The Firefighting Fire Sale

On Feb. 14, Adin Kloetzel lost his job as a trails forestry technician at the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest in southwest Montana, where he hauled supplies into remote areas by mule, cut trails, and supported firefighting efforts. 

Like many of 3,400 Forest Service employees abruptly fired by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Kloetzel’s permanent job offer last spring had come with a year-long “probationary” period, giving him fewer job protections. Since he lives in Forest Service housing, he also lost his housing. Altogether, around a quarter of the ranger district’s employees were fired. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow,” he says.

But Kloetzel is worried about more than just his career. He fears the cuts to the Forest Service will prevent the agency from properly managing national forests and wildfire threats — and potentially be used as justification to transfer federal management to the states, opening the door to privatizing public lands and services. 

Stripping the Forest Service of its seasoned workforce ensures that when fires spark, they will find public lands less defended and ready to burn, as climate change creates warmer, drier conditions and extends fire seasons. Reducing firefighting services leaves communities more vulnerable to these growing risks. 

Creating staffing shortages may make contractors seem like the only viable solution, says Rod Dow, a retired smokejumper who spent 45 years fighting fires in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Much of what federal land managers do will be difficult to replicate, he warns. It takes 10 to 15 years to gain the qualifications to manage large-scale fires, he says, so the recent job cuts don’t just gut the agency’s ability to perform necessary physical tasks: All the money and time invested in staff training disappeared, too.

Their loss “will have a devastating impact on agency missions and government operations,” wrote Doreen Greenwald, the National Treasury Employees Union president in a letter to union members.

For example, fire camps, temporary on-the-ground hubs for firefighting operations, require an incredible amount of infrastructure and rapid communication spanning multiple government agencies. “It’s not going to be easy to convert that over to a privatized arrangement,” Dow says. “It would be really stupid. That doesn’t mean [Donald] Trump and [Elon] Musk aren’t going to do it.”

Nevertheless, increasing budget cuts have already forced public lands to turn to private contracts for basic tasks in recent years. Under his first term, Trump oversaw efforts to increase private-sector involvement in national park facilities. The 2016 Republican Party platform suggested rethinking the “absentee ownership” of the federal government, stating, “Congress should reconsider whether parts of the federal government’s landholdings and control of water in the West could be better used for ranching, mining, or forestry through private ownership.” 

In 2017, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke took steps to do so, allowing private companies to upgrade and operate campgrounds to address the National Park Service’s maintenance backlog, which exceeded $11 billion at the time, and which Trump went on to cut by 12 percent. The National Park Service currently has more than 500 concession contracts, generating over $1 billion in revenue for those private companies. 

These budget cuts extended to the Forest Service, too. According to the National Wildfire Suppression Association, which represents 12,000 private contractors, approximately 45 percent of fire resources are now provided by private companies. (Experts told The Lever this figure seemed exaggerated, but exact numbers depend on how you count: The Forest Service says it has about 35,000 service members, not all of whom primarily work on fighting fire. According to a recent Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has about 18,000 dedicated firefighters, a number that reflects its hiring challenges.)

For-profit operators don’t have an obligation to stage equipment in risky areas or dispatch support to other locations — private businesses can simply decline a contract if the job isn’t profitable. The free market might not make saving your home an attractive proposition. 

Reducing federal land management — whether that’s selling off public lands or turning control over to states — fragments oversight and reduces resources. Unlike the Forest Service, which has coordinated interagency support, many states lack the funding, staff, or infrastructure to handle large-scale fires. 

Trump, who previously suggested California “clean your forests” by rake while blasting the state’s forest fire management strategy, campaigned in 2024 on selling off federal land to developers. Since taking office, the President has proposed selling the nation’s public lands to provide funding for a sovereign wealth fund, along with firing an additional 1,000 National Park Service employees. 

Kloetzel has seen a move toward privatization already playing out in Montana, where the Forest Service recently authorized a controversial land swap in the state’s Crazy Mountains. In January, the agency approved the transfer of almost 4,000 acres of federal land to private owners, including the Yellowstone Club, which is affiliated with the ski resort Big Sky. The stunning area was exchanged for an alternate parcel Kloetzel describes as “flat, weedy range land.” 

“Honestly, I agree the federal government could use a ‘fat trimming,’” Kloetzel says, but “I’m worried about land swaps that put public land in private hands in order to profit.”

“Sooner Or Later, Something’s Going To Happen”

Owen Wickenheiser juggled a walkie-talkie, tuning in as it squawked with updates from his winter job as a ski patroller. 

Like Kloetzel, he’s spent his career caring for public lands and protecting the people who visit them. Until Feb. 14, he was a wilderness ranger in the Okanagan National Forest, primarily working in the wilderness area of the Enchantment Mountains in Washington’s central Cascades. It’s one of the state’s top destinations, attracting tens of thousands of tourists each year. 

Every summer, he helped fly out up to 10,000 pounds of human waste from the Colchuck Lake area, an operation that involved helicopters and rappel crews. “There is no plan to make sure that happens this year right now,” he says bluntly. The Colchuck Lake drains into one of the two main water sources for the nearby town of Leavenworth. 

Wickenheiser says that’s far from the only hazard looming: Much of his job is monitoring for fires, especially those intentionally set by campers. “There’s a lot of beetle kill, a ton of standing dead trees,” he says. If an errant spark caught in the wilderness, it could quickly rip down the valleys into downtown Leavenworth. Meanwhile, many of the area’s medically-trained wilderness first responders were just fired in the same layoffs. 

Though firefighters were supposed to be exempt from these staff cuts, people who lost their jobs like Wickenheiser and Kloetzel conducted essential work for fire crews. Many, like Kloetzel, also had a “Red Card,” a certification that qualifies them to work on wildland firefighting assignments — and he had repeatedly been asked to do so. 

After spending 16 hours on the line, firefighters rely on incident command post staff, who are often permanent or seasonal workers, for things like food, shelter, and meteorological and technical support. “All these duties will either have to be contracted out, which is a lot more expensive,” Wickenheiser says, “[or] we’re just going to have teams that are really, really lacking learned experience because people just won’t be there anymore.”

In a letter reviewed by The Lever, the new Department of Agriculture secretary pledged her support and assurance firefighters would have “the tools and resources need[ed] to safely and effectively carry out [their] mission.” 

In practice, firefighters say that’s not how it’s playing out. Dow’s own nephew is on a Hotshot crew based in Alaska, one of the elite teams deployed to the most challenging and large-scale wildfires. Hiring for the 20-person crew is currently frozen due to Trump administration policies, meaning they can’t replace any members they lose to other jobs, injury, or illness. They need at least 18 people to keep their ability to deploy in certain situations, and the time window to hire additional crew members is closing. 

“If they don’t have it figured out in a month,” Dow says, “they’re going to be in trouble.” He says the freeze could be a critical problem for wildland firefighting operations nationwide, especially as fire season ramps up in North America. 

Bureau of Land Management fire management staff across multiple states told The Lever this week the Department of Government Efficiency put a $1 limit on their purchase credit cards and their travel credit cards, preventing them from buying time-sensitive supplies to prepare for the fire season. It means if there were to be a fire, they potentially couldn’t travel to fight it. The move came after similar measures were placed on other federal agencies.

The Trump administration also recently froze about $3 billion in wildfire mitigation efforts, which may impact land management on state lands that rely on federal funding. 

“Watching Musk cavorting on stage with a bedazzled chain saw that he’s never run in his life, while the Conservative Political Action Conference crowd laughed and cheered is especially galling juxtaposed with this,” Dow adds.

Though skeletal crews might be able to stumble along during normal conditions, when fire season hits and things get busier, Dow says, “sooner or later, something’s gonna happen.” 

The decisions made this month, may function as fate when a disaster inevitably strikes. Given all the necessary equipment and skills needed for a successful fire command, he says, “You’re gonna lose somebody’s house, or somebody’s going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you just don’t have the helicopter time to go save them.”

“Devastating Impact”

The mass firings have also raised significant legal and procedural concerns. 

On Feb. 19, a coalition of federal labor unions filed a temporary restraining order to halt the employment decisions in a U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. In Yosemite, where an upside-down flag was hung over the weekend to protest the staff cuts. A handful may find their positions restored as the Trump administration appeared to backtrack, announcing plans to restore just 50 jobs to parks nationwide. 

Many, like Kloetzel, were told in their termination notice that they had “performed poorly.” He’s hoping to appeal, as he has positive performance evaluations from his direct supervisors supporting his work. 

To Kloetzel and many others who received similar notices, the explanation feels less like an honest assessment of their work and more like a pretext for a broader political agenda — one that prioritizes ideology over expertise. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Russell Vought, Trump’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget and co-author of the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda in private speeches before the election. “We want to put them in trauma.”

Nor is DOGE’s ostensible goal of government savings likely to be met. Wickenheiser’s job, for example, was funded through a Recreation Conservation Office grant from the state of Washington, with matching funds from the federal government. “They actually aren’t saving money on some of these cut programs,” he says. 

On Feb. 22, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) highlighted the story of another forest service ranger whose salary was completely funded by Washington state. “Elon fired him,” she wrote on X. 

Many public access points, like the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument·and Saguaro National Park, have announced reduced hours or had to close visitor centers, while even popular parks like Yosemite have shut down their reservation system amid the turmoil.

While his own life has been thrown into chaos, Wickenheiser says that’s not the point. “I don’t want to be focused on as a person,” he says. “I want the land and what’s happening at the administrative level to be the focus. We cannot allow this to happen.”