The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (USFWS) office in Lander works with the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes on the Wind River Reservation to conserve the area’s big game and fish. That collaboration has been going on for decades, but the office’s lease is one of many listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) termination list. While the office currently remains open, there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s next for the location’s work and staff.
When asked about the status of the Lander office lease, a USFWS spokesperson wrote the following in an email: “The USFWS remains committed to fulfilling our federal responsibilities to communities, tribes, and conservation partners. We are working with GSA [General Services Administration] to ensure that facilities or alternative solutions remain available to support our mission while embracing new opportunities for efficiency and innovation. This process is ongoing, and we will provide updates as more information becomes available.”
Jason Baldes is a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and runs the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative on the reservation, which partners with FWS on things like wildlife-friendly fencing and elk studies. He also works for the National Wildlife Federation's Tribal Partnerships Program and serves as vice president on the board of directors for the InterTribal Buffalo Council.
Baldes spoke with Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann about what he thinks the closure would mean for the Wind River Reservation ecosystem and how it would violate the government’s trust responsibility to tribes.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Jason Baldes: My dad [Richard Baldes] was a project leader for the [FWS] Lander Field Office. He worked close to 30 years there. He just has described to me over the years the importance of this office, but also the trust responsibility that's fulfilled.
These other field offices were [also] put in place to support tribes in a similar manner at Blackfeet, Northern Cheyenne and Crow [in Montana], in the Dakotas [and] in Utah.
The purpose really was to assist tribes in gathering data, doing habitat inventory, doing population surveys and understanding how the fish and wildlife resources on reservations can be managed such that they can be beneficial to the people. So the Lander Field Office, I think, is really the shining example of what trust responsibility can be.
That office provides the data, provides the information to leadership to make well-informed decisions. If there's no field office, there's none of that data being collected. Then the tribes are kind of left to fend for themselves in terms of making decisions that may or not be adequate for water or fisheries or wildlife, because that data may not exist.
Hannah Habermann: On the ground, how would the closure of this office affect wildlife on the reservation?
JB: It could be pretty detrimental. Every year, the Fish and Wildlife Service goes out and they do population estimates, habitat surveys for wildlife and also fisheries. We have 265 lakes on the reservation, and if we're not knowledgeable about the fisheries and the importance of native trout and some of the sensitive species like sauger and ling burbot, we wouldn't necessarily have the correct information to be able to make well-informed decisions.
With the closure of that office, there could be some deterioration of the numbers of wildlife. There could be more poaching. There could be more trespassing. There could be hunting out of season.
I think the ramifications of closing an office like that could go on and on, where it may not happen next year, but down the road we would see the implications of closing an office like that.
HH: For people who are less familiar with the relationship of trust responsibility, can you describe what that is?
JB: Because of treaties, tribes that relinquished a lot of land in exchange for healthcare, for law enforcement, there were promises that were made when those treaties were signed.
Ours was in 1868 and 1863. We have, as a tribe, given up a lot, and the trust responsibility is just that, that the federal government has that responsibility to uphold those promises that were made with tribes.
Tribes are still looking for those promises to be fulfilled and it changes with every administration. We've been going through this for a long time and recognizing that we likely will never see the promises or the treaty obligations or the trust responsibility ever being fulfilled by the federal government.
But nonetheless, we have to hold the federal government and whatever administration it is accountable for that trust responsibility, or the lack thereof.
As tribes, as tribal governments, as sovereign entities, we govern ourselves and we have reservation lands that are a fraction of what they once were. We're just trying to protect what little we have left.
And whether that's fish and wildlife, or land and water and air, we have that obligation to ourselves to ensure that we're doing that for our own communities and future generations.
But without the federal government's trust responsibility, that makes it very challenging.
HH: Do you interact with this office in your own work consistently? What does that look like?
JB: We’ve applied for some federal funding to help with wildlife friendly fencing for buffalo [and] we've looked to the Fish and Wildlife Service for things like an elk study that we plan to conduct on the population of elk that live on the river. If we didn't have that relationship, there's funding that could be jeopardized. There's projects that are ongoing that we continue to work on that we rely on the Fish and Wildlife Service for.
HH: As you mentioned, your dad Richard is a biologist and worked at this office for decades. Do you have any memories of tagging along with him when you were growing up?
JB: Oh, certainly. I got to join my dad on a lot of his field work, as long as I got good grades where I could get out of school.
I joined him for the capture and release of pronghorn antelope and bighorn sheep. I was a little kid when I got to witness and participate in that, so it was very formative for me to participate in a lot of the things he was doing.
We'd spend 25 to 30 days in the backcountry on horseback in the wilderness when he was working on the fishery studies of those upper country lakes.
It was challenging for him though, working for a federal agency, because he didn't have the support system. He was one of the few tribal biologists in the country at the time. So his recommendation to me was really not to work for any federal government or state government, or even tribal government, because of the bureaucratic nature of government.
I sat with that for a bit and realized that maybe I should go more into the nonprofit sector and academia and consider entrepreneurship and utilize that as a way to really help our people, help our community and reservation.
HH: I first saw this office on a list of lease terminations put together by Democrats from the Natural Resources Committee in the U.S. House. It's also now listed on the official DOGE website with a lease termination date of March 2025. Obviously that's already passed and the office is still open. So to me, it just seems like there's a lot of uncertainty around this closure. I'm curious, what do you make of that uncertainty and how is that affecting you?
JB: It kind of reiterates what my dad said, that the bureaucratic nature of government agencies can be at the whim of [an] administration. So that makes me glad that I actually chose the path that I did, because as we started this nonprofit for buffalo restoration, we tried to steer clear of federal dollars, knowing that there is a lot of rules and regulations and red tape with federal money.
We kind of purposely steered clear of that, which has put us in a little bit safer place. But nonetheless, we still have partnership and collaboration with [the USFWS] office.
In the InterTribal Buffalo Council, we do rely heavily on federal money, and so there's, some problems with access to funding in that realm.
It's just frustrating to have this office on the DOGE list and then the uncertainty of whether the positions are going to be terminated or whether the rent won't be paid or whether they've got credit cards or even internet turned on is challenging.
I haven't had a good conversation with the folks over at the field office because they're really kind of reluctant to talk about anything because of fear of losing their job. It’s unnecessary. I really think that there has to be a better way.
The trust responsibility that lies with the federal government agencies was inadequate before, and so it's even more inadequate now.
That's a problem for tribes. That's a problem for tribal communities and offices and programs that rely on federal dollars that we don't know if it's going to be there. It's really frustrating.
