April 23, 2025

April 23, 2025

What a beautiful day! I had to come in and rest awhile after working in the yard cleaning up the winter mess of leaves, branches, and fir needles. Other than my back aching, it feels good to soak up that Vitamin D and look at the results of my work. Anyhoo, enough of that.

As I’m looking at the forest around me, I have to think about this summer and wildfire season. Donnie would be proud of me for the work I did today. His solution for wildfire prevention is people getting out and raking up needles on the forest floor. I did about 20 wheelbarrows yesterday and today. Seriously though, DOGE and the Trump administration have cut 10 percent of the US Forest Service workers with more firings likely coming; frozen hiring, preventing the agency from fully staffing positions critical to wildfire preparedness; and frozen grants that would reduce wildfire risk. Most notably, thus far about 700 red card-carrying employees have been terminated from the Forest Service. No, the red card is not a MAGA affiliation, but a designation as trained and certified to fight wildfires when they arrive at the incident. Those workers hold other full-time jobs in the agency but have been trained to aid firefighting crews and to assist with prescribed burns, which reduce flammable vegetation to prevent bigger fires. These prescribed burns can only occur if there’s a certain number of staff available to contain them and non-firefighting employees without a red card cannot perform such tasks. The cuts by this administration have resulted in the cancellation of some training programs to gain additional firefighters and prescribed burns. All of this being done at a time that the number of wildfires have increased annually. Hey, at least I’m doing my part by raking that forest floor.

Meanwhile, I guess Trump is now on his 5^th IRS Commissioner in less than 100 days and tens of thousands IRS workers are being fired by DOGE as turmoil at that agency is exploding. The Treasury Department is predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts compared to 2024 amounting to more than $500 billion in lost revenue. This is a result of a combination of factors: taxpayers not filing returns as they think the IRS staffing cuts decrease their chance of being caught; taxpayers claiming ineligible deductions and credits; and cuts to IRS staffing making it easier for wealthy taxpayers to evade paying what they owe. This is government efficiency at it’s finest. DOGE is doing a splendid job.

Hey, if any of you own $TRUMP, Trump’s meme coin, I want to let you know you have a chance to attend a gala dinner next month with Donald at his golf course outside Washington D.C. This will be a black-tie optional event, but there are some fine print terms and conditions that you should probably consider. 1) Don might not be able to attend the dinner, 2) it could be canceled for any reason, 3) all costs incurred by attending the dinner will be at your own expense. But don’t worry. If the dinner has to be cancelled and you were chosen to attend you will receive a “limited edition TRUMP NFT,” a sort of digital trading card that would be Trump memorabilia (think of those baseball cards you collected as a kid). People must be pretty excited about this as the coin jumped to about $14 this afternoon, up 54% over yesterday. Though I hope you didn’t buy it just before Inauguration Day at $75 per coin. Donald J. Trump the Greatest Grifter Ever.

Time to move on. Have a great evening. Ziggyman