Since last week, the Forest Service has fired at least 2,000 employees, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service. That’s raising concerns among some employees, who say they’re worried about how the Trump administration’s staffing cuts will affect fire season — particularly in the vast wildlands that make up Oregon and the West.
In interviews with OPB, almost a dozen current and former Forest Service employees said they feared this loss of workers will be catastrophic for the fire season ahead. The agency’s fired employees included ecologists, park rangers and other workers broadly called “forestry technicians.”
Some were also part of a backup team of certified firefighters.
Liz Crandall, a former field ranger with the Deschutes National Forest in Central Oregon, was part of that team, and is among the fired Forest Service staff. As a park ranger, Crandall spent most of her time patrolling vast wildlands around Central Oregon, clearing abandoned campfires and responding to emergencies.
“I’m eyes on the woods,” Crandall said. “I’m the person that’s seeing every corner of the woods that others might not see.”
Crandall was also part of what Forest Service employees internally call the “militia” — a team the agency can tap for firefighting help when staffing is slim or when major fires strain resources.
Crandall has worked with the agency since 2017, but she entered into a probationary period when she took on a new role. Many of the federal employees who lost their jobs were probationary workers — meaning they were in their first year or two of a position and, therefore, had fewer worker protections.
Crandall said she has helped fight 12 major wildfires since joining the Forest Service. She said the agency’s claims about its firefighting staff are misleading.
“They’re saying no firefighters were fired, but in fact, many of us are firefighters,” Crandall said.
FILE: Firefighters' mop-up hotspots along the edge of a wildfire in the Willamette National Forest in July 2024.
Courtesy U.S. Forest Service via InciWeb
In a statement, a USDA spokesperson said the Forest Service didn’t fire any “operational firefighters,” and that it is “committed to preserving essential safety positions.” The spokesperson did not respond to questions about employees who were certified to fight fires as secondary roles.
Some terminated Forest Service workers also supported firefighting work in other ways.
Lanny Flaherty, who was an ecologist with the Wallowa Whitman National Forest, said he was often on the fire line as a resource advisor or out with a team that researches fire behavior.
Like Crandall, Flaherty was also a certified wildland firefighter. He usually spent about half his year working alongside firefighters, either in Oregon or in other states that needed more staff. Flaherty said he was doing just that in Louisiana when he was fired, only to have his position temporarily restored long enough for him to travel back home before he was fired again.
“It’s just unequivocally cruel,” Flaherty said. “Nobody’s getting into this game because they think they’re getting rich off it. We’re losing this pool of dedicated and passionate people.”
When Flaherty wasn’t working on a fire line, he was collecting vegetation data in Eastern Oregon. Some of that data measured stream impacts from nearby cattle grazing. He also monitored brush and trees in areas that recently burned. That data added to the Forest Service’s fire prediction modeling.
Flaherty also helped firefighters avoid inadvertently destroying rare plants or archaeological sites during prescribed burns.
“Every role is so dynamic,” Flaherty said. “There’s a huge amount of those secondary roles that aren’t just directly digging line or swinging a tool that supports the firefighting operations.”
Some people fear these federal cuts will not only affect fire suppression, but also fire prevention work like prescribed burns, setting up the country for a potentially catastrophic fire season. Prescribed burning — intentionally setting fire to brush and grasses — is crucial to helping prevent major wildfires on public lands.
“You can come up with a lot of ways in which this goes sideways very quickly for mountain communities, for forest communities and for anyone who lives in the wildland urban interface,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director with the conservation advocacy group Center for Western Priorities, said.
This is all happening on top of a seasonal worker hiring freeze that the Biden administration announced last year. Those seasonal workers did a wide range of tasks, from cleaning bathrooms to maintaining trials to working as trail guides. This freeze applies to natural resource agencies including the Forest Service and the National Parks Service — places that typically see a lot of foot traffic during the summer months.
Without these staff, travelers might struggle to get camping reservations or permits for recreational activities like hiking, dispersed camping and mushroom foraging. Travelers might also run into more damaged trail infrastructure, like bridges and directional signs.
“If you vacation on public lands — if you’re planning to go places like Crater Lake or the Olympic Peninsula, or Mount Rainier, you name it — there is a very real chance you’re going to have a pretty terrible summer vacation,” Weiss said.