Firings will worsen wildfire season
USFS cuts will make fires harder to fight
Standing in the desert on Saturday, I found my eyes tearing up as I looked north to where Mount Lemmon burned during 2020.
I’ve already written about how that fire, which burned in the Catalina Mountains throughout July during lockdown, brought me to an emotional low. Now I worry about what coming months will bring. My concern? The Trump-Musk regime just dismissed 3,400 U.S. Forest Service workers on the verge of Arizona’s fire season.
Although Trump originally claimed he wouldn’t be firing any firefighters, many of these employees were trained to step in and assist during fire season. Other dismissed employees were dealing with some of the brush build-up in our national forests.
Remember how Trump used the Los Angeles fires last month to complain that forests wouldn’t be burning if we’d just carry out “management of the floor”? Well, via Musk, he just fired some of the workers hired to do that under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
That funding, approved by Congress and thus technically not subject to cancellation by the executive branch, allocated roughly $3 billion for wildfire mitigation efforts. These included projects to clear out “hazardous fuels”—the dead wood and small trees that fuel large burns.
In short, we’re losing many of the workers recently hired to help make forests more resistant to wildfires, along with some who actually contributed to controlling wildfires. And, contrary to what their dismissal letters claimed, these employees did nothing wrong.
They fell into the line of firing merely because they were in a standard probationary period, even if it resulted from taking a new position after years with the forest service.
On top of that, there’s still a hiring freeze impeding the agency’s ability to hire seasonal firefighters, according to an anonymous Feb. 18 letter by a Forest Service manager to Substack’s The Hotshot Wake Up. Employment offers also have been rescinded for some of those already hired, and “onboarding” new employees with training has been delayed.
Meanwhile, things are heating up here in Arizona. It’s only February, but we’re facing another week of temperatures in the 80s. One of my neighbors saw a rattlesnake last week—weeks earlier than they usually come out of hibernation. Over the weekend, I saw two ground squirrels scurrying across the road. When hibernating animals such as snakes and squirrels start circulating again, our cool season is drawing to a close.
And when our cool season draws to a close, our fire season often starts.
Historically, Arizona could expect wildfires starting around April in the desert and May in the higher elevations, with fire season mostly ending once the monsoon season arrived in late June or July with its summer rains. But now, as the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management tells us, fires can occur at any time of year.
In 2020, for instance, the fire on Mount Lemmon burned through the month of July—normally a wet month, but an exceptionally dry one during the exceptionally hot 2020. It was one of 2,520 wildfires that burned close to a million acres.
Meanwhile, the warmer temperatures and general lack of rainfall have put southern Arizona, where I live, at risk for “significant fire potential” as early as March, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s next week.
Even without considering the fiery hot breath of climate change, now a forbidden topic at federal agencies, we can’t expect fire-fighting efforts to go smoothly when led by an agency that suddenly lost about 10 percent of its work force and remains under a hiring freeze.
Even before the random firings, the Forest Service was finding it challenging to recruit and hire firefighters, as reported in a March 16, 2024, Propublica article. In 2021, the Biden administration tried to address this by securing a raise for wildland firefighters to bring their pay up to $15 an hour.
Nice start, but that’s less than what my neighbor earns working at the Dollar General. And she doesn’t risk her life battling blazes, live away from home for weeks or months at a time, and say good-bye to her income once fire season ends. She also doesn’t have to worry about an elevated risk of cancer from a work environment filled with smoke.
All of this raises an important question. Unless it’s sheer incompetence, why would Trump and Musk want to hobble the forest service’s ability to fight wildfires? Trump has also gone out of his way to alienate our long-standing allies, Mexico and Canada, who helped fight the blazes around Los Angeles last month.
Is it possible this administration actually want to see our forests up in flames?
I can’t read their minds. But given that the people on top seem to care only about profits, not people, I suspect they’d be happy to put the American people through a summer of hellish wildfires to forward their agenda of reverting to the older but now rejected practice of clear-cutting forests.
That practice in the past actually primed our forests for today’s fires, with a lot of same-aged smaller trees crowding the forest floor as the logged forests regrew. But this historic context is bound to elude Trump and his supporters because it’s inconvenient.
It’s a pretty sure bet that once fire season gets underway, they’ll be clamoring to cut down the big trees desired by the timber industry as a false way to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
They’ve already got a bill halfway passed that could do that—the deceivingly named Fix Our Forests Act, passed by the House of Representatives. If senators cave into supporting this, we could find ourselves rapidly losing stands of old-growth forests—the ones with the big trees that happen to be the most resilient to wildfires.
The behind-the-scenes Trump policy of burn, burn, burn could soon become an on-the-record push to cut, cut, cut. Then we’ll have to fight the temptation to cry, cry, cry.
Instead, we’ll need another campaign such as 1990’s Redwood Summer. That effort rallied environmentalist activists throughout the nation to protect ancient redwood trees in California from the axe of a voracious timber company. Lawsuits and legislation that followed helped codify protections for some of the remaining remnants of these long-lived trees.
So, remember—after a good cry, it may well be time to fight, fight, fight.
Please urge your senator to vote against the Fix Our Forests Act. The vote could come up any day now. Call 202-224-3121 and ask for your senator. In particular, Arizona Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego need to hear from you.
Also, individuals interested in helping to reduce the potential for catastrophic forest fires could check with their local forest districts to see if they allow the removal of logs and other downed wood for firewood. Each district has its own rules and window of opportunity.