While 650,000 furloughed civilian employees continue to face the harsh realities of federal budget cuts due to sequestration, a Washington state military base has just received a $3.5 million grant from the Defense Department to protect gophers and butterflies.
According to Fox News, the Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) was recently awarded the grant by the Pentagon in order to purchase the lands surrounding the base. The new real estate, however, will be used to protect the Mazama pocket gopher – a species neither endangered nor threatened – and not military training purposes.
Not surprisingly, the funding does not sit well among furloughed employees, who see the government’s spending as irresponsible and misplaced.
“That really makes me mad that they would do that,” Matt Hines, a civilian DoD employee, told Fox News. “I’m all for saving animals, but at what cost?”
Hines is one of 10,000 civilian employees taking a 20 percent pay cut.
Grants such as this are not uncommon among the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. Under the Readiness and Environmental Protection Initiative, $297 million has been awarded to military bases since 2003 in an effort to protect surrounding lands.
Despite how outrageous and bizarre the grant may seem to many, Sarah Hamman from the Center for National Lands Management supports the DoD’s actions, telling Fox News they are a “really important partner in this process in terms of providing the funding and providing the land for these species.”
Glenn Morgan, a representative at Freedom Foundation based in Olympia, Wash., disagrees with Hamman, and believes that the Mazama pocket gophers are no different than other gophers surviving on their own throughout the country.
“It shows our government is out of control and our priorities are completely out of whack,” Morgan told Fox News. “And they’re skewed in a strange way that has no benefit for people who live here or even the animals they claim they’re trying to protect.”
If it’s any consolation to the furloughed employees, though, the multimillion-dollar grant is also expected to help Taylor’s checkerspot butterflies and streaked horned larks, who also thrive on the lands surrounding the JBLM.
