Sasha Abramsky: After Massive Cuts to Forest Service, US Enters Fire Season Woefully Unprepared

The results could be catastrophic, especially in states that have experienced unprecedented fires in recent years.

A week ago, smoke from early season Canadian wildfires, which had necessitated mass evacuations in several Canadian provinces, began wafting into the United States. It was a harbinger of what will likely be another dangerous and disruptive summer of fires across the United States and Canada.

Yet, while Canadian provinces such as Ontario have been boosting the resources they provide their firefighting services, the United States Forest Service, which includes the 10,000 personnel in the federal firefighting system, has fallen victim to indiscriminate “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) cuts since Donald Trump’s inauguration.

In February, about 700 Forest Service employees, whose full-time work is other than firefighting but who are trained to join firefighting efforts in emergencies, were fired. Thousands of other Forest Service employees, as well as others in the parent department, the Department of Agriculture (USDA), were also placed on notice that they would be fired at some point over the coming months. Many more have disappeared from, or will soon disappear from, the government’s payrolls, either through job losses or deferred resignation or early retirement, and many others have spent the past several months in limbo, as court battles play out as to whether or not they can be terminated. Absurdly, as fire season nears, many are still being paid but have been placed on administrative leave — meaning they are being paid not to work.

“In February, along with many thousands of other federal workers with less than a year in their positions, I was fired via a form letter which lacked details of my supposed ‘poor performance,’” one Forest Service employee in Colorado, who worked at building partnerships with community stakeholders to develop fire prevention strategies in western forests and grasslands, told Truthout, asking to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal. “Since then, I was provisionally brought back to work, issued a pseudo-mea culpa, and finally told that pending litigation might invalidate previous court orders … meaning that I just might be fired again.”

Another Forest Service employee, who worked in communications and also asked to remain anonymous to avoid reprisal, recalled that on the afternoon of February 13, she had just wrapped up a meeting about how to coordinate a safety message as fire season approached, when her supervisor walked toward her and beckoned her to follow her into her office. “I knew right then,” she told Truthout. “I said, ‘Is it happening?’ She said ‘Yes.’ She didn’t want to share too many words. From there, I went and filled out the paperwork and gave back my work laptop and cellphone. I was crying. Ten or so people got fired. There were lots of people crying at the supervisor’s office. It was very traumatic — like a bomb had just gone off.

The results of these indiscriminate firings, especially in western states that have experienced historically unprecedented fires in recent years, and, in consequence, huge disruptions in the insurance market, could be catastrophic. There are now less personnel available for controlled burns — meaning that conditions will be left to deteriorate until large blazes break out; there are fewer legal staff on hand, as a result of which the Forest Service will struggle to respond to lawsuits against fire management strategies; and there are fewer crews available to proactively search for fire outbreaks before they grow to dangerous proportions, as well as to tackle large fires once they do jump the fire lines.

In February, The New York Times reported that federal agencies were unable to hire thousands of firefighters as they normally do at the start of each fire season because of indiscriminate federal hiring freezes that were put in place immediately following Trump’s inauguration. Many firefighters who had already been offered jobs had those offers rescinded.

In April, the White House extended the hiring freeze through mid-July, sending a note out to agency heads informing them: “No Federal civilian position that is presently vacant may be filled, and no new position may be created.” Last week, the Washington Post reported that the administration plans to wind FEMA down after this coming hurricane season and leave states to largely fend for themselves when disasters strike.

This starve-the-beast strategy is championed by Project 2025, and implemented by the Office of Management and Budget, as well as the DOGE commissars now presiding over key federal agencies and departments. It is shredding basic government function across the board, hitting everything from science research to services for people with mental illness.

Over the coming months, Americans will start directly experiencing the consequences of this financial squeeze. Some states have the resources to plug many of the gaps created by the rollback of federal services: For instance, California is making huge investments in firefighting this year, in particular in clearing materials from forest floors and in hardening up its urban infrastructure to make it harder for fires to spread within cities; and Colorado has set up a new multimillion-dollar wildfire mitigation program. But other states either don’t have the resources or lack the political will to expand their own government infrastructure in the ways that are now needed.

In February, New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, along with several colleagues, sent a letter to the acting secretary of the USDA warning that blocking payments to fire prevention efforts that were already underway was “not only unlawful but also endangers our rural communities by removing a vital component of their economies and delaying critical work to mitigate the threat of wildfire.” More recently, officials in Kansas have warned of a near-total collapse of the state’s wildfire fighting abilities in the face of huge federal cuts.

The cuts impact not only firefighting readiness but also the health and safety of firefighters, with programs designed to track firefighters’ exposure to cancer-causing chemicals being cut back, and with workplace safety programs being either eliminated or massively reduced in scope.

Cumulatively, all of this means that, at the behest of the federal government, the United States is entering fire season with one hand tied behind its back. Ostensibly this is being done in the name of fiscal responsibility; in reality, it is anything but: A single fire that surges out of control, as did the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year, can result in tens of billions of dollars in damages. That hardly seems like a recipe for making America great again.

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First published in Truthout. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

Sasha Abramsky writes a weekly political column. Originally from England, with a bachelor’s in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he now lives in Sacramento, California.