Kirk Siegler
As a correspondent on NPR's national desk, Kirk Siegler covers rural life, culture and politics from his base in Boise, Idaho.
His beat explores the intersection and divisions between rural and urban America, including longer term reporting assignments that have taken him frequently to a struggling timber town in Idaho that lost two sawmills right before the election of President Trump. In 2018, after the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, Siegler spent months chronicling the diaspora of residents from Paradise, exploring the continuing questions over how – or whether – the town should rebuild in an era of worsening climate-driven wildfires.
Siegler's award winning reporting on the West's bitter land use controversies has taken listeners to the heart of anti-government standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, including a rare interview with recalcitrant rancher Cliven Bundy. He's also profiled numerous ranching and mining communities from Nebraska to New Mexico that have worked to reinvent themselves in a fast-changing global economy.
Siegler also contributes extensively to the network's breaking news coverage, from floods and hurricanes in Louisiana to deadly school shootings in Connecticut. In 2015, he was awarded an international reporting fellowship from Johns Hopkins University to report on health and development in Nepal. While en route to the country, the worst magnitude earthquake to hit the region in more than 80 years struck. The fellowship was cancelled, but Siegler was one of the first foreign journalists to arrive in Kathmandu and helped lead NPR's coverage of the immediate aftermath of the deadly quake. He also filed in-depth reports focusing on the humanitarian disaster and challenges of bringing relief to some of the Nepal's far-flung rural villages.
Before helping open the network's first ever bureau in Idaho at the studios of Boise State Public Radio in 2019, Siegler was based at the NPR West studios in Culver City, California. Prior to ing NPR in 2012, Siegler spent seven years reporting from Colorado, where he became a familiar voice to NPR listeners reporting on politics, water and the state's ski industry from Denver for NPR Member station KUNC. He got his start in political reporting covering the Montana Legislature for Montana Public Radio.
Apart from a brief stint working as a waiter in Sydney, Australia, Siegler has spent most of his adult life living in the West. He grew up in Missoula, Montana, and received a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
- President Trump wants to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the National Park Service budget this year and much more next year. The effort is facing bipartisan criticism.
- Michael Boren, an ally of President Trump, is expected to be confirmed by the Senate to run the U.S. Forest Service. It's an agency he's frequently fought with as a wealthy, private landowner.
Local and federal officials in LA say recovery from January's deadly wildfires is on pace to be the fastest in modern California history. Scientists worry that toxic debris isn't getting cleared.- LA Mayor Karen Bass says her city is recovering faster than after any other wildfire in modern California history. But experts caution against cleaning up too fast given the risks of toxic debris.
Almost all of the wheat grown in the Pacific Northwest is for export, and even before President Trump's trade war, farmers were dealing with rock bottom prices and slagging global demand.- Reporters have been looking at federal agencies and employees impacted by DOGE cuts from food inspectors to nuclear scientists to firefighters, and the broader effects of the restructuring efforts.
After initially excluding it from a budget bill, House Republicans approved a controversial late hour amendment Tuesday that authorizes the sale of federal land in two western states for affordable housing and other uses.- Republicans are considering selling off some federal lands to pay for President Trump's domestic agenda, which is reigniting a decades-old controversy in the West.
Many oil company executives celebrated Donald Trump's return to the White House. But now expectations of higher profits are fading amid fears of a recession.
The Trump istration's dramatic staffing cuts at federal lands agencies like the Forest Service are causing anxiety in tinder dry New Mexico, where the wildfire threat is already severe this Spring.