Day 2: We Didn’t Start the Fire, But They Made Sure We’d Breathe It
Part Two of My Analysis of H.R. 1 — On Smoke, Silence, and Selling Out the Forests to Billionaires
I knew I’d fucked up about two stoplights down 42 just before the daily traffic jam at Thales Academy. My inhaler was still sitting on the kitchen counter back home, right where I’d left it after trying to unclog the damn garbage disposal with a butter knife and a mouthful of curse words. We kept driving past the private school where the parking lot is freshly paved and the uniforms are spotless. Where two paid cops stand in the road like a sentry, holding back traffic so parents in SUVs can roll through without delay.
A private school built on land that used to belong to Percy Flowers, Johnston County’s most famous bootlegger. Now it’s a hub for gated learning, owned by a conservative billionaire who bankrolls anti-public school legislation. The irony burned like exhaust. Maybe that is why the air inside the car tasted like metal. The AC blew it cold, but not clean. My inhaler was still at home on the bathroom sink, useless. I should’ve turned around. I didn’t. We kept driving.
Across the road, a bulldozer idled behind chain-link fencing. They call it the “Waterfront District,” but it’s really just a retention pond with delusions of grandeur, ringed by half-built townhomes and the same boxy apartments stamped out across every gentrifying highway in the South. No shade trees, just saplings zip-tied to PVC stakes. No sidewalks yet either, but who walks here anyway?
It started the way most mornings in late March did. With my six-year-old pressed into his Spiderman Booster seat, shoes kicking the back of the passenger seat because he is in the 90th percentile for height and his little cough shaking loose like an engine trying to turn over. He hates the smell of Vicks, says it makes him smell like a grandpa, but I still rubbed it into his chest before we left. My daughter was already on her way to school, with her bus rolling out just after the sun rose. It is a bright spot in Smithfield, NC tucked into a red-brick building that was built when Johnston County schools were forced to integrate in 1969 and now offers STEM and career readiness labs.
The smoke was heavier that week. Not the kind you smell from someone burning trash in a backyard barrel, this was wildfire smoke, drifting in from western Carolina. Old growth forests on fire, air so thick you could taste it. My son kept coughing. My daughter missed five days of school. I thought it was allergies. Maybe it was. If breathing in the consequences of environmental sabotage counts as an allergy.
But allergies to choking skies don’t go away with a Claritin. That week in March, Monday through Friday resulted in an urgent care visit, and by Saturday we were in the urgent-care lobby four times. Bright lights, cotton masks, cough syrup and the same damn question every day. Can we get through the week without my kids collapsing?
I thought back to those fires after reading Subtitle B—Forestry
Sec. 10201. Rescission of amounts for forestry on our nations 249th birthday.
They started in Polk County. Then suddenly, those flames hung suspended in our clog-choked air, drifting four hours east, landing here like a spiteful reminder: we’re all connected, even when they pretend we’re not.
I thought back to when the sky smothered us on the 4th of July not because of fireworks but because Congress and Donald Trump was choking another kind of forest, this time in fancy D.C. filigree, signing H.R. 1 into law on July 4th. They stripped out almost $5 billion in forestry funding. Stealing money from the crews who map streams, the ones who inventory old-growth, the gardeners planting shade trees, and the offices that answer the phone when your kid can’t breathe.
It made me realize the cuts didn’t just happen to places I’ve never been. They happened here, right in our lungs, our school parking lots, and along the roads where my kids cough and I can’t leave them behind. That’s where we start this policy discussion and once you’ve tasted that air, there’s no forgetting what they stole.
Most people won’t notice Section 10201 of H.R. 1. It’s tucked under Subtitle B — Forestry — and reads blandly:
10201.Rescission of amounts for forestry
The unobligated balances of amounts appropriated by the following provisions of Public Law 117–169 are rescinded:
(1)Paragraphs (3) and (4) of section 23001(a) (136 Stat. 2023).(2)Paragraphs (1) through (4) of section 23002(a) (136 Stat. 2025).(3)Section 23003(a)(2) (136 Stat. 2026).(4)Section 23005 (136 Stat. 2027).
That bland text masks a brutal cut. Billions of federal dollars earmarked for managing wildfire risk, replanting after storms, supporting rural conservation workers, and boosting equity for BIPOC landowners are erased—funds targeted explicitly for disadvantaged and climate-vulnerable communities. In North Carolina, the NC Forest Service awarded $2.2 million twice in early 2025 to urban and community forestry projects—tree canopy expansion, heat island mitigation, habitat restoration, especially in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Entire grants like that are wiped from the federal ledger now.
Rural western North Carolina counties were poised to receive IRA funded habitat restoration and wildfire prevention grants. H.R. 1 eliminates all of it. That means fewer boots on the ground for firebreaks, less reforestation after logging or hurricane events, and a sudden cliff in funding for conservation crews.
In Western NC, wildfire threats have expanded. Counties in the Blue Ridge Parkway rely heavily on federal forestry dollars to cut brush, restore streams, and protect watershed lands. Now, this funding evaporates. No more crew hires, no new trails, no mitigation projects.
The GOP finessed it into the budget, no amendment or debate mentioned hurled it into law. 216 Republicans voted yes. That vote endorsed pulling the rug out from under climate resilience in rural and urban NC. The law references four specific chunks:
Paragraphs (3) & (4) of Section 23001(a).
Paragraphs (1)–(4) of Section 23002(a).
Section 23003(a)(2).
Section 23005.
This isn’t just tax code mumbo jumbo, it translates to nearly $5 billion cut from forestry programs meant to protect people, land, and low-income workers.
Section 23001(a) funded hazardous fuel reduction on wildland-urban interface (WUI) forests—$1.8 billion—plus $200 million for vegetation/watershed health, $100 million for environmental review, and $50 million protecting old-growth forests. All that evaporates
Section 23002(a) directed $450 million to private forest landowners for climate-smart practices and $100 million for wood innovation grants under the 2018 Farm Bill. That’s chopped
Section 23003(a)(2) funded $700 million for the Forest Legacy program and $1.5 billion for Urban & Community Forestry—the grants planting trees in low-income neighborhoods, expanding canopy, buffering heat, and serving underserved communities. That money’s gone
Section 23005 covered USDA administrative costs for rolling these programs out, now also rescinded.
In North Carolina, that hits hard. The NC Forest Service tapped $2.2 million in IRA grants for urban tree canopy and community forest projects now cancelled. Asheville and Haywood County strode ahead on wildfire mitigation; those crews have no paycheck now. Counties throughout North Carolina have now lost out on restoration grants that would have kept small conservation jobs alive.
It hides in plain sight behind Clause Numbers and Statute references, deliberately ignored even as wildfires spread east and urban heat waves bake urban trees. They legislated the cuts quietly, but most people won’t notice until their neighborhood is hotter, their clinics shuttered, and volunteer fire departments reach their limit. District 13 Congressman Brad Knott and our Senator Ted Budd voted yes. That was a vote to bite off the safety net from rural and BIPOC communities alike.
Section 23001(a)(3) and (4)
Let me translate it plainly. Section 23001(a)(3) handed $100 million to the Forest Service for environmental reviews under NEPA, the law that forces agencies to actually assess the impact of forest projects. Section 23001(a)(4) allocated $50 million to protect old growth forests and complete an inventory of mature stands across National Forest System land. This wasn’t pork barrel spending; they were key to ensuring transparency, preservation, and accountability in forest management. Now H.R. 1 rescinds that funding. It doesn’t freeze it. It fucking vanishes.
Imagine somewhere in NC, like Pisgah National Forest above Asheville, crews are standing by to begin an NEPA review, mapping streams, checking endangered salamander habitats and somebody pulls the damn money. That means no paperwork gets done. No environmental safeguards remain. Decisions accelerate toward timber sales, road-clearing, or hazardous fuel projects that could slash old-growth stands to ashes. This isn’t bureaucratic slow-motion. It’s a bulldozer without brakes.
The $50 million wasn’t arbitrary. It funded inventories of ancient trees, some hundreds of years old. Old growth isn’t replacement wood. It stores carbon, stabilizes soil, and filters water. Without that money, Forest Service staff can’t even know what they have before selling or cutting. This is erasing knowledge and protections, not helping locals, but endangering all of us who drink the streams and breathe the air.
Here in North Carolina, the NC Forest Service used IRA-backed funds to support urban forestry grants totaling about $2.2 million annually. These are projects that plant shade trees in Durham schools, improve watershed health in Raleigh, or stabilize creek banks in Johnston County. Those crews worked on environmental assessments, now ghost projects undone by Section 10201.
This matters in places outside Asheville, too. In Franklin, Person, Caswell Counties, landowners waiting on old-growth inventories mean knowing whether your forest is worth protecting or selling. Without funding, it’s a gamble; the answers never come.
Think about community forests too, those old oaks shading Yanceyville churchyards, the trees lining Four Oaks’ main street. No funding means no planting, no maintenance, no canopy expansion. It's a slow ecosystem collapse. Which means hotter streets, flash floods, respiratory illness, reduced local wildlife.
When 216 House Republicans voted yes, they didn’t just cut money. They voted to rip out the glue holding forest economies, climate solutions, and rural communities together. All this was wiped out when Section 10201 rescinded these unused IRA funds. That single move erased decades of building opportunities for rural land managers and climate forward forestry in North Carolina and across the U.S. Not one line in a sound bite said that. That was hidden in Section 10201, but the damage is going to be loud and very local. The trees will fall and you will hear it.
Section 23002 — The Forests They Never Let Us Keep
They always call it “unused funds.” That’s the phrase they slap on anything that might've helped the wrong kind of people, the kind with calloused hands and a deed passed down from a grandfather who never made it into anyone’s Rotary Club. But let’s tell the truth: Section 23002 wasn’t about waste. It was the closest thing rural folks, especially Black and brown landowners, had to a damn lifeline.
$450 million was earmarked to fix what white policy broke in the first place. Land grants and timber deals that always seemed to skip the edge of town. Climate incentives that only showed up once the corporate boys had already cashed in. This was finally our shot: four grant programs tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act to give everyday forest stewards a fighting chance.
$150 million for climate-smart practices. That meant paying families to care for the woods they already love. Real money for controlled burns, erosion control, longleaf restoration—stuff our granddaddies did for free until the state told them they were doing it wrong.
Another $150 million to help those same families enter private climate markets where big corporations pay landowners not to cut trees, to sequester carbon instead of selling off soil. The markets are real, but the gate’s always been locked unless you’ve got a lawyer, a lobbyist, and a tract big enough to make Wall Street care. This money was the key. Now it's ash.
$100 million more for small-tract owners, less than 2,500 acres. That's practically the entire map of eastern North Carolina if you cut out corporate timberland and development parcels. This was a hand extended to farmers, homesteaders, church land, maybe even the old hunting club at the end of the dirt road.
Then there was $50 million set aside for states to pay these landowners directly for verified climate work. Not charity, it was compensation. You plant it, you protect it, you get paid. Like it should have always been.
But on July 4th, 2025, Trump signed H.R.1 and they stole it back. Every damn dollar.
They didn’t just cancel grants. They cut off access to the tools we were finally learning how to use. No technical assistance. No carbon credits. No bridge to a market that was supposed to reward the people protecting the Earth instead of bulldozing it.
You think that didn’t hit North Carolina hard? Ask the landowners in Caswell County who waited two years for USDA to help them transition to sustainable silviculture. Ask the Black family outside Yanceyville whose forest has been in the family since Reconstruction but who couldn't afford to certify it for carbon without this program. Ask the Lumbee farmers who were finally lining up to apply.
Now those folks are told the funding “expired.” But that’s a lie. It didn’t expire. It was rescinded, intentionally, surgically, because this Congress doesn’t want small landowners competing with timber barons and oil-backed offsets. They’d rather keep those markets white, rich, and gated.
They keep talking about freedom while setting fires behind our damn backs. They say the money was sitting unused, but the truth is it was unreachable until this year. Right when people started knocking on the door, they torched the whole damn building.
Section 23003 — Shade Wasn’t Just Shade, It Was Survival
They want you to think this was just about trees. It is always like that. Pretend it's some liberal tree-hugging wish list while the rest of us are out here gasping for breath in school parking lots with no shade and no shelter, watching our electric bills spike and our grandmamas pray the AC holds on one more day.
But Section 23003 was never just about trees. It was about who gets to breathe clean air and who’s left roasting in the wreckage. It was $1.5 billion in competitive, multi-year grants—money designed to land in the hands of states, Tribes, local governments, and nonprofits to plant trees where they mattered most: neighborhoods cooked by pavement, flooded after storms, choked out by decades of racist zoning, industrial runoff, and redlined neglect.
This wasn’t for gated subdivisions or private golf-course towns. This was for us.It was for towns where whole stretches of road don’t have a single mature tree left. For East Smithfield where runoff from busted lots turns into street-level rivers every spring. For Roxboro, where the schoolyard’s so damn exposed that by March the kids are dragging by lunchtime.
It was for people who never got a “green space,” just another Dollar General and a utility pole leaning like it’s about to fall. But all that promise? All that damn hope carved out of the Inflation Reduction Act?
Fucking gone.
Section 10201 of H.R. 1 didn’t “trim fat.” It gutted the one program we had that actually aimed at air justice, flood protection, and urban heat survival—not with think tanks or task forces, but with actual grants to plant real trees, create real jobs, and build real buffers between working-class families and climate collapse.
Who fucking killed it?
The same crew who pretends to care about “rural America” while funneling money back to the suburbs and developer zones. The same people who’ll cry about liberty while making sure every low-income town from Caswell to Johnston to Edgecombe keeps suffocating under the weight of asphalt and stripped land.
This was a climate equity program, and that made it dangerous.Because once people like us had shade, fresh air, and green jobs? We might’ve started thinking we deserved more. Deserved safety. Deserved dignity. Deserved futures. They couldn’t have that shit. So they cut the damn root, right as it was beginning to grow.
Now, when the heat hits 100 before noon and the floodwater doesn’t drain and your kid can’t play outside without an asthma attack, you remember this, Republicans said Section 23003 was part of something beautiful and it was supposed to help.
Section 23005 — The Engine They Took Apart on Purpose
You can have the blueprints to build the best damn house in the world, but if you never hire a crew to pour the foundation, all you’ve got is a blueprint and a fantasy.
That’s what Section 23005 was, the foundation crew. The office lights. The boots on the ground. The people answering the phone when your county applied for a tree canopy grant or when a Black landowner in Caswell finally got through the red tape to apply for resilience funds after generations of being ignored.
This wasn’t some “wasteful government slush fund” like Republicans love to claim. This $100 million was the engine oil for the entire forestry and conservation package
$100 million to staff the USDA. To process the paperwork. To hire grant writers. To make the program work, especially in places where it never had before.
It’s easy for the Brad Knotts of the world to sneer about “administrative costs” like it’s some boogeyman phrase. But ask anybody trying to keep a school HVAC system running in rural Johnston County, admin is the difference between done and dust.
What H.R. 1 did was cut the engine out of the damn car while pretending to care about the ride. Without this money, nothing else in the forestry plan moved. Not the grants. Not the outreach. Not the jobs. Not the trees.
USDA offices were already stretched thin. Some of them were one resignation away from collapse. This was supposed to build capacity, not shut the damn doors. It was the part of the bill designed to level the playing field, so small landowners didn’t need a law firm and a private consultant just to apply.
It was how BIPOC communities, nonprofits, and cash-strapped counties finally had a shot at federal funding instead of watching it vanish into the hands of developers with friends on the inside.
But on July 4th, while the flag waved and the TV anchors babbled about liberty, Congress and Trump took a pen and slashed the tendons of this entire system, quietly, efficiently, deliberately.
The paperwork won’t be processed. The calls won’t get answered. The programs won’t run and the very people who needed this support the most, the poor, the rural, the historically shut out are now expected to do what? Compete against corporations with no damn help?
Don’t let them lie to you about what this was.
It wasn’t “just admin.” It was the only part of the government trying to make things fucking fair. The only thread holding together hope for rural families, Black landowners, small-town planners, the kid coughing in the backseat while the bulldozers pave over every last tree.
Now it’s gone.
Just like the shade.
Just like the stream surveys.
Just like the forest’s chance.
The Lorax warned us—unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
On July 4th, while fireworks cracked across the sky and news anchors waved tiny flags, Donald Trump signed H.R. 1 into law. Buried in that brick of a bill was Section 10201 was a surgical strike against the lungs of our country. It rescinded nearly $5 billion in forestry funds: old-growth protection, urban tree canopies, small landowner grants, stream mapping, and local jobs that help us breathe easier. They killed all of it.
Here in North Carolina, that money would’ve funded creek bank stabilization projects, tree planting grants and wildfire prevention. It would’ve kept staff on payroll at rural USDA offices. It would’ve made climate-smart forestry less of a buzzword and more of a damn lifeline.
Instead 216 House Republicans voted yes.
They voted to take money from the Forest Legacy Program, from the kids sweating in trailer classrooms without trees, from the elders with COPD on streets where the pavement cracks and the air stands still. They voted to let rich developers keep paving, keep polluting, keep pretending that rural folks and Black communities don’t deserve clean air unless it lines someone’s pockets.
It wasn’t just a budget adjustment. It was an act of environmental violence disguised as fiscal responsibility. They passed it on Independence Day, like a dare. Like they thought we wouldn’t notice the smoke was back.
Like they thought we’d choke and just be quiet. So breathe deep. Then get loud. Because the fire’s still burning. We didn’t start the fire. That much is true. We didn’t light it, but we damn sure tried to fight it, with grant applications, with tree plantings, with emergency inhalers and urgent care visits, with busted budgets and broken backs. We fought it with every shade tree rooted in red clay, every creek bed buffered by people who still believe public good should mean something.
They torched the funds. They torched the future. But we’re the ones choking on the smoke. It was always burning but that doesn’t mean 216 Republicans had to pour more gasoline.
Thank you so so much for making the details of this legislation transparent. As part of a group in JoCo who implored the County Commissioners and mayors of almost all the local towns to take advantage of IRA funding, especially in forestry, it became clear that the administrative tools (and learning how to use them) were the biggest hurdle. That and the fact that it became clear that some of our civic leaders would not take advantage of IRA funds, no matter how beneficial, because it was deemed a "democratic bill." And now the opportunity has passed.