Forest Service firings mean fewer visitor services, opportunities
Laura Lundquist
(Missoula Current) On Thursday afternoon, a man in khaki and green slumped in his chair and looked around at the dozens of photos adorning his office walls. Each showed young, smiling U.S. Forest Service crews from different years, holding chainsaws, shovels and Pulaskis, arms thrown casually over each others’ shoulders. Stopping his gaze on the photo of last year’s crew, he finally sighed and picked up the phone. By the end of the day, he’d told all of them they were fired.
On Thursday, the U.S. Forest Service fired approximately 3,400 employees throughout the agency who were still on probationary status. Most probationary employees are in entry level jobs working in the field, such as maintaining trails, clearing timber and brush and providing customer service. The cuts affected about 10% of the Forest Service workforce.
In Montana, that put 360 people out of a job and affected more than 400 people across the national forests of Region 1. That might not sound like many, and Americans may not feel the Forest Service cuts yet. But they probably will in a few months as winter begins to ease and they try to visit their favorite trails and campgrounds. Because those are the places that the former employees cared for.
“(The day) went from using the tracker to figure out when they would start their six months (of work) to then they got the news that they’re terminated,” a Forest Service manager said. “We just lost the people that maintain these things, our probation folks. We lost (several) in just our district, people who work on weeds, fish and wildlife techs, trail and recreation, customer service and timber. Some of our people had worked a decade before they finally got this job. They weren’t just probation; they’d been here. They just fell in that category. And got the phone call.”
The Forest Service sources for this story asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs.
Some probationary employees were trail crew members that maintained hundreds of miles of trail on each ranger district or weed technicians battling invasive species. Some were customer service employees at ranger stations who helped visitors with questions or who worked the reservation systems for forest service cabin and lookout rentals. Some were campground hosts, who not only maintained the peace each night but also cleaned the vault toilets and restocked the toilet paper. So campgrounds probably won’t be as clean or quiet this year. Some were recreation specialists that monitored rental cabins, trails, trailheads and boat launches.
Will campgrounds close? Will reservation systems be cancelled? Will trails become impassible? That all could happen, but it’s still too early to say, one manager said.
“We’ll have to look at our trail programs and our campgrounds and where are we going to start making cuts? We may have to let class 2 and 3 trails, less popular trails, go. I hate to see it and even talk about it, but at some point, it’s the law of diminishing returns because we just don’t have the people. Now we’re trying to figure out how the hell that looks” one Forest Service employee said. “If there are no campground hosts, every night we have thousands of people on the district. You need people cleaning toilets. Campgrounds in Northern Montana and Idaho with the Canadians - what are we going to do with all those people? A lot of it is Canadians. They like it down here.”
Vault toilets are going to be a big issue, because each district has between 50 and 100 and in addition to being cleaned, all of them have to be emptied regularly. The Forest Service contracts with private companies to pump out the vaults in addition to hauling trash from campgrounds and day sites.
But Forest Service managers said the agency budget was uncertain at this point, so they might not have the money to fulfill the contracts this year. So as toilets and dumpsters overflow and degrade, some may have to be closed, which causes human waste problems elsewhere.
Forest Service visitors might be displeased by the results of the cuts, but rural communities could suffer more. Most ranger stations are in small communities where some of the residents have depended on the Forest Service for part-time employment. Such communities in Montana include Huson, Wisdom, Lincoln, Hungry Horse and Eureka.
One Forest Service employee said some locals work six months, collect unemployment benefits for three months and then tough out the rest of the year. Some did it for the money - $15 an hour - while others did it hoping to finally land a permanent Forest Service position. Either way, it kept some people employed and money flowing into the community.
In 2024, the Forest Service changed from hiring people seasonally to using a temp-to-perm program, where new hires still worked only six months but they got health insurance and benefits. However, they were also on probation. And that’s who was fired. With little or no other work in small towns, those people will likely move, leaving the towns diminished. In addition, the Forest Service often hired the local businesses for sanitation work but that’s up in the air now.
One Forest Service manager wondered how he was going to carry out his duties with only 12% of his team remaining. He said the firings could have a ripple effect, because the employees that remain might decide at some point that it’s no fun struggling to meet requirements with a skeleton crew. There are also no employees being trained to move up.
“Even some that were fortunate enough to get year-round (employment), I expect to go into their office tomorrow and see them cleared out. And, those folks at the bottom who were so happy to get their positions, great people, hard workers - they’re gone. I don’t see where that’s efficient. It just sucks,” the manager said. “One guy resigned after he lost his crew. To lose a guy like that, it takes a long time to train a guy like that.”
The Trump administration has made some rash moves only to walk them back after people protest. For example, also on Thursday, the administration fired National Nuclear Security Administration workers without understanding the workers are responsible for designing, building and overseeing the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. On Friday, the administration tried to reverse their terminations but reportedly struggled to reach the people that were fired because the workers had been locked out of their government email accounts.
Even if the Forest Service firings were reversed, some of the damage has already been done. Forest Service hiring is a process that takes about a month and some former employees might have already moved on. In the meantime, the tourist season isn’t far off. One employee called it “a dark situation.”
“The mission of the Forest Service is caring for the land and serving people. But they just chopped one of the legs off the people they’re serving. If they were going to stick it to somebody, they just stuck it to a bunch of people who work six months of the year and make about $15 an hour. You just hit the best part of the agency,” one employee said. “You think about national parks too. Public land is so badass - it’s so awesome to have this opportunity, and they just arbitrarily dumped it with no give-a-shit. It’s not a golf course; it’s the best of the best.”
About 1,000 National Park Service employees and 420 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees were also fired on Thursday.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.