailing metaphor for organizational capacity is that they are comprised of interchangeable parts that can be rebuilt or replaced any time. However, the actual reality is they are more like plants that grow. Privatizing the public sector is akin to planting a tree with the aim of having it give you shade, except every 5-10 years you cut it down and replant a new one. In the end, you never really get what youāre supposed to, but a bunch of people are making money off it.
Yes. I was making a joke. Consultants often are inexperienced and just make cuts, not improvements. Most of the work is done by cheap grads, who compete for few roles in the hope they make it. Most donāt. The customers get overcharged for poor advice.
Usually, they are just a way for management to have someone to point to for the decisions they make that negatively impact people or the business.
