USDA spent a year swearing it wasn’t gutting the Forest Service, and then a federal lawsuit pried loose the plan it was hiding, which proves the agency was lying the entire time.

The hidden plan sets a target to slash the workforce by at least 23 percent, and it works by ordering employees to move across the country so they quit instead. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told the public one thing and wrote the opposite into her own memo, in consecutive sentences. Then it fought in two federal courts to keep the plan secret while it carried out the dismantling anyway.

Congress passed a law forbidding this. USDA’s own lawyers declared that law unconstitutional and barreled ahead anyway. A federal judge could halt the whole thing on August 21.

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