Most Forest Service employees will soon lose their jobs

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The US Forest Service is a federal agency that manages 193 million acres of land, about the size of Texas. Next year, the agency will have to manage this land without a seasonal workforce. in September the agency reported that it is suspending all seasonal hiring for the 2025 season, a decision that will result in about 2,400 job cuts. Almost all of these positions are field jobs, ranging from biologists and loggers to trail technicians and recreation staff. In addition, the agency freezes any external hiring for permanent positions. The only exception to the hiring freeze is the roughly 11,300 firefighters the agency hires each year.

According to the agency and its partners, the consequences of these staff cuts will be far-reaching and serious. During a Sept. 17 call to all employees in which he announced the hiring freeze, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said, “We just can’t do the same job with fewer people.” While the Forest Service has been cutting jobs for decades — about 8,000 jobs over the past 20 years, Moore said — this will be the largest single-year reduction in recent memory.

Seasonal workers perform important field work and research that goes beyond what many Americans think of as the Forest Service’s jurisdiction. Rangers patrol whitewater rivers, rock climbing and dangerous alpine peaks. Biologists are engaged in catching salmon. Recreation crews maintain forest roads and clean toilets in the camp. Employees of all types step in as emergency firefighters when needed. Staff cuts could leave some avalanche centers that rely on Forest Service funding short of staff this winter, according to the American Avalanche Association.

And then there are trails. According to the Government Accountability Office, the Forest Service has a maintenance backlog of more than a decade and controls more miles of trail than it can maintain. Retrenchment of most of the field staff will only make matters worse.

“This policy will lead to prosperity trail maintenance lagboth due to a lack of attention by Forest Service personnel to trail maintenance and a loss of communication and relationships with partner organizations,” Mike Passo, executive director of American Trails, a nonprofit partner of the Forest Service, said in an email.

Backpack spoke with about a dozen permanent and seasonal employees of the forest servicemost on the condition of anonymity, about their experience of downsizing. Some have expressed concern that trail crews simply won’t be able to work. They described how crews of six seasonal workers had disappeared, leaving one or two permanent crew leaders trying to make things work. One intern in the National Pathways program, which is designed to automatically place successful interns full-time at the agency, said she was told her job offer would likely be withdrawn. Other conservation and nonprofit workers who saw Forest Service positions as a step on the career ladder are rethinking their priorities.

Danica Mooney-Jones, a trail crew leader who has been with the Forest Service since 2021, is among those who will be out of a job next year. Where she works, the trail crew will be reduced from five to two, and the wider recreation program will be reduced from 13 to four.

“I moved to another country to work here, for a seasonal job,” she says. “We have people who have worked here for 10 years as seasonal workers, and have made careers in these positions. They believed that jobs would not disappear.”

Now she and her former colleagues face a difficult choice: leave their communities to find work elsewhere, or stay put and find a new career. Mooney Jones considers herself lucky; armed desert EMT trainingshe found a local winter job as a ski patrol. Still, the idea of ​​leaving the Forest Service forever is sobering.

“I would be very sad if this was the end of my trailer career,” says Mooney-Jones. “I really enjoy working, I like seeing the product and I’m very proud of the work we do.”

Road maintenance is important in every season, but 2025 could prove especially difficult for the workforce that does it. After Hurricane Helen, the southern portions of the Appalachian Trail are closed due to landslides, landslides and washed out bridges. According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, more than 2,000 trees need to be cleared from the AT in Tennessee alone, and many Forest Service access roads from Georgia to Virginia are closed due to erosion and rockfall.

That’s just on the AT, a popular long-distance trail maintained by a nonprofit organization and hundreds of trained volunteers. Elsewhere in the southern United States, lesser-known trails face similar conditions, but rely solely on Forest Service personnel to reopen them.

The cuts also left staff and partners wondering how the budget shortfall became so dire after several promising years of increased funding.

In 2021, the Biden administration set a minimum wage of $15 an hour for all federal employees, raising wages for some entry-level positions in the Forest Service. The agency has also converted about 1,300 seasonal non-firefighter positions to permanent employment over the past few years. Wild firefighterswho now make up about half of the Forest Service workforce, received bonuses of up to $20,000 a year, which were temporarily funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. Several Forest Service officials said the hope is that pay raises for firefighters will eventually lead to raises for other workers in the field.

But those short-term gains have all but disappeared, replaced by a sudden budget deficit.

In March, the Forest Service requested $8.9 billion in funding, a $500 million increase from $8.37 billion in 2024. By summer, it was clear the agency was unlikely to get him. In August, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore released a statement on how the USFS is preparing for a reduced budget. With little evidence that Congress will pass a government funding bill before the end of the year, Moore said in a Sept. 17 all-staff phone call that “(the Forest Service) has an obligation to plan for the most conservative funding option.” A week later, Congress passed a continuing resolution that extended the 2024 funding level until December 20.

The lowest figure Moore talked about comes from a House Interior Appropriations Committee proposal that would set spending caps for all federal land management agencies, including the Forest Service and the National Park Service. This year’s proposal includes $8.43 billion for the Forest Service — technically a modest increase from 2024. But last year’s budget was boosted by an additional $945 million through pandemic-era stimulus bills, a source of funding that has since dried up. And while the House proposal fully funds firefighter pay raises, the proposed budget would still require cuts in other parts of the agency. All of these details cloud the financial picture, but compared to total funding in 2024, the agency could face a budget hole of nearly a billion dollars next year.

With next year’s Forest Service budget still pending, it’s likely the agency will fill some seasonal positions in the near future. “We are working closely with individual partners to explore creative solutions to fill gaps where possible. And we hope to have more hiring options next year if additional funding becomes available,” Scott Owen, national press officer for the Forest Service, wrote in an email.

Even with these serious financial details, it’s clear that the agency’s decision to balance the balance sheet by cutting seasonal jobs came as a shock to many employees.

“My confidence definitely took a hit,” says Mooney-Jones. “I would consider going back to the Forest Service, but I’m not sure I can. It’s a balance between how I feel about how we’ve been treated and how much I love the forest.”