President Donald Trump says he wants the US to have the cleanest air and water on the planet — a desire, unsurprisingly, shared by all Americans.

Those resources don’t just appear. They come from nature. Freshwater mussels, clams, and aquatic vegetation, for example, filter rivers and streams and provide clean places to swim and habitat for fish to thrive. They also lower water treatment costs. On larger scales, forests and grasslands absorb air pollutants and regulate rain cycles, which helps clean the air.

It’s a bit strange, then, that the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees at the already short-staffed US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) — the only government agency whose main goal is to conserve animals, ecosystems, and the life-supporting services they provide. Late last week, the Service terminated around 420 employees who were newly hired or recently promoted, amounting to about 5 percent of the agency’s workforce, as part of a sprawling government purge.

“In his first term, President Trump proved that environmental stewardship and economic greatness can go hand-in-hand,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told Vox. “He will continue to protect America’s abundant natural resources while streamlining federal agencies to better serve the American people.”

During his first term, however, Trump did roll back a long list of protections for natural resources that were designed, in part, to keep Americans safe. The terminated Fish and Wildlife Service employees, meanwhile, worked to protect those very resources in a wide range of positions. They include scientists who help conserve imperiled animals, such as freshwater mussels, and workers who help farmers with issues like erosion and runoff that can pollute water.

“My sadness — true sadness — is I don’t think they’ve bothered to ask and really understand what the Fish and Wildlife Service does,” Martha Williams, who led the FWS under the Biden administration, said of Trump administration officials. “If they did, they’d realize we’re functioning in a way that’s critical to rural and urban communities across the country. The Fish and Wildlife Service exists to protect the natural world.”

Williams acknowledges that the conservation community, including FWS, has not done a good enough job at linking its work to the everyday lives of Americans. Many people don’t even know what the FWS does, so they gravity of this loss may not sink in.

I wanted to let her explain. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

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Do you have information to share about the US Fish and Wildlife Service or other government agencies? Reach out to Benji Jones at benji.jones@vox.com, on Signal at benji.90, or at benjijones@protonmail.com.

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Martha Williams

What keeps me up at night is the wholesale decimation of........

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