The jobs of small business contractors and conservation organizations in Montana are in limbo.
The freezing and thawing of federal funds under the Trump administration has thrown into question the future of grants money already promised to the state. That money pays for a wide range of work including watershed restoration, reforestation and road maintenance.
Since 2022, Montana has been awarded over one and a half billion dollars in federal funds to upgrade infrastructure and address environmental pollution. The money was earmarked for a wide array of things all tied into two massive packages of legislation under former President Joe Biden.
Many of the projects awarded money now find themselves in a strange holding pattern after the freezing from the Donald Trump Administration and potential thawing from court decisions.
The uncertainty this creates impacts the many local communities and businesses that have been contracted to carry out much of this work.
That includes Jake Watts, the owner operator of a small environmental contracting company in Missoula called Timberland Excavating.
Watts is a specialized contractor who does environmental remediation construction like restoring streams to improve fish passage and water quality, or mine reclamation. It can be over a month from invoice to payment and a lot has changed very quickly under the new federal administration.
"Forty-five days is substantial in anybody's mind, but it's more substantial with what's going on in between," Watts told MTPR
Watts has been paid for restoration work done in 2024, but a lot of those invoices were paid before Biden left office. It’s unclear if he’ll be paid for future work under the Trump administration.
Since swearing in less than a month ago, Trump has signed executive orders to halt Biden's climate and infrastructure funding, as well as enacting the comprehensive federal funding freeze in late January, which is still being fought over in the courts.
Watts’ business is small, run by him and a co-worker. The vast majority of his contracts are done with environmental nonprofits. Federal land management agencies contract with nonprofits for on the ground restoration work, and those nonprofits then hire specialized contractors like Watts to carry out portions of a project. Without the federal dollars involved, Watts could see a huge hit to his business.
“Ninety percent of the work we did last year fell into the category of federally funded environmental work,” Watts said. “So, I guess the impact that would mean for this year is we would have to pivot essentially and find work elsewhere.”
There are at least a dozen other small, local contracting companies like Watts across Western Montana. They make up what’s often referred to as a “restoration economy”.
As the timber economy died down, it left behind a legacy of disconnected and degraded streams, and forests with dense overgrowth. Many specialized contractors that once worked in the timber industry have been able to pivot into doing restoration work in these same areas.
Adam Switalski is a restoration project manager for the Clark Fork Coalition, one of the groups that Watts regularly does work for.
“So along came this IRA funding, the Inflation Reduction Act funding, which created this opportunity to address many of these legacy impacts and to create, at the same time, a large number of restoration jobs,” Switalski said.
Those projects look like building out bigger culverts to promote fish passage and better instream flows, or fixing roads to have less runoff.
Clark Fork Coalition Executive Director Brian Chaffin says they have been doing this kind of work in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management for more than a decade.
“We are doing work on public lands in partnership and collaboration with land management agencies who do not have the staff and sometimes the expertise to get it done themselves,” Chaffin said. “We are flexible. We are more nimble. That's why they rely on us.”
Chaffin says since the first White House memo announcing the freeze of all federal funding, the federal accounts his organization will invoices for restoration work they’ve done, hang in limbo. And with the work season to complete their contracted jobs right around the corner, he’s worried.
“We have literally millions of dollars of restoration work planned for summer 2025. Those millions of dollars are, they're under signed contracts, they’re under signed agreements,” Chaffin said.
To break this down: the federal government under the last administration contracted with the Clark Fork Coalition to do this work, and said it would pay for it. Chaffin and his team began the work, and brought on specialized contractors like Watts. Now, they’ve already sunk some of the costs into preparing, but there’s a question whether the federal government under new leadership will pay the bill.
Without that money, Chaffin says plans to reconnect tributaries of rivers like the Clark Fork, the Bitterroot, and the Blackfoot won’t happen.
“The road segments that are in desperate need of reducing the sediment load to the streams so the fish can breathe, literally breathe as they're as they're moving towards spawning grounds or just living in their tributary homes. None of that work will happen,” Chaffin said.
Chaffin says in some cases the work has already been done but the federal government isn’t paying.
James Watts, the restoration contractor who works closely with Chaffin and the Coalition, doesn’t get paid until a job is done. Having federal money tied up in this freeze/thaw cycle, creates a lot of uncertainty.
“I never would have dreamt this up,” Watts said.
If federal funding isn’t figured out by the time restoration work starts, he’s not sure what this summer’s going to look like.
