The US Forest Service is firing about 3,400 recent hires while the National Park Service is terminating about 1,000 workers under Donald Trump’s push to cut federal spending and bureaucracy, according to a report on Friday.
The terminations target employees who are in their probationary employment period (which includes anyone hired less than a year ago), according to Reuters, and will affect sites such as the Appalachian trail, Yellowstone, the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr and the Sequoia national forest.
The cuts represent about 10% of the Forest Service workforce and about 5% of National Park Service employees, but excludes firefighters, law enforcement and certain meteorologists, as well as 5,000 seasonal workers, from the cutbacks.
“Allowing parks to hire seasonal staff is essential, but staffing cuts of this magnitude will have devastating consequences for parks and communities,” the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) president, Theresa Pierno, said in a statement.
The association warned in a statement this month that staffing levels are not keeping pace with increasing demands on the national park system, which saw 325m visits in 2023 alone – an increase of 13m from 2022.
Kristen Brengel, the NPCA’s senior vice-president of government affairs, warned that visitors from around the world expecting a once-in-a-lifetime experience, could now be faced with “overflowing trash, uncleaned bathrooms and fewer rangers to provide guidance”.
Like other government agencies, the National Park Service was taken by surprise by a late January order from the White House office of management and budget pausing federal grants. The administration rescinded the order two days later and is reevaluating it.
Across the federal government, about 280,000 employees out of the 2.3 million-member civilian federal workforce were hired in the last two years, with most still on probation and easier to fire, according to government data.
In addition to the national parks, about 159 million people visit national forests annually. The Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said it could not comment on personnel matters.
The agriculture department said in a statement that protecting people and communities, as well as the infrastructure, businesses and resources, remains “a top priority”.
“Our wildland firefighter and other public safety positions are of the utmost priority,” it added.
However the federal funding freeze is affecting programs meant to mitigate wildfire risk in western states as well as freezing the hiring of seasonal firefighters.
The reduction in resources for wildfire prevention comes a month after devastating blazes in Los Angeles that are expected to be the costliest in US history.
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The Oregon-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project non-profit said its contracts with federal agencies, including the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, to reduce hazardous fuels in Oregon, California and Idaho have been frozen.
“The funding freeze has impacted more than 30 separate grants and agreements that Lomakatsi has with federal agencies, including pending awards as well as active agreements that are already putting work on the ground,” the project’s executive director, Marko Bey, said in a letter to Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
A spokesperson for the interior department, the parent agency of the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, said it was reviewing funding decisions.
Senate Democrats have called on the administration to unlock fire-mitigation funding, and separately have asked interior and the agriculture department leadership to exempt seasonal firefighters from a broad federal hiring freeze.
Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy group for federal firefighters, said its members have been unable to hire the hundreds of firefighters that are typically brought on at this time of year to gear up for the summer fire season.
“The agencies already have had a recruitment and retention problem,” Riva Duncan, vice-president of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said in an interview. “This just exacerbates that problem.”
Article by:Source: Edward Helmore and agencies
