Leaked recordings detail a major environmental agency quietly gutting its workforce

This story was published in collaboration with High Country News.

Americans visit hiking and camping areas managed by the US Forest Service more than 150 million times each year.

If you have climbed a peak or hiked in a golden aspen forest, paddled a protected river or visited a cultural site on any of the hundreds of millions of acres of public national forest land, there’s a good chance any federal workers you encountered were not full-time employees.

The agency relies on a large, often underappreciated army of seasonal or temporary workers who clean bathrooms and campgrounds, empty trash cans, maintain trails, welcome people at visitor centers, and do critical research work on the environment.

These employees help monitor the health of the public waters and forests the agency oversees, clearing brush and trees that pose wildfire danger and monitoring the health of Alaska’s sockeye salmon. The Forest Service-managed portions of the Appalachian Trail that were damaged by Hurricane Helene will likely be repaired by temporary workers. (Hikers are currently advised to stay off over 800 miles of the Appalachian Trail.)

Next summer, however, most of these tasks will be performed by other staff — or not done at all.

Due to a looming budget cut, the agency will not be hiring seasonal staff for the next fiscal year, leaving thousands of people out of work and putting essential conservation and biodiversity work at risk.

The spending bill recently passed by the House gave the agency around half a billion dollars less than it requested, meaning that the Forest Service, within the Department of Agriculture, faces a large budget cut. Most other environmental and science-based federal agencies also face large cuts. Meanwhile, the money the agency received from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate law, has already been spent.

All of this, combined with recent cost-of-living increases for staff, means the agency is feeling strapped for cash. The next year “will not likely be a very robust budget environment,” said Forest Service Budget Director Mark Lichtenstein during an all-staff call in mid-September.

This decision does not apply to the more than 11,000 temporary firefighting positions that the Forest Service hires every year. An agency spokesperson said the Forest Service hired more than 2,500 non-fire temporary employees in fiscal year 2024.

In the all-staff call, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore acknowledged that the agency will be forced to struggle without its seasonal workforce.

“I know that this decision will affect your ability to get some of the critical work done,” he said. “It’ll also be felt deeply by managers and units all across the agency.”

In the days before the call, news of the hiring freeze spread rapidly through the ranks of temporary seasonal employees. Some heard about it directly from their supervisors. Others found out on Reddit, where a letter announcing the hiring freeze from the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest region had been posted. Temporary workers who feared for their futures filled the comment sections.

“I was really banking on (seasonal work next summer),” said one temporary employee in an interview, asking that her name not be used, since she is still employed by the agency. “I was also banking on seasonal winter Forest Service positions to get me through the off season, and all of a sudden, all of that was completely nixed.”

Temporary employees often face this sort of precarity, piecing together work for the winter when they lose their jobs and health care benefits and then returning to seasonal work for the summer. In many cases, they depend on the agency not only for paychecks, but for housing, living in buildings owned or subsidized by the Forest Service.

The budget cut’s impact on hiring extends beyond seasonal workers. The agency also announced that, with very few exceptions, it won’t be hiring external candidates for any position within the agency, meaning that open positions will have to be filled by current employees. And since seasonal work is a common stepping stone to a permanent role, many temporary workers who hoped for a career in public land management now find themselves at a loss.

News of the hiring freeze left longtime seasonal and permanent workers shocked and angry. In a recording of a mid-September staff meeting shared by an employee and reviewed by Vox and High Country News, staff at the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in southern Washington stressed the importance of seasonal labor. One man, who identified himself as Trevor, said his “entire program” relies on a “large seasonal crew” and wondered how he would be able to do his job in the future. Another employee referenced years of insufficient funding from Congress that have diminished agency morale. She added the loss of temporary workers would have “agency-wide” negative impacts.

“We cannot operate without our seasonal staff,” she said.

They might be “temporary” in name, but the Forest Service’s seasonal employees are a vital source of institutional and local ecological knowledge for the agency.

Many return season after season, often to the same forests, despite the low pay — often around $15/hour for an entry-level position. Several workers interviewed for this story said they stay on in hopes of snagging a permanent role. These workers are especially vital for field operations, said Jamie Tommins, who worked for several years as a trails and wilderness lead for offices in Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Washington.

“It takes most people many years of seasonal work to land a permanent job, and those higher-grade seasonals are where you find all the most knowledgeable field workers,” he said.

“Permanent employees may be as highly trained, probably from being seasonals themselves first,” Tommins said, “but they’re usually busy under their own administrative load and aren’t always available to get out in the field or train the newer folks.”

From building and maintaining trails to planting trees and removing dangerously flammable invasive species like cheatgrass, seasonal employees shoulder much of the work of maintaining the national forests.

“I just can’t fathom all the skill and know-how the Forest Service is about to lose,” he said.

In practice, temporary employees often wind up doing work far above their pay grade. James Bardo, a biological science technician who works with plants, said this summer in Oregon’s Fremont-Winema National Forest, due to understaffing, he found himself doing rare plant work that would be better suited to an agency botanist.

“I’d never been to southern Oregon,” he said. “I never worked in southern Oregon or anywhere near there. And I was the authority for taxonomy there, and it was just like, I really shouldn’t be.”

Bardo worries what cutbacks to the agency’s already paper-thin workforce will mean for important ecological work like preserving threatened species.

“It can be problematic when you’re going to be working in the forest, cutting down trees,” he said. “Do you know that this rare plant species is actually there? Or is it easily confused with something else? … It’s very concerning as a conservation botanist.”

Next summer, this loss of expertise will be felt in countless ways. During the all-staff call, Moore said the agency would scale back services rather than demand more of its reduced workforce.

“We just can’t get the same amount of work done with fewer employees,” he said. “So, in other words, we’re going to do what we can with what we have. We’re not going to try to do everything that’s expected of us with less people.”

But there are some tasks that can’t be set aside easily. A temporary employee, who asked that her name not be used, works in the visitor center at the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. She described basic chores like emptying trash, weed whacking around buildings to reduce fire risk, and directing overflow parking at the popular site. All these tasks, if left undone, could cause chaos next summer.

She estimates two permanent employees will be left to do the work of five people, once the seasonal positions are cut. She imagined the possible consequences: locked gates and closed recreation access, and trails or camping sites left inaccessible. She called it a “disservice to the public” as well as to the employees who will have to deal with the fallout.

“You always get people coming in complaining about things,” she said, “but if we’re shutting things down, and there’s trash everywhere, that’s just going to increase, and it’s very unfair to the workforce that will remain.”

In recent years, the Forest Service has attempted to reduce its reliance on seasonal employees, converting approximately 1,400 temporary workers to permanent status. But even those newly permanent employees will feel the budget cutbacks.

Many of these new positions are known as “permanent seasonal” roles. In a recent Substack post about the agency’s hiring woes, Tommins compared the job to that of a public school teacher: “a permanent employee with a long” break, although that break is during the winter, not the summer.

In normal years, employees can extend their terms, adding hours or taking on new work for some extra money. But in its announcement of the hiring freeze, the Forest Service made it clear that permanent seasonal workers will not be able to extend their terms in the coming fiscal year. Meanwhile, many promised promotions are on hold, and some external hiring offers will have to be rescinded.

Scott Schell, the executive director at the Northwest Avalanche Center, worries what the cutbacks will mean for his organization, a public-private partnership that works with the Forest Service to provide weather and avalanche data in Oregon and Washington. In addition to vital avalanche data for backcountry skiers and ski resorts, the NWAC also contributes to climate research and weather forecasts for Interstate 90, one of the nation’s major transcontinental highways, which crosses the Cascade Mountains in Washington.

Schell said his office had received an allowance from the federal government to bring on a handful of seasonal employees to do avalanche forecasting, but fewer than in years past.

“We’re basically going through a kind of triaging matrix,” he said. “There is no way we can do the work we did last year.”