LUDOVIC MARIN via Getty Images President Donald Trump is getting pushback from his own party on a plan shut down several rural job-training centers.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other Republican lawmakers are breaking with the White House on its plan to make cuts to a conservation job training program and lay off more than 1,000 federal workers.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including a dozen GOP members, sent a letter Wednesday urging Cabinet members not to shutter a third of the nation’s Job Corps Civilian Conservation Centers, which train underprivileged youth in jobs that help protect America’s public lands.

McConnell sent a letter of his own the same day, noting the plan could cost 100 Kentuckians their jobs.

The White House has said it wants to streamline the program and make it cheaper. But those goals aren’t shared by the Republicans who will have to explain to constituents why their own centers are shutting down. They called the White House’s decision to pursue the closures without congressional approval or input “troubling.”

“These centers not only help support these underserved youth and young adults with invaluable job training, but they also provide essential capacity for the U.S. Forest Service to fulfill its mission and provide economic opportunities in rural areas,” the group wrote.

The letter is signed by 51 members of Congress and addressed to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

In his own letter to the same officials, McConnell said the program plays “an important role” in training young people, particularly in “rural and economically depressed areas.”

The White House plan, first reported by HuffPost, would transfer control of the program from the Agriculture Department to the Labor Department, cutting 1,065 federal jobs and at least eight centers in the process. The work at centers that don’t get axed could be contracted out, effectively privatizing them.

Students enrolled in CCC programs are trained in wildland firefighting, forestry and disaster recovery, and often work on public lands in the wake of disasters. Each year federal employees at the centers train nearly 4,000 young adults, most of them from low-income backgrounds. The program has been around since 1964.

In 2017 alone, students from the centers provided approximately 450,000 hours of wildfire response, and 5,000 hours responding in communities impacted by Hurricane Harvey, according to the letter. Many labor unions view the program as a talent pipeline feeding into their own apprenticeship systems.

It’s not hard to see why President Donald Trump is running into trouble with his own party on this one. The training centers are all in rural areas, mostly in the South and West, and the centers slated to close tend to be in purple or red states: Montana, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Virginia, Washington, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oregon.