This story was published in association with High Country News.
Americans visit hiking and camping areas managed by the US Forest Service More than 150 million times every year
If you climb a mountain or hike through a golden aspen forest, paddle a protected river or visit one of the cultural sites of the millions of acres of public national forest, there’s a good chance you’ll encounter not a bunch of federal workers. – Time employee.
The organization relies on a large, often unappreciated army of seasonal or temporary workers who clean bathrooms and campgrounds, empty trash cans, maintain trails, greet people at visitor centers, and do critical research work on the environment.
These employees oversee the agency’s monitoring of public water and forest health, clearing brush and trees that pose wildfire hazards, and monitoring the health of Alaska’s sockeye salmon. Forest Service-managed sections of the Appalachian Trail damaged by Hurricane Helen will likely be repaired by temporary workers. (Hikers are currently advised to stay closed 800 miles of the Appalachian Trail.)
Next summer, however, most of these tasks will be performed by other staff – or not at all.
Due to budget cuts, the agency will not hire seasonal workers for the next fiscal year, putting thousands of people out of work and jeopardizing essential conservation and biodiversity work.
D The spending bill was recently passed by the House Agency has given That’s about half a billion dollars less than requested, meaning the Forest Service faces a large budget cut within the Department of Agriculture. Most other environmental and science-based federal agencies also face big cuts. Meanwhile, the agency has already spent money it received from the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate act signed by the Biden administration.
All of this, combined with recent cost-of-living increases for staff, means the agency is feeling strapped for cash. Next year “probably won’t be a very robust budget environment,” Forest Service budget director Mark Lichtenstein said. An all-staff call in mid-September.
The decision does not apply to the more than 11,000 temporary firefighter positions that the Forest Service hires each year. An agency spokeswoman said the Forest Service has hired more than 2,500 non-fire temporary employees in fiscal year 2024.
On an all-staff call, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore acknowledged that the agency would struggle without its seasonal staff.
“I know that this decision will affect your ability to do some critical work,” he said. “It will be felt deeply by managers and units across the agency.”
In the days leading up to the call, news spread quickly that recruitment through the ranks of temporary seasonal workers had been suspended. Some heard about it directly from their supervisors. Others have found out on redditWhere a letter has been posted announcing a hiring freeze from the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service. Temporary workers who feared for their future filled the comment sections.
“I was really banking (seasonal work the following summer),” one temporary employee said in an interview, asking that his name not be used, since he is still employed by the agency. “I was also banking on seasonal winter Forest Service positions to get me through the off-season, and all of a sudden, they were completely canceled.”
Temporary workers often face this type of uncertainty, working together for the winter when they lose their jobs and health care benefits and then returning to seasonal work for the summer. In many cases, they depend on the agency not only for paychecks, but for housing, living in owned buildings or subsidized by the Forest Service.
The impact of budget cuts on hiring goes beyond seasonal workers. The agency also announced that, with very few exceptions, it would not hire external candidates for any positions within the agency, meaning open positions would have to be filled by current employees. And because seasonal work is a common stepping stone to a permanent role, many temporary workers who had hoped for careers in public land management now find themselves at a disadvantage.
Longtime seasonal and permanent workers are shocked and angry at the news of the hiring freeze. A recording of a staff meeting in mid-September was shared by an employee and reviewed by Vox and High Country News, Workers at the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southern Washington emphasize the importance of seasonal labor. One man, who identified himself as Trevor, said his “entire program” depends on a “large seasonal crew” and wondered how he would be able to do his job in the future. Another employee cited insufficient funding during the Congressional year as a drain on morale in the organization. He added that the loss of temporary staff would have an “agency-wide” negative impact.
“We cannot operate without our seasonal workers,” he said.
Symbolizes the backbone of seasonal workers Forest Service workforce
They may be “temporary” in name, but the Forest Service’s seasonal employees are an important source of institutional and local ecological knowledge for the agency.
Many return season after season, often to the same forest, despite the low pay – often around $15/hour for an entry-level position. Several workers interviewed for this story said they are hoping to snag permanent roles. Those workers are especially vital to field operations, said Jamie Tommins, who worked as a trail and wilderness lead for several years for offices in Wyoming, New Hampshire and Washington.
“It takes many years of seasonal work for most people to get a permanent job, and those high-grade seasonals are where you find the most knowledgeable field workers,” he said.
“Permanent employees can be highly trained, perhaps they can be seasonal at first,” Tommins said, “but they’re usually busy under their own administrative load and not always available to go into the field or train new people.”
From building and maintaining trails to planting trees and removing dangerously flammable invasive species like cheatgrass, seasonal employees do much of the work of maintaining national forests.
“I just don’t understand all the efficiency and how the Forest Service is going to lose,” he said.
In practice, temporary employees often end up working far above their pay grade. James Bardo, a biological science technician who works with plants, said this summer at Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest that, because of short staffing, he found himself working on rare plants that would be better suited to an agency botanist.
“I’ve never been to Southern Oregon,” he said. “I’ve never worked in Southern Oregon or anywhere near it. And I was the taxing authority there, and it was just like, I really shouldn’t be.”
Burdo worries about what cuts would make to the agency’s already paper-thin workforce for important environmental work like conserving threatened species.
“It can be problematic when you’re going to be working in the forest, cutting trees,” he said. “Did you know that this rare plant species is actually there? Or is it easily confused with something else? … This is very worrying as a conservation botanist.”
Next summer, this loss of efficiency will be felt in countless ways. During the all-staff call, Moore said the agency would scale back services rather than make more demands on its reduced staff.
“We can’t do the same amount of work with fewer employees,” he said. “So, in other words, we’re going to do what we can with what we have. We will not try to do everything expected of us with fewer people.”
But there are some tasks that cannot be easily separated. A temporary employee, who asked that her name not be used, works at the Mount St. Helens National Volcano Monument visitor center. He described basic tasks such as emptying trash, weeding around buildings to reduce fire hazards, and managing overflow parking at popular sites. All these actions, if left undone, can cause chaos next summer.
He estimates that two permanent employees will be released to work for five, once the seasonal positions are cut. He envisioned the possible consequences: locked gates and closed recreation access, and trails or camping sites left inaccessible. He called it “detrimental to the public” as well as to employees who have to deal with the fallout.
“You’re always going to have people complaining about things,” he said, “but if we shut things down, and there’s trash everywhere, it’s only going to increase, and it’s very unfair to the workers who remain.”
Important work will stop
In recent years, the Forest Service has tried to reduce its reliance on seasonal employees, converting about 1,400 temporary workers to permanent status. But even those newly permanent employees will feel budget cutbacks.
Many of these new positions are known as “permanent seasonal” roles. in recent times substack Post about the agency’s hiring problems, Tommins compared a public school teacher’s job: “a permanent employee with a long” break, though that break is in the winter, not the summer.
In normal years, workers may extend their tenure, add hours, or take on new jobs for some extra money. But in announcing the hiring moratorium, the Forest Service made it clear that permanent seasonal workers will not be able to extend their tenure in the next fiscal year. Meanwhile, many promised promotions are on hold and some external recruitment offers have to be rescinded.
Scott Shell, executive director of the Northwest Avalanche Center, worries what the cutbacks will mean for his organization, a public-private partnership that works with the Forest Service to provide weather and snowfall data in Oregon and Washington. In addition to important snowfall data for backcountry skiers and ski resorts, NWAC contributes to climate research and weather forecasting for Interstate 90, one of the nation’s major transcontinental highways, which crosses Washington’s Cascade Mountains.
Schell said his office has received an allowance from the federal government to bring in a handful of seasonal employees to forecast snow, but fewer than in past years.
“We’re basically going through a sort of triaging matrix,” he said. “There’s no way we’re going to do what we did last year.”
