Do States Have a Secret Weapon to Counter Trump's Forest Service and Medicaid Cuts Before the Damage Becomes Permanent?

But will the corporate overlords allow it?

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The federal government announced the destruction of the United States Forest Service via the same process of royal decree that this nation was founded on ending. So much for originalism, right? No floor debate, no public hearing, no vote. Just a piece of paper that ended 121 years of institutional history before most people had finished their coffee.

Here is what that press release actually said, translated from bureaucratic into plain English. All ten regional offices, the ones that have managed 193 million acres of American forests since Gifford Pinchot built the system in 1905, are closing.¹ More than fifty research stations across thirty-one states are shutting down, and with them go decades of long-term scientific data on wildfire behavior, endangered species, watershed health, and climate patterns.² The people who spent their careers building that knowledge will receive individual assignment letters in May or June, informing them whether they need to relocate their families to Utah or find other work.³ We know how this ends because we have watched it happen before. When the Bureau of Land Management went through a smaller version of this during Trump’s first term, 287 of 328 employees told to relocate simply left the agency instead.⁴ The Forest Service reorganization is an order of magnitude larger.

The headquarters is moving to Salt Lake City. This is not incidental. Utah’s political leadership has spent years and millions of dollars in litigation and lobbying trying to strip federal ownership of public lands and transfer control to states and private industry.⁵ Senator Mike Lee attempted to slip language mandating the sale of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land into a must-pass Senate reconciliation bill.⁶ Utah’s governor sued the federal government for 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land.⁷ Moving the agency’s leadership into that environment, replacing ten regional offices staffed by career scientists with fifteen political appointees embedded in state capitals, produces a Forest Service that exists on paper while functioning as an industry permit office.

The forests are one emergency. The health care system is another. The reconciliation bill that Republicans passed last year and that the president signed into law on July 4, 2025 cut more than a trillion dollars from Medicaid and ACA marketplace coverage.⁸ The Congressional Budget Office estimates roughly fifteen million Americans will lose health insurance by 2034 as a direct result, including 7.5 million losing Medicaid specifically.⁹ The same law triggers $45 billion in automatic Medicare cuts for fiscal year 2026 under federal budget rules, with those cuts projected to total $536 billion over nine years.¹⁰ Congressional Republicans are now discussing a second round of cuts on top of that.¹¹ Fifteen million people losing coverage. Half a trillion stripped from Medicare. These numbers have names attached to them, and those names belong to people with doctors they are about to lose.

Governors have responded to arguments like these with caution. Ned Lamont of Connecticut, asked about aggressive state-level action last year, said the states cannot leave the union. Here’s something for Governor Lamont to consider. North Dakota has been operating the only state-owned bank in the country since 1919. It has turned a profit every single year of its existence, returned $335 million to the state in 2024 alone, and carries an A+ credit rating from Standard and Poor’s.¹² North Dakota is not a blue state running a progressive experiment. It is one of the most reliably Republican states in the country, and it built this institution over a century ago because it reliably serves the public more fairly than privately owned banks while also operating at a substantial net profit that then serves the people of North Dakota even in times of economic downturn when “spending our way out of a depression” is not feasible through standard taxation. Governor Lamont, no one is asking Connecticut to leave the union. A public bank is not secession. Hiring displaced scientists to work for the state is not secession. Standing up a state health insurer is not secession. These are normal exercises of state power, the kind that happen every time a governor deploys the National Guard after a hurricane or issues emergency orders after a chemical spill. The question is not whether states have this authority. The question is whether governors will use it.

Emergency powers exist in law because legislators understood something that often gets forgotten in normal times: some threats move faster than the ordinary pace of government can address without causing massive, preventable harm. When a governor declares a state of emergency, they access authority that lets the state act at the speed the crisis requires, bypassing the months or years that standard legislative processes demand. A 50-state legal assessment conducted by the CDC’s Public Health Law Program found that 35 states explicitly permit governors to suspend or amend both statutes and regulations during a declared emergency, with most remaining states retaining some form of executive emergency authority.¹³ The standard for triggering that authority is not “unprecedented.” The standard is whether ordinary processes are adequate to prevent the harm. Watching fifteen million people lose health insurance qualifies. Watching fifty research stations close and their scientists scatter to the private sector in sixty days qualifies.

So here is what governors in blue states can do right now, using authority they already hold.

A governor can declare a public health emergency, which in most states authorizes the executive branch to stand up programs to address the crisis at hand. A state can then use that emergency authority to capitalize a public bank on the North Dakota model, issuing loans and holding deposits like any bank while directing profits back to public programs rather than Wall Street.¹⁴ That bank provides startup capital for a state-owned health insurance company and funds state-owned clinics and hospitals that employ doctors and nurses directly. Those providers generate operating revenue that flows back into the system. The insurer runs on sliding-scale premiums, the wealthier you are the more you pay, down to nothing at the poverty line, and covers everyone in the state who needs coverage. The state owns the surplus. No shareholder extracts profit from the moment someone needs a doctor.

The Forest Service emergency offers a second and more immediate use of the same authority. The scientists who staff those fifty research stations have individual assignment letters coming in sixty days. Most of them will not move. States can hire them before they disperse, using emergency procurement authority to skip the year-long hiring processes that would otherwise apply. More urgently, those research stations contain decades of data, physical sample libraries, long-term monitoring records, the kind of scientific foundation that cannot be rebuilt once it is gone.¹⁵ Emergency grants to secure, digitize, and transfer that data to state universities and research institutions could preserve irreplaceable knowledge that the federal reorganization would otherwise scatter or destroy.

The courts will come up often in these conversations, and they should. What the opposition has figured out, and what we need to internalize, is that legal challenges and actual destruction operate on completely different timelines. A judge can rule in eighteen months that the Forest Service reorganization was unlawful. That ruling does not reassemble the research stations. It does not rehire the scientists who spent those eighteen months building careers elsewhere. It does not reconstruct forty years of monitoring data that nobody preserved before the Portland station went dark. Courts restore legal status. They do not restore dissolved institutions, and the people running this reorganization understand that perfectly. The emergency powers argument does not ignore that reality; it exploits the same logic in reverse. Act now. Hire the scientists before they sign elsewhere. Secure the data before the stations close. Open the health insurer before the Medicaid cuts take effect in December. If the federal government wants to challenge a state’s authority to do any of that, let it file the lawsuit while the programs are already running and the people are already covered. Stopping something that exists is a harder legal and political fight than preventing something from starting. The opposition knows this. It is time governors did too.

Project 2025 was meant to exploit the traditional electoral process due to the fact that the law moves much more slowly than a wildly destructive executive branch.

The federal government did not lose its way or cut the wrong program in a budget negotiation. It is systematically and deliberately eliminating the institutions it built over a century to manage public land, protect scientific knowledge, and keep people alive. It announced the end of the Forest Service with a press release. It cut a trillion dollars from health care to fund tax reductions for the wealthiest Americans. It is planning to cut more.

States that wait for the federal government to reverse course are going to be waiting while their residents die, while their forests lose the scientists who understood them, while the data that took fifty years to build disappears into a reorganization that was designed to make it disappear. The authority to act is already there. The emergencies that justify using it arrived Tuesday morning in a press release. What is missing is not permission.

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Works Cited

¹ High Country News. (2026, March 31). Forest Service overhaul sows confusion, concern. https://www.hcn.org/articles/forest-service-overhaul-sows-confusion-concern/

² Summit Daily. (2026, March 31). U.S. Forest Service announces ‘sweeping restructuring’ including Colorado-based research headquarters. https://www.summitdaily.com/news/u-s-forest-service-restructuring-colorado-research-headquarters/

³ Government Executive. (2026, April 1). Forest Service to move HQ out of DC, shutter regional offices in sweeping overhaul. https://www.govexec.com/management/2026/04/forest-service-move-hq-out-dc-shutter-regional-offices-sweeping-overhaul/412566/

⁴ Oregon Wild. (2026, April 1). Trump to “reorganize” Forest Service, close Portland regional office. https://oregonwild.org/trump-to-reorganize-forest-service-close-portland-regional-office/

⁵ Oregon Wild. (2026, April 1). Trump to “reorganize” Forest Service, close Portland regional office.

⁶ Oregon Wild. (2026, April 1). Trump to “reorganize” Forest Service, close Portland regional office.

⁷ More Than Just Parks. (2026, April 1). BREAKING: Trump Administration Orders Dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. https://morethanjustparks.substack.com/p/breaking-trump-administration-orders

⁸ Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2025, August 27). By the numbers: Harmful Republican megabill will take health coverage away from millions of people and raise families’ costs. https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/by-the-numbers-harmful-republican-megabill-will-take-health-coverage-away-from

⁹ Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (2025, August 27). By the numbers.

¹⁰ Congressional Budget Office. (2025, August 15). Potential Statutory Pay-As-You-Go effects of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2025-08/61659-SPAYGO.pdf

¹¹ Modern Healthcare. (2026, March 26). GOP budget reconciliation bill may target more Medicaid, ACA cuts. https://www.modernhealthcare.com/politics-regulation/mh-gop-budget-reconciliation-bill-medicaid-aca/

¹² Bank of North Dakota. (2025). 2024 Annual Report. https://bnd.nd.gov/bank-of-north-dakota-releases-2024-annual-report/

¹³ Sunshine, G., Thompson, K., Menon, A. N., Anderson, N., Penn, M., & Koonin, L. M. (2019). An assessment of state laws providing gubernatorial authority to remove legal barriers to emergency response. Health Security, 17(2), 156–161. https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2018.0126

¹⁴ Armitage, C. (2025). Soft secession: State financial independence through public banking. The Existentialist Republic. [URL needed]

¹⁵ High Country News. (2026, March 31). Forest Service overhaul sows confusion, concern.