The Best People I Know Are Losing Their Jobs

Quick thoughts on what federal funding cuts and the loss of 10 percent of the Forest Service workforce mean for the future of public lands.

I wrote this story in about two hours yesterday (2/14) and didn’t cover nearly everything that I wanted to. For those interested in a bit more context, I just posted a part two here.

---

“It’s up in the air right now.”

I work in wildfire resilience and everything is up in the air right now. Funding for a prescribed fire training event I help with in the fall; funding for programs that help high-risk rural communities prepare for wildfire; grants that were already earmarked for specific projects this spring but are lost in the ether. Oh, and research institutions that receive funding through federal grants can no longer use words like “underserved” and “socioeconomic” or the especially inflammatory qualifiers “Hispanic” and “Black” in their published research. Oh, and they’ve suspended the Women in Wildfire program, which helped women learn about wildfire roles in a supportive environment free of the all-too-common misogynistic good ole boys (ask me how I know about the misogynistic good ole boys). And maybe you’ve heard that, just yesterday, it was confirmed that Trump fired 3400 Forest Service employees.

These were, by and large, probationary employees, or the folks who do the sort of “grunt work” of the Forest Service. Trails, recreation, wildfire mitigation/fuels, timber markers, field technicians or “ologists” etc. To be clear, these people aren’t rich, and they aren’t fraudsters. They’re public servants who are passionate about managing and protecting public lands, and it’s difficult to see the current administration playing fast and loose with their livelihoods. The truth is that this loss of nearly 10 percent of the Forest Service’s workforce will not only impact those who lost their jobs—it will also equate to reduced capacity for critical wildfire positions and resources like militia crews, which are 20-person emergency wildfire crews made up of a mix of fire and non-fire positions (recreation, timber, silviculture, “ologists” etc) as well as a number of incident management team roles that are not traditionally maintained through fire funding. Whatever your thoughts are about the inefficacies of federal land management—you can expect it will get a whole lot worse now that these non-fire and support positions have been lost.

The writing on the wall for wildland firefighters right now is that this is all part of the process of privatizing federal land management/wildland firefighting—a move that wouldn’t be unsurprising given, for just one example, outspoken Montana Senator Tim Sheehy’s ownership of Bridger Aerospace, an aerial firefighting company valued at $84.1 million in September 2024, up 26% year-over-year from late 2023 to late 2024. Bridger just picked up a $20-million-dollar federal contract, too! Privatization and multi-million dollar federal aircraft contracts are good for business! It’s important that we keep Bridger’s 148 employees paid and working—jobs are good! But the people making $15 with their hands in the literal dirt doing the work that actually contains wildfires, yeah those guys and gals can suck it! Sarcasm aside, their already difficult jobs will be immeasurably harder this summer as critical incident management team support roles go unfilled; as more hotshot crews lose their status because they can’t retain qualified people (or hire rookies); and as less federal engines and militia staff are available to support hotshot crews and other resources in tasks like building indirect line, performing burnouts, mopping up and other roles that are more critical to building containment on wildfires than any amount of aircraft will ever be.

As a quick aside, for a group of people so worried about “15 minute cities” and the urbanization of everything, I have to imagine that cutting 3400 people from jobs in rural communities (where, I probably don’t need to tell you, good careers are few and far between) is a pretty effective way to force people to move to more urban areas. In that same vein, the potential loss of public land stewardship for the common good (rather than for profit) also runs pretty counter to the crunchy alt-right utopia we’ve been sold by RFK and his ilk—the one where we have clean air and water and we can all homestead to our heart’s desire with our brood of homeschooled children raised on unpasteurized milk and essential oils. Keeping those kids healthy without continued research into cures for deadly childhood diseases will surely not be easy. Not to mention that fruits, veggies and high-quality beef are also likely to be a bit more expensive once prices reflect the fact that farmers and ranchers are not being reimbursed for millions of dollars of Inflation Reduction Act funding intended to support their operations.

Finally, who are we expecting to steward the 192 million acres of USDA land in the US if we continue gutting our federal land agencies? We are getting rid of positions that often thanklessly support and manage our public lands in ways few people even understand—the health of those lands and our access to them, to name a few. This is land that makes up some of our most treasured recreational sites, land where some 180 million people get their drinking water. And Elon Musk is out here talking about how these employees are “parasites”. I shudder to imagine a future in which the right successfully paints all employees of federal land agencies as inept “parasites” before paving (probably literally) the way for the privatization of our public lands because surely, capitalism could do better than these public servants making $50k a year while doing six different jobs because all of their colleagues were fired???

This all brings me back to my fundamental question: Why are we targeting people making maybe $60k a year doing fuels projects that make a meaningful difference in protecting rural communities from wildfire? Why are we targeting the people who clear trails for $15 an hour so those of us who enjoy the landscapes we live in for their beauty rather than for their extraction potential can enjoy them? We’re talking about the people who keep dispersed campground bathrooms clean (the lord’s work if you ask me), the people who take kids on nature hikes and teach them about plants, people who fight f*cking wildfires as a collateral duty.

On a slightly different note, a hiring “delay” remains in place for USDA firefighters and seasonal employees, at about the exact time when seasonal firefighters/employees are generally being hired for summer work. The freeze was apparently lifted by that has not made actually hiring people any easier, according to sources who are actually doing the hiring. When I worked on a hotshot crew, I got my job offer the day before Valentine's Day, if it’s any indication. February is the peak of hiring season, and this is important because rookies/new-hires on these crews (in other words, the people who don’t have rehire rights from having been on the crew before) must prepare to uproot their lives for a fast-approaching six-month fire season. They need to know what type of crew they’re hired on so they can train appropriately and prepare to travel to their duty stations for start dates in April and May. And we need these seasonal employees who currently can’t get hired. Maybe you’ve heard but we already have a pretty bad retention issue. And delaying hiring by even a few days or weeks means that this retention will be further impacted, because people will go find jobs that are less up in the air rather than sitting around waiting for a job offer from an agency in complete disarray. None of this diminishes the fact that we need our hotshot crews at full capacity, we need to be able to staff engines, we need militia crews, and we need to continue bringing fresh folks into the system to ensure our land management goals are met not only this year but for years to come.

To be clear—I know not everything is rainbows and butterflies in the Forest Service (or the BLM etc). A lot needs to be changed, but that’s an essay for another time. What worries me is watching these people burn it all down without a legitimate plan in place to built it back, and I worry about how the people who stand to make a lot of money off our public lands will fill this vacuum, because my instinct is that it will probably involve a lot of extractive industry in the places where we get our drinking water.

My point is: the very LAST thing that needs to be culled from these agencies are the people with their boots on the ground doing meaningful work that represents American ideals actually worth representing: those of collaboration and cooperation, those of using your body and strength for good, those of working for the greater good with people you may or may not agree with, but whom you share a common, unified goal with. And while it’s not a perfect consolation, it does bring me peace to know that our soft, feckless, fake-tanner-covered president will never understand what it means to be a part of something as special as that.