Public lands in the United States have long been considered a national treasure.
But, since Thursday, at least 3,000 employees have been laid off across the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, part of a wave of Trump administration cuts to the federal workforce. Together, these agencies oversee 278 million acres of land, roughly the size of Texas and Montana combined.
With whole teams slashed and fewer staff to provide basic functions like cleaning up trails, emptying pit toilets, carrying out trash and staffing visitors centers, employees say these vast public lands are in danger of falling into disarray.
Current and former employees of these agencies say their departments were already underfunded and understaffed before the job cuts, particularly as climate change has begun to significantly transform America’s natural areas.
Over the weekend, I spoke to nearly a dozen employees who were terminated or saw their job offers rescinded, along with managers forced to deliver those notices from the Forest Service and the National Park Service. Most had been employed by the federal government for years or even decades.
Some cuts could threaten the local economies and safety of nearby towns, the employees say. Among those whose jobs were eliminated were river and wilderness rangers, scientists who help keep forests healthy to minimize fire danger, analysts, attorneys and administrators. Many were trained to assist firefighters, possessing skills that are required each summer as climate change causes bigger and more severe fires.
The workers had a lot in common: Most lived in small towns, most had no backup plan when they were let go and all expressed that they had worked for these agencies because they loved public lands and wanted to be of service to their communities.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, said the agency made “the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, nonfirefighting employees.”Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, “is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted,” the spokesperson said. The Park Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Patrolling America’s wilderness
Kate White, 29, lost her position as a wilderness ranger outside Seattle on Saturday after six years of seasonal work and 20 months of permanent employment with the U.S. Forest Service. She and her six co-workers took care of 500 miles of popular trails crisscrossing the Cascade Mountains. In a single season, she said, they monitored 70 backcountry toilets, carried out 600 pounds of trash and disposed of more than 1,000 piles of human waste.
This weekend, most of her co-workers also lost their jobs. Just one is left, which means just one staff member has the primary duty of patrolling 340,000 acres of wilderness, White said.
Many workers in these agencies, outside of full-time firefighting, carry what’s called a red card, which means they’re trained to assist in wildland firefighting. Without those personnel, it will be more challenging to manage the increased risk of wildfire under climate change.
Another employee who had a job offer rescinded at Mount Rainier National Park worried over visitor safety in the mountains. “Large areas of the alpine terrain are going to be unstaffed and inaccessible for long periods of time,” the employee said.
An employee at a national forest in California said the cuts, plus unfilled roles, meant their particular forest would go into summer with 80% fewer staff members overall, not including full-time firefighters. Both employees asked to remain anonymous out of fear of being terminated or not being rehired by the U.S. government.
Search and rescue
On Friday morning, Stacy Ramsey, 49, was monitoring a section of the Buffalo National River, a 135-mile waterway in northern Arkansas managed by the National Park Service, when she saw an email pop up on her phone with a headline that included the word “termination.”
She was still in shock when, minutes later, she received a text to return to headquarters. There, the division chiefs, some crying, gathered in a conference room to tell her the firing was effective immediately.
“They looked like someone had died,” Ramsey recalled the next day. She’d spent three years in a contract position, working weekends while holding down a second full-time job just to get her foot in the door. She’d become the park’s only year-round river ranger last March.
Ramsey had grown up along the Buffalo in Searcy County, one of the poorest parts of Arkansas. She made $39,000 a year, a pay cut from her previous job teaching middle school, but just enough to cover her mortgage and bills.
In the past few years, Ramsey noticed the river was changing, which she attributed to more extreme weather under a warming planet. Last summer, an extended drought caused 4 miles of the river to dry up, killing hundreds of fish. Major floods have become more common, eroding the banks and making the river wider and shallower. Floods also wash in trees, creating dangerous culverts called strainers. She said these events can increase dangers for park visitors.
Her job as a river ranger was to keep them safe: She monitored the waterway, talked to visitors and issued warnings for parts of the river that could put them at risk.
“If no one is there to educate, it increases the risk of someone getting hurt on the river,” Ramsey said.
Safety and education
Workers said there will be fewer people to educate visitors about the wilderness.
In 2022, Jillian Greene, a 24-year-old wilderness ranger, moved to Montana for a seasonal position with the U.S. Forest Service. She fell in love with the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, a region of steep peaks draped in rapidly melting glaciers. She lost her job last week.In her position, she spent five to eight days at a time backpacking into high elevations to clear trails and clean up campsites. A decade ago, five wilderness rangers covered roughly a third of the nearly 1—million-acre wilderness over the summer season; last year there were two, including Greene. This year, unless staff are rehired, there won’t be any. Greene said she worried about an increase in potentially dangerous encounters between visitors and bears and about fewer hands to put out untended campfires. “I’m so scared for the future of public lands,” Greene said. “It’s been a really emotional weekend.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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