About 64,000 acres in Minnesota’s superior national forest have been burned by forest fires that started earlier this summer from lightning strikes. As of this writing, some are still going on in and around the boundary waters and crews are working to contain them.

However, the devastation could have been less if the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s “DOGE” hadn’t gotten in the way by holding up needed federal dollars.

John Parker met with Aaron Kania to discuss the situation. Kania is a former law enforcement officer, wildland firefighter, and most recently served as a Forest Service official.

He is also the DFL endorsed candidate running for Minnesota House Seat 3A in Northern Minnesota.

Interview with Aaron Kania

John Parker:
Last year, 2025, Doge paused a $10 million grant to Minnesota that would’ve addressed helping us fight and prevent forest fires in areas that were deemed high risk, which obviously this was. Can you tell our listeners and viewers, what was that grant intended to do?

Aaron Kania:
Absolutely. What you said, we used science to find the highest risk areas. And we looked at our forest and this was the place. So up here we worked together and we were working with the state of Minnesota, the US Forest Service, the counties, and private landowners. We were all on board. We had all of our environmental paperwork in place. And the Undersecretary of Agriculture came out, took a look at it, and said, “You know what? Y’all are working together. You know how to get this done. This money is going in the right place.”

And we applied for and received that $10 million grant in 2024.

And then first thing in 2025 with the change of administration, with DOGE coming on board, that money was paused for review. And basically in the intervening 18 months, that work hasn’t been put on the ground until these fires occurred.

And then now our firefighters are putting that work into place.

John Parker:
Now, so as I was reading the media reports here and from the original reporting that started in the Washington Post, you were quoted as saying that you all were “shovel ready.” So this wasn’t just that you’d applied for the grant and you got the grant, you were ready to go and get to work.

Aaron Kania:
That’s absolutely right. Which is hard to do because sometimes you do, you have lawsuits, you have litigation, the community’s not on board, your plan’s not ready.

This is one of those cases where absolutely everything was shovel ready.

And we were at that point where we were working with contractors, we were getting ready to sign the paperwork to get the money put out there so contractors could bid on it and really literally get to work. And that would’ve been early in ’25.

John Parker:
DOGE was pausing or axing altogether federal funding that was tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change. Aaron, what reason did DOGE give you all for why they paused the funding?

Aaron Kania:
It was all of those things. So they were going through, and I have to say it felt like there was bots going through. They were really using AI.

We plant trees every year. We plant millions of trees. We have contracts to do that with our contractors, and that got paused because of the word “diversity.”

John Parker:
Because the “diversity” of trees?

Aaron Kania:
The diversity of trees. So we plant pines and other trees, and because it got flagged as diversity, that got paused as well. And we really almost missed the planting season in 2025.

So it didn’t even seem like there was a human behind this taking a look at it and said, “Oh, not that kind of diversity. This is tree diversity.”

John Parker:
Wow. So I mean, every administration, Presidential administration comes in, and they’ve got their different priorities. To you, did it feel like there was something more, what’s the right word here? I was going to say sinister. I mean, what did it feel like when they came in here and they were doing all this? Because this didn’t come across as this is just a different administration that just has different priorities.

Aaron Kania:
I went through a lot of administrations. I think my first administration was the Clinton administration, and so I’ve seen the pendulum swing. It did feel like the pendulum swung a lot further this time, but it was definitely the tone.

At least when you go from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, it was like, “You know what? We’re doing renewable energy and now we’re doing more oil and gas, but we still need a federal workforce to do that. And now this is your priority.”  Okay, I understand that.

This one did feel it was a little more targeted. And some of those first emails that we got, I mean, they almost felt like spam. They didn’t feel real. I’ve never seen that in my career.

The type of language that they were using of things like essentially go out and get a real job. You’ll do more in the private sector.

And like I said, as a law enforcement officer, as a wildland firefighter, those are basic government functions. We obviously don’t want our law enforcement to be in the private sector. We want our law enforcement, we want our firefighters to be government employees because you’re servants of the people and you’re held accountable.

John Parker:
That is another part that I wanted to ask you about. So thousands of federal employees were laid off last year, more accepted buy-outs. How did that affect the situation as well? Because there was the grant part of it that they paused, and then there’s just thousands of people leaving the federal workforce and they were being intimidated out.

Aaron Kania:
Certainly. So up here we saw roughly a 10% cut in the Ely area, but that goes across, that goes over to Grand Marais. It goes up to Voyagers National Park, more than a hundred people up in Northern Minnesota, which is actually a big part of our workforce. But the thing is who was impacted? So it was really the people that were on the upper end of their career.

Myself, I retired naturally. I was planning to retire. I actually ended up staying an extra 11 months to get through this. But there was a lot of really senior people with a lot of experience and education and training that retired early.

And then on the other end, entry level employees who were coming in, we spent a lot of time recruiting them. They moved here, they were starting families and buying houses, just what we want up here. But they weren’t necessarily committed into the government.

They had just started their career. They had other options.

And so they left and they really did leave under duress.

There were a number of employees that were saying things like, “This was my dream job. I’ve always wanted to do this. But I’m just not going to put up with this chaos and the uncertainty and I am going to go out.”

And a lot of them actually moved over to the state or other agencies within the state. So thankfully some of them stayed here and gave a boost to state employment, but the federal government lost them.

John Parker:
Eventually the grant did clear at the end of last year, but they forced you to rewrite it as I understand that. Can you tell us about that?

Aaron Kania:
So the objective changed and the objective was to have more timber sales in it, which is fine. Typically, we don’t pay for timber sales. Timber sales pay for themselves, but they wanted to see more timber production, which the original objective was wildfire risk reduction.

And how strategically you go about doing that is you do use those roads or rivers out there as fire breaks, and they’re more linear on either side of the road versus timber sales are blocky and there’s space in between them.

And even after you do a timber sale, there’s still treetops and branches on the ground that are flammable and can carry a fire. So the objective changed and the strategy of how to reduce wildfire also changed. And we really did see the outcome of that here. And I want to be clear, I think this is a point, some of the online discussion that’s come out of this.

By no means would this [grant] have stopped these wildfires. They wouldn’t have prevented the wildfires. It was a natural event with a lightning strike. But what it did shift on a small piece of the fire, that work would’ve been done ahead of time.

At least some of it would’ve been done ahead of time. And that would’ve been a great location to have kept those fires from jumping over the Echo Trail in particular and then into the southern portion of the Boundary Waters Canaria Wilderness. So it wouldn’t have stopped, it wouldn’t have prevented, the cost wouldn’t have been zero, it would’ve been less.

And the firefighters that did that work, because this work did get done under emergency conditions, the firefighters that did that.

200 firefighters could have been working on other parts of the fire or even other places in the country because now we saw yesterday huge wildfires out west in Spokane and other places that actually burned a lot of houses.

And so could those firefighters have stayed out west or could they have been working on other parts of this fire and brought control faster to other places? So we have to speculate there, but we know some fire break would be better than no fire break.

John Parker:
Can you give us a sense of how bad the situation, the economic impact of these fires in Northern Minnesota? When you take away from the tourist season that is not a small thing there.

Aaron Kania:
This goes into why I’m running for the Minnesota House as well. And obviously we’re talking about having a special session of the legislature. That’s how significant this is. The governor was up here taking a look at it firsthand, meeting with businesses in the community and just really hearing how devastating it is.

I was up in Grand Marais this past weekend. They had the fisherman’s picnic, which normally huge crowds, and it was a lot slower. A lot of the locals were saying just how slow it was. And so when you are into a situation where it’s so dire that the legislature has to come back, I mean that’s significant.

70% reduction in businesses. When your business is evacuated and you are now having to rent an apartment or rent a Airbnb, not only do you have no income, but now you have more outgoing expenses.

So, this has been huge. And again, preventable to an extent. It could have been smaller. And the work we would’ve been doing was local jobs. It was local contractors. It was putting money back in our economy. So our economy would’ve been better off had we done this work.