Trump fires federal workers who help fight forest fires weeks after historic LA blazes
Victoria Porter spent two days last year fighting a small forest fire that sprang up from a hunter’s campsite in the Montana wilderness.
Porter, 28, helped dig a fire break to prevent the blaze from spreading and used a mule team to haul water to squelch the blaze.
Firefighting wasn’t Porter’s primary job at the time. She worked for the U.S. Forest Service on a crew maintaining hiking trails. But, like many Forest Service workers, she has basic training in fighting wildfires and is expected to help fire crews when needed.
Porter won’t be around to help when the next wildfire flares up. She was fired from her job last week as part of the wave of mass terminations of probationary employees by President Donald Trump’s administration, a move she believes will put a strain on the agency’s firefighters.
“They need our support, and now they don’t have it,” Porter said.
As wildfires raged around Los Angeles last month, Trump said not enough was being done to prevent such disasters.
He criticized the fire response in his inaugural address and flew to Los Angeles during his first week as president, chastising local officials.
Yet fired Forest Service workers who have been caught up in Trump and Elon Musk's push, through the Department of Government Efficiency, to cut government agencies say the administration is harming future wildfire fighting efforts through their cuts.
The DOGE cuts are impacting many people who help with firefighting, even if it’s not their primary job.
The Forest Service says about 2,000 probationary workers were terminated.
“None of these individuals were operational firefighters,” according to a spokesperson for the United States Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service. The USDA and White House did not respond to questions about the impact of the terminations on wildfire prevention.
Forest Service workers say that just because the agency isn’t losing full-time firefighters doesn’t mean it’s not losing firefighting capacity.
Losing the reserves
The constant risk of wildfires was brought into vivid relief last month when multiple blazes around Los Angeles killed dozens, destroyed thousands of structures and caused billions of dollars in economic damage.
Fighting wildfires is one of the Forest Service’s top priorities, listed first in a recent budget document laying out the agency’s funding needs. The Forest Service manages lands from Alaska to Florida and fire is a constant threat.
Low pay and dangerous conditions have made it hard for the agency to maintain staffing.
“We struggle to hire and retain firefighters in areas of the country where the labor pool is low and pay isn’t as competitive as we would like,” the agency’s website says.
The Forest Service had 11,393 wildland firefighters in 2024, according to its website.
Many other Forest Service workers are pulled in to help fight fires, though, said Andy Vanderheuel, the head of the union representing about 17,000 Forest Service employees.
The agency has about 35,000 total employees, its website says, and among those who aren’t firefighters, Vanderheuel estimated that more than half have what’s known as a “red card,” which means they’ve received at least basic training in fighting wildfires.
That cohort includes Edith Robinson who was part of the same Montana trail crew as Porter until both recently were terminated. Robinson, 32, previously worked as a firefighter.
Robinson compared Forest Service workers with red cards who don’t primarily work as firefighters to military reservists who are called on in times of need.
“We’re not in active duty but … the vast majority of folks who were laid off were able to act as fire resources as needed,” Robinson said.
Many probationary workers who were fired likely had red cards, Vanderheuel said. They can help fight fires in myriad ways, from staffing the camps that support firefighters tackling large blazes to extinguishing the fires, as Porter and Robinson did recently when they put out the wildfire that began at a hunter's campsite in a remote part of the Rocky Mountains.
“Nobody, technically, whose job as a firefighter got let go, but a lot of people fight fire, not just firefighters,” Vanderheuel said.
Raising alarms
The job cuts at the Forest Service are part of a wave of terminations across many government agencies. The cuts have targeted probationary workers who were hired or promoted recently and don’t have job protections.
Asked on Tuesday if he has any concerns about how the terminations have been handled, Trump said “No, not at all. I think we have to just do what we have to do.”
“Don’t forget, I got elected on the basis of making our government stronger and smaller,” Trump added.
Musk described his approach Tuesday in a joint Fox News interview with Trump as a “thrashing of the bureaucracy.” Critics worry he is gutting important programs.
Colorado Democrats, including Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, released a letter blasting the Forest Service cuts.
The Forest Service is already “critically understaffed, and further employee cuts will have real and immediate consequences for Colorado’s economy, rural communities, and wildfire resilience,” the letter reads.
Called into action
The fire that Porter and Robinson helped extinguish last November in Montana was on a mountain ridge in a stand of pine trees in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.
To get water up to the fire, the trail crew filled 5-gallon jugs and lashed them to mules. Each mule could carry four jugs.
They dumped water on hot spots in the burned grass around the pines and dug around the burned area with shovels and other tools to create a barrier to prevent the fire’s spread.
Their effort contained the blaze to just an acre, preventing its spread to an open grass field nearby and potentially much farther.
On another occasion, the trail crew spotted a forest fire, called in help and worked to protect a historic cabin from being burned. The trail workers also maintain campsites, educate campers about fire safety and douse campfires that are left smoldering.
“If you're concerned about what happened in Los Angeles, you should be very concerned with these mass layoff or mass terminations,” Robinson said. “We need as many people as possible who know how to fight fire.”