Despite being in office for less than a month, the Trump administration has already made the United States more exposed to catastrophic wildfires in ways that will be difficult to reverse, current and former federal employees say.
On Thursday, the administration fired 3,400 employees from the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of land, about the size of Texas. This comes on top of a funding freeze also ordered by the administration that has interrupted work designed to clear national forests of vegetation that can feed wildfires.
That work has grown increasingly important as wildfires become more frequent and intense because of drought and other conditions linked to climate change.
The job cuts, which amount to roughly 10 percent of the agency’s work force, could hobble the Forest Service, which was already struggling to remove vegetation across its vast land holdings at a pace that matches the growing threat from fires, according to current and former federal employees, as well as private companies and nonprofit organizations that work on thinning forested lands.
“The forests were already in crisis,” said a person who manages wildfire prevention projects in California and spoke on the condition of anonymity out of a fear of reprisal. He noted that Congress had given more than $2 billion in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act for forest management, including wildfire prevention, through 2031. “This is pulling the rug out from that entire endeavor.”
The Trump administration has said reductions in staffing and cuts in spending will improve government efficiency. But several of these actions are leaving the country more exposed to disasters, ultimately driving up costs, experts say.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has quietly weakened its rules that are designed to protect schools, libraries, fire stations and other public buildings from flooding. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is losing staff members who manage disaster resilience grants, which help Americans rebuild after catastrophe.
At the same time, the Trump administration is working to roll back federal efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from burning of coal, oil and natural gas, which are warming the planet and making wildfires, flooding, hurricanes and other severe weather events worse.
For much of the past century, the Forest Service aimed to protect land by stopping forest fires. That approach failed to take into account that fires clear out vegetation, and it allowed trees and brush to build up over decades. Now, when a fire does ignite, it burns larger and hotter. High temperatures and drought driven by climate change mean more dried-up vegetation, or fuel, for wildfires.
During the Biden administration, Congress invested in efforts to remove vegetation on federal lands, through a mix of thinning forests and deliberate fires known as prescribed burns. But the work is expensive and labor intensive — and with millions of acres in need of attention, the Forest Service and other agencies were only just beginning to address the need.
Even if the Trump administration resumes wildfire prevention efforts funded by the 2022 law, the window for that work may have closed in some areas, experts said. That’s because forest management projects like prescribed burns can only happen safely during specific months, when the risk of those fires getting out of control is low.
The cuts at the Forest Service and other agencies targeted employees who were still on probation and therefore had less protection against termination. But wholesale removal of probationary employees meant the cuts were not focused on poor performers, as a more strategic effort might have been.
“It’s a blunt tool,” said Laura McCarthy, the New Mexico state forester, who is responsible for managing her state’s forests. She works closely with federal land management agencies like the Forest Service on wildfire prevention projects.
In fact, firing newer and younger employees could mean the Forest Service is losing the people with the most up-to-date knowledge about forestry, Ms. McCarthy said. “Some of them may have reached a good modern skill set because they just graduated,” she said. “That is the work force that could help meet the administration’s goal of efficiency.”
In California, the Forest Service’s efforts to remove underbrush are on pause, according to a person who manages an organization that runs wildfire prevention projects in the state and who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern of reprisals.
That’s notable, given the way President Trump has criticized California for failing to remove dried vegetation in forested areas, saying that poor management of the forests contributed to the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles last month.
The Forest Service isn’t the only federal agency whose efforts on wildfires have been hampered.
At the Interior Department, where 1,000 employees were laid off Friday, a manager has been unable to hire a seasonal crew to work on fire prevention projects following the Trump administration’s freeze funds from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
Regional managers are also scrambling to figure out how to pay permanent employees, the person said.
“We’ve been understaffed for many years, so when those B.I.L. and I.R.A. funds came through, it filled vacancies that had been sitting open,” said the manager, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “But we were just told to stop moving forward with hiring.”
The impact can be seen even in small things. A fire truck, for example, that would be fully staffed with six people only has one full-time employee, so it can’t be used to help fight wildfires.
“When we get to July and August and we have forest fires, how are we going to manage those?” the person said.
The effects of the mass layoffs could be long lasting, according to current and former employees.
Many of the provisional employees who were laid off this week were frontline workers, the people working in forests, rather than behind desks in Washington.
If and when the Forest Service tries to refill positions to work on fire prevention, the nature of this week’s firings — abrupt and without obvious logic — could make recruitment difficult.
“Who in their right mind is going to want to come back?” one person said. “This is going to ripple for years.”
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