Federal firefighters have found their jobs on the chopping block as a result of US President Donald Trump’s executive orders, with a hiring freeze simultaneously blocking reinforcements in the aftermath of the Los Angeles wildfires and ahead of the upcoming fire season.
“I know multiple people who were supposed to start work on Monday and were not able to,” said Rachel Granberg, a firefighter who serves as representative for the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), in an interview. A US District Court judge on Feb. 12 cleared the way for Trump’s buyout offers to millions of federal employees, overcoming a lawsuit by labor unions.
Granberg warned that without an exemption to the Trump administration’s widespread hiring freeze, “we’re not going to have fire crews fully staffed.”
Potential reductions to the approximately 18,000 federal firefighters, who are trained to battle blazes deep inside forests as well as at the intersection of cities and nature, would come at a time when their work has never been more crucial. Rising temperatures are contributing to faster-burning fires and ensuring blazes occur more frequently and torch more land. Climate change has also extended the burning season by two months in the US since the 1970s.
Yet the ranks of firefighters haven’t increased, and now reinforcements aren’t on the way. The union representing federal firefighters said that job offers have been withdrawn due to the hiring freeze.
“The LA fires may have had less destruction if the proper crews were fully staffed,” said Pat Bouman, a former federal firefighter who is now a member of the New York City Fire Department, referring to highly specialized “hot shot” crews employed by the government.
“It’s a wildly risky move to invite your firefighter workforce to leave in February, a few weeks before you expect fire season to ramp up,” said Rob Arnold, a union representative with NFFE.
Federal firefighters are spread out across five agencies: the US Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, as well as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs and Fish and Wildlife Service, which are part of the Interior Department. Crews from these agencies move around the country as fire hotspots shift throughout the year. For the US Southwest, fire season ramps up next month.
“Wildland firefighting positions are considered public safety positions,” said a spokesperson for the Forest Service, adding that the agency is working with the Office of Personnel Management on the wildland firefighting positions. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said it “continues to review funding decisions to be consistent with the President’s Executive Orders.”
Past federal hiring freezes have exempted firefighters. In a round of government job cuts in 2017, during the first Trump administration, firefighters weren’t affected. This time is different, although the consequences of the 60-day freeze that started on Jan. 20 remain unclear. “There is a lot of confusion,” Granberg said.
About half of all federal firefighters are currently employed as full-time workers, according to Granberg, while the other half are seasonal hires.
Granberg herself is impacted by the freeze: She’s been a seasonal federal firefighter for the past 10 years and is a squad boss who manages helicopter crews. Because her paperwork needs to be renewed every year, her usual March start date is in limbo.
US Senator Adam Schiff, a Democratic from California, wrote a letter on Feb. 7 asking for an exemption for firefighters and “to stop encouraging firefighters to resign,” noting that they had been deployed to stop the Los Angeles fires.
Firefighters on the job described thinning ranks even before the hiring freeze. “Right now is the time of the year that the agencies are finalizing hiring and bringing people on,” said Alex Pawelczyk, a dispatcher for the US Forest Service and a representative for the NFFE. “The few of us that are left are so stretched thin, people could be at risk.”
“Staffing levels are the No. 1 risk to firefighter safety,” he added. “You burn people out, they don’t operate safely.”
Warner Vanderheuel, another union representative and a battalion chief with more than two decades of experience, said worker exhaustion has already prompted what he described as mass resignations. “We have employees who are supposed to start in March,” he said. “I don’t know if they have a job.”
For the majority of firefighters, who serve local communities, specialized training for wildland and urban-interface fires isn’t provided. The International Association of Fire Fighters offers a class that costs $50,000 a course. Currently, funding for the training comes from grants and appropriations at the federal, state and local level.
The hiring freeze isn’t the only new setback for federal firefighters. Retention pay originally made available by former President Joe Biden’s administration to boost firefighter salaries is set to lapse in March. The loss of that money would cut compensation by as much as $20,000 per person.
For Keith Kelly, a Forest Service employee and member of the NFFE union, the loss of that cash would be “catastrophic.” He and his wife are both federal firefighters who met on the job and have two children under the age of three. He’s now trying to figure out how they will manage childcare costs if they lose it.
“That’s where all of our cash goes,” he said.
Photo: US Forest Service firefighters head out to put out hot spots during a fire in California. Photographer: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images