For 40 years, the Wells Reserve at Laudholm has been a place of beauty, peace, and learning.

But recently, it feels like it could get washed away at any moment.

Layoffs are gutting the reserve’s coastal partners, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Maine Sea Grant (per the Project 2025 playbook or in seeming retaliation for defending the law). Friends and colleagues at the Fish & Wildlife and National Parks Services have disappeared overnight. The federal government is convulsing under unelected Elon Musk’s apparently illegal and unconstitutional terminations. I'm watching devoted, smart people lose their jobs every week, while infrastructure projects, environmental protection efforts, and scientific and medical research stutter to a halt. Uncertainty and chaos are the order of the day.

I speak for many when I respectfully ask: what the heck is going on?

I’d say it’s “déjà vu all over again,” but the first months of the Trump Administration in 2017 were a sprinkle compared to this winter’s storm. I think this gale is going to leave lasting, generational damage, at a particularly vulnerable time. Climate change, artificial intelligence, and nuclear war continue to be civilization-ending threats, and yet the Trump White House is rapidly dismantling the government of the United States, the only institution with enough resources and expertise to face those threats. Who terminates scientists and researchers in the 21st Century? The United States has already lost the renewable energy race to China; will we now cede any further research and development progress? Under this bungling butchering of America’s scientific community, can there be any other outcome?

And where is the Congressional outrage from the controlling majority, or judicial stays of execution? I, and many others, await the emergency response from our other two Constitutionally-equal branches of government. But as one researcher here at the Wells Reserve remarked: “I study invertebrates for a living. I recognize a lack of a backbone when I see it.” For all our sakes, I hope we see some soon.

Speaking as a citizen and also the head of a nonprofit that exists to support science, education, and conservation, I say this: the Wells Reserve and Laudholm Trust will weather this storm, but we are appalled by the selfish, careless destruction wrought by the new administration. We stand with civil servants and civil society. We stand with NOAA and Maine Sea Grant. We believe in respecting and supporting invited guests, being a good neighbor and not a backstabber, and staying clearly on the right side of moral history. When we do all those things, and more, only then will America be great again.

Nik Charov

President, Laudholm Trust