It is not so strange. When the federal government reserved forests from the action of the homestead laws, they decimated the tax base for rural forested communities. These isolated communities could not expand to support services and local individuals could not privately develop the natural resources and contribute to the local economy. A bad situation from the get go.
In the 1920s, Congress wisely recognized this and came up with a formula where a percentage of the profit from logging and grazing and other uses on the National Forest (U.S. Dept. of Ag) would go to forest counties for roads and schools.
When the northern spotted owl and associated old growth ecosystem flora and fauna was listed under the Endangered Species Act, harvest stopped and so did the revenue from logging on National Forests. The money comprised as much as half of forest county school and road budgets. There was a crisis. So Congress developed a replacement formula to bridge the gap until logging would once again be possible. Of course that never happened.
The easterners in Congress called it rural county welfare and have cut it dramatically, saying that counties needed to be weaned off. This was unrealistic since the basic structural issues of having up to 90% of a county removed from the tax roles remained.
In order to get more recent iterations passed, mid-west, southern and eastern counties had to be brought in to get the votes, even if they were never effected by the spotted owl.
It sure looks to me like a bunch of fig leaves, cherished as they may be. Rednecks get spoiled when subsidized. This could the anodyne that keeps them voting for mushy GOP when they might go for stark bible values candidates otherwise.