On Valentine’s Day, the White House fired thousands of federal employees, including many of the people formerly tasked with stewarding our public lands. These layoffs targeted employees within their “probationary period,” (1-2 years on the job) and veterans hired through non-competitive processes. Agencies affected include the Forest Service, Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Who was impacted?

Across the public land agencies, most of the people who lost their jobs were those working to keep public lands accessible, sanitary, and ecologically healthy, including:

• Entire trail crews maintaining paths for hikers, skiers, and snowshoes
• Rangers welcoming visitors to National Parks
• Recreation technicians with the thankless task of cleaning outhouses
• Plow drivers clearing roads and parking lots
• Field crews maintaining SNOTEL sites and weather stations
• Weed control specialists protecting ecosystems
• Many, many other “mission-critical” positions

Many of those fired were also trained wildland firefighters, essential to staffing up “Type 2” fire crews in the heat of fire season. In many cases, now-fired employees lived in agency housing and have now lost their homes in addition to their income  and other benefits. And, in many cases these were people who’d worked for the government for years, sometimes even decades, but were within their probationary period due to a change in status from a seasonal to permanent employee, a promotion, or taking a new job at a different agency.

Why were they fired?

Rather than thoughtfully considering how to achieve their goal of making the government run more efficiently, the White House chose to target probationary employees because it’s easy to fire them without justification and was an easy way to shrink the federal workforce.

Thus, rather than actually identifying, much less solving, any problems or inefficiencies within the federal workforce, these mass layoffs destabilized land management agencies, wasted millions in taxpayer dollars, and left public lands severely understaffed.

While some layoffs have been reversed due to Congressional pressure on the White House and impacts to public lands are getting a lot of news, we need to keep fighting. We need to keep the pressure on Congress to reclaim its role as a check on the Executive Branch, its role in determining how our tax dollars are spent, and get lawmakers to stand up for public lands by demanding that all of the employees who care for these lands be reinstated.

Historical Context: A Decade-Long Decline in Public Land Staffing

Even before these layoffs, land management agencies were severely underfunded and understaffed. Over the last ten years, staffing at land management agencies has steadily declined even as visitation has increased.

Since 2010, the Park Service has seen a 20% reduction in full-time staff, despite a 16% increase in visitation during the same period. More than 1,000 Park Service employees were fired on Valentines Day. The effects of this were felt immediately. For example, cars backed up for an hour and a half to enter Grand Canyon National Park over President’s Day weekend because four of the Park Rangers who work the entrance were terminated.

The Forest Service was already grappling with significant budget shortfalls for years and already faced staffing shortages this year due to the agency’s hiring freeze on seasonal employees implemented in October. The Forest Service was hit particularly hard by the February layoffs because the agency recently converted many longtime seasonal employees into permanent positions. Because most Forest Service recreation staff work seasonally and were already off the table for this year or were recently converted to permanent employees and lost their jobs on Valentines Day, the layoffs decimated Forest Service recreation program. Similar scenarios played out across the agency’s weed control, research, and restoration programs.

Where does this mean for public lands?

The full extent of the recent layoffs is still coming into focus—because the termination notices came from the White House the agencies themselves are still learning the extent of jobs lost. And, it’s widely understood that more layoffs are coming, leaving federal employees walking on eggshells, unsure of whether they will have a job from one day to the next. 

People will continue to flock to and recreate on public lands, but with limited staff to maintain recreation infrastructure or manage visitor impacts we will see:

• Outhouses filled and locked
• Toilet paper “flowers” blossoming across the landscape
• Trash pile up within and beyond campfire rings
• Impassable trails
• Escaped campfires growing into wildfires
• Infrastructure fall even further into disrepair
• Long-term impacts to ecological health
• Significant setbacks in scientific research

Nonprofits and the volunteers that they recruit have long been critical partners for public land agencies, but the non-profit community cannot fill the void left by a hollowed-out federal workforce. For one, volunteers are no substitute for professional crews. Second, much of the funding to support these stewardship and partnership programs was frozen or rescinded by the Trump Administration, forcing nonprofits to lay off or not hire the staff that would normally support public land agencies.

Setting the Stage for Public Land Sell-offs

To be clear, in addition to breaking the government, the ultimate goal of these actions is to sell off our public lands. Shrinking the workforce and leaving the public land agencies unable to meet their missions provides fodder for anti-public lands voices who argue that public lands would be better managed if transferred to the states or even sold to the private sector.

As we talked about ad nauseum during the first Trump administration, state lands are managed for profit, not public use, and states lack the resources to manage the vast federal land base. Thus, transferring federal public lands to the states is a quick stop on the road to privatization. 

Help Defend Public Lands

Without adequate staffing and resources, our experiences outside, wild winters, and the outdoor recreation economy will suffer. Congress and the Administration must take quick action to protect the workforce that keeps our public lands safe, accessible, and well cared for.

Using the form below, please write to your lawmakers right now. It’s quick and easy to ask them to push back against cuts to land management agencies and demand that our public land stewards be reinstated!