President Donald Trump is following through on promises to gut the federal workforce. In addition to a federal hiring freeze, thousands of jobs are being cut and employees are being fired, mostly probationary workers. These are employees who have recently been hired, or promoted to a new position, and are in a one- or two-year probationary period. Among the agencies impacted are federal land management agencies, which oversee millions of acres in the West.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, 2,000 probationary non-firefighting employees were let go.
Reuters is reporting approximately 2,300 employees have been let go from the Department of the Interior, including about 800 Bureau of Land Management employees, and over 1,000 National Parks Service employees.
Now, public lands advocates and lawmakers are sounding the alarm, warning of the potential impacts these cuts could have on agencies they say are already stretched too thin.
In a 12-minute speech on the Senate floor on February 19, 2025, Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) called on the Trump administration to rescind cuts to thousands of Forest Service jobs.
He said that fire season is only getting longer in Colorado and across the Rocky Mountain West, worsened by historic drought on the Colorado River.
“Cutting staff that put out unattended campfires, that manage timber sales and support wildland firefighting efforts means that our communities will face much more wildfire risk come spring,” he said.
Bennet also decried the idea that these job cuts are reducing wasteful spending, or getting rid of red tape. He said if the administration really cared about the agency operating efficiently, they’d dedicate more money to wildfire mitigation.
“Waiting till the fire happens is the most expensive way you could possibly deal with it,” he said. “The second most expensive way is to lay off the very people that help prevent the conditions from arising that are going to lead to those fires, which by the way, cost $50,000 an acre to fight.”
Steve Bloch, the legal director for the conservation nonprofit Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, says the same argument could be made for the job cuts happening in the BLM.
“If you want to accelerate leasing for oil and gas, or approval of drilling permits, but you've just cut a bunch of staff… I don't really know how that happens,” he said. “So, in a very unintended consequence, I think it's going to gum up how this agency works.”
The Trump administration and new Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum have promised to “unleash American energy,” and increase fossil fuels production. Trump has also tapped Kathleen Sgamma, a longtime advocate for the oil and gas industry through the Western Energy Alliance, to head the BLM.
Bennet also mentioned the impacts of the cuts on private businesses that rely on public lands.
“These cuts undermine businesses that require permits to operate on our public lands, from outfitters and guides to oil and gas companies, and fewer boots on the ground staff to manage visitation from clearing trails to cleaning bathrooms,” he said.
“I think it's going to really impact the ability to fight wildfire this coming summer,” Bloch said. “I think it's going to mean that recreating on public lands will be more difficult, less enjoyable. Trails won't be maintained. It'll be harder to issue special use permits.”
Bloch also said that some people have a misconception about federal land management agency workers, that they’re Washington, D.C. bureaucrats that work in an office and don’t understand the lands they manage, and they don’t realize that there are BLM field offices across the West. These are the communities, he said, that will be most hurt by these cuts.
“Small western towns who are now losing jobs. I mean, these are kids from rural communities who work in these federal offices,” he said.
“The federal government makes up a really significant chunk of the workforce of those local communities, and those are the people who are losing their jobs now,” he said, referring to small towns across central and southern Utah. “It's our friends, our neighbors.”
Bennet said that his office had been getting calls and emails from now-former USFS workers that had been impacted by the job cuts.
“I've… heard from a 40-year career civil servant who has worked for multiple agencies in rural Colorado, including over 25 years in the Forest Service,” he recounted. “As a result of her vast experience and years of service, she was recently promoted, which put her in probationary status, not because she was a new employee, but because… with all of her vast experience, she had been elevated, she had been promoted. But she was, nevertheless, a probationary employee because of the way the bureaucracy works. Over the weekend she was let go, and she worries that she'll never have her well-earned position.”
“These people have done absolutely nothing wrong,” he said.
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including KSJD.