Greater fire danger, closed public bathrooms and deteriorating hiking trails are among the impacts of President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to the National Forest system that locals might notice in the coming months.
The Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest has lost 36 employees, almost a third of its workforce, according to the Forest Service union. Twelve of those were let go from the Mount Baker Ranger District. The forest stretches along the west side of the Cascade Range from the Snoqualmie Ranger District in King County to the Mount Baker Ranger District in Whatcom County.
“The people who got laid off are the backbone of this forest,” said Jack Bruemmer, a lead wildland firefighter based in Concrete. “They’re the ones who keep the roads open, keep the toilets open, keep the campgrounds open — they deal with the local stuff.”
The full implications of the workforce reductions, both locally and nationwide, have yet to be seen.
But they’re potentially massive. Thousands of workers in the Forest Service and other federal agencies found themselves suddenly facing unemployment this month after the mass firings ordered by the Trump administration. Many of those impacted were probationary employees, usually relatively new hires or workers recently moved into new positions who had fewer protections against termination.
Seth Holton was in that group. For the last 11 years, he’s worked in various roles in the Mount Baker Ranger District, most recently as a wilderness backcountry ranger. He’s been based in Glacier almost all of that time.
In May 2024, Holton was moved to a permanent position as part of a larger push to transition staff out of temporary status, he said.
He was “caught off guard” when a supervisor called Feb. 13 to tell him he was dismissed. “I hadn’t really thought of the whole scope of it all,” Holton said. “It took a bit to set in.”
Much remains uncertain, including whether the cuts will hold up to legal scrutiny. Labor unions and some states have already moved to challenge the dismissals of federal workers in court — with limited success so far, though the cases are still far from a final outcome.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose agencies include the Forest Service, wrote in a statement the department dismissed “about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service.”
More than 300 Forest Service employees in Oregon and Washington were fired, wrote George Geissler, state forester for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, in an email. He noted “additional reductions are expected.”
The first wave of fired Forest Service employees were notified Feb. 11 and the second group got their letters days later, said union steward Al Hernandez, a member of Bruemmer’s fire crew.
Both Hernandez and Bruemmer stressed they were speaking on their own behalf, not for the Forest Service or union. They spoke to Cascadia Daily News on Feb. 20, days before returning to work for their seasonal positions on Feb. 24.
The dismissals will likely have direct consequences for public safety. Bruemmer explained that though he believes fire crews are exempt from dismissal, other workers are often “red carded” to fight wildfires while those crews are elsewhere.
His crew, called the Baker River Hotshots, doesn’t generally fight local fires, he said. Instead, they’re sent to fire-prone areas in Eastern Washington or other states. Meanwhile, other employees deal with small fires that spring up closer to home.
“I’m not going to say it definitively will happen,” Bruemmer said, “but just with less available firefighters on the force, we could see things that otherwise would have just been dealt with and not be a big deal grow to be larger, too.”
Though she’s not on a fire crew, Jaelle Downs has been called on to fight fires before. Until she was removed from her position this month, she was a forestry technician based in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.
Downs said she’s been red-carded several times, including last August when she worked alone to contain a blaze set by a lightning strike until other workers could join her.
Forest Service employees also respond to search and rescue incidents. Downs said even though such incidents are considered infrequent in her area, everyone she worked with assisted with a search and rescue “at least once a summer.”
The workers let go performed a range of duties beyond public safety, however, and Hernandez doesn’t want their contributions reduced to firefighting.
“I keep seeing a lot of questions like, ‘Well, how is this going to affect the fire season? How is this going to affect the fire season?’” he said. But “just because they have that support role doesn’t make fire the most important thing.”
Another impact: trail and campground maintenance. Forest Service staff remove fallen logs from trails, pick up trash, and deal with pit toilets and public restrooms, among many other duties, employees explained.
Downs said as a wilderness ranger, one of her many roles in the Forest Service was burying human waste from wilderness areas where people didn’t find the pit toilets and ensuring those toilets didn’t overflow. Those areas can be near lakes where waste could contaminate drinking water if left unchecked, she said.
“If you’ve been to any trailhead without a bathroom, you see it as soon as you get out of your vehicle,” Holton said. “There’s toilet paper everywhere, there’s trash everywhere.”
Trailheads and public bathrooms on National Forest land could close. Two trailheads in the Interstate 90 corridor, Franklin Falls and Denny Creek, already appear to be indefinitely shut down due to the firings, according to a Mountains to Sound Greenway social media post.
Holton singled out Artist Point, a popular hiking destination on Mount Baker Highway, as a particularly busy area that could see such closures. However, he sees trail closures as “pretty extreme.”
Lack of maintenance in recreation areas could also cause long-term damage.
“Given that the Forest Service is not an especially well-funded organization to begin with,” Bruemmer said, “these sites not receiving maintenance for even a couple of years may take them past the point of really ever being recoverable.”
Downs and Hernandez agreed. Without employees to fill all the duties terminated workers normally perform, “it’s going to be chaos,” Hernandez said.
Holton said he’s been working on trails for about nine of his years at the Forest Service. Each year since he started, crews have gotten smaller.
“Bit by bit, the trails have been losing a little bit every year,” he said. “But without anyone to do this, that’s that many years that it’s going to build up.”
Meanwhile, losing employees who performed science or engineering roles could mean “maybe a bridge isn’t going to get fixed now,” Hernandez said, “or we’re not going to be able to rely on those science roles” to come up with a plan for prescribed fires.
Impacted workers received letters via email informing them they’d been let go based on poor performance, he said. But all those he’d spoken to had positive performance ratings as of their most recent evaluation.
That was the case for Downs, who’s worked for the Forest Service since 2018. She was considered a probationary employee because of a move from temporary to permanent status in June 2024 and a subsequent promotion.
On Feb. 14, she received an email informing her the agency was dismissing her “based on your performance.”
In an October performance appraisal, reviewed by CDN, a supervisor gave Downs a glowing review, writing she not only “accepted and excelled with the new duties, but she also proactively initiated duties before I could even assign them.”
Many of those in probationary status, like Downs and Holton, worked as temporary employees for years before finally getting promoted to permanent status at “their dream job,” Hernandez said. “It’s crushing.”
He worries those let go are “just going to move on,” even if their jobs are later reinstated.
Among employees who still have their jobs, Bruemmer has sensed some anxiety about future cuts.
“Working for the federal government has kind of been one of those things where it’s like, ‘Oh, you have a really safe job,’” he said. “And this is certainly undermining my perception of the stability of my job.”
Over the weekend, federal workers received an email asking them to list five accomplishments from the previous week by midnight Monday. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, head of the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency, initially posted on social media that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation” — though many challenged the legality of this threat.
Confusion grew on Monday when the federal human resources agency said officials could exempt their employees from the email’s instructions and Musk posted on X workers would get “another chance” to respond, The New York Times reported.
Hernandez said USDA employees have been advised to ignore the email.
Sophia Gates covers rural Whatcom and Skagit counties. She is a Washington State Murrow Fellow whose work is underwritten by taxpayers and available outside CDN's paywall. Reach her at sophiagates@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 131.
