As Longtime Seasonal Workers Emerge as Casualties of Mass Firings, Stakeholders Warn of Dire Consequences to Public Lands

Lyle Olsen has met so many decent, dedicated, goodwilled people since his first seasonal job with the U.S. Forest Service in 1972, he’s curated a list of beneficiaries whose dreams he promises to bankroll, just as soon as he buys a winning lottery ticket.

Holding a termination letter from the federal government in his hands on Feb. 20, the 73-year-old Tobacco Valley resident admits his luck may have run out. But even as Olsen and most of his friends reel from losing their jobs with the Kootenai National Forest, his list of prospective prize winners continues to grow.

“It just breaks my heart,” Olsen said Thursday, less than a week after cuts to the federal workforce decimated the summer recreation crew he’s worked on for the past 11 years (out of 31 total seasons with the agency, including 10 years as a Youth Conservation Corps leader). With 50 people reportedly fired across the Kootenai’s five ranger districts, Olsen worries that the forest won’t be able to function amid the cuts, which are compounded by the Trump administration’s move to freeze funds for wildfire prevention programs, all of them supported by legislation backed by former President Joe Biden, The Associated Press reported.

Every summer from April to October, the agency relies on a legion of seasonal or temporary workers to clean bathrooms, maintain campgrounds, empty the garbage, maintain trails, field questions at visitor centers, and provide support to wildland firefighters. Although Olsen figures he only had three or four more summers before his shelf-life as a jack-of-all-trades campground caretaker and forest steward was up, he worries about his younger coworkers who depend on the summertime work in a forested corner of Montana whose sprawling public land mass is more than seven times the size of Rhode Island. He also worries about the people who hike, hunt, boat and boondock at the recreation sites dotting the landscape. And he worries about the potential for a devastating wildfire on a landscape where mitigation projects have been placed on hold.

“These people are like family,” he said of the recreation crew. “They’re who cut hazard trees and pump the toilets and maintain the boat access and fix the docks. And now they’re all gone.”

Between the Kootenai and Flathead national forests, the Bob Marshall and Cabinet Mountain wilderness areas, and Glacier National Park, every community in the region is touched by the 7 million acres of public land girding Montana’s northwest corner, which in turn depends on a network of seasonal employees to operate and maintain them.

Following the recent purge of federal employees, however, hundreds of displaced seasonal workers across Montana have seen their lives upended as exasperated land managers triage their organizational charts and settle into a holding pattern.

As is the case with Olsen and his crew, many of the layoffs affected workers entering the final months of a one-year probationary period that began last year, when approximately 1,400 seasonal employees — known within the agency as 1039 workers, a designation that corresponds with the number of hours in a six-month season spanning April to October — converted to a permanent status as part of an agency-wide efficiency initiative aimed at meeting projected budget constraints. To offset the costs of the conversion, U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore announced a moratorium on seasonal hiring in 2025.

“We will not be bringing on any additional seasonal [employees], outside of fire,” Moore said when he announced the hiring measures last September during an all-employee call. “I need to let you know that we have also converted between 1,300 and 1,400 1039 employees to permanent seasonals. And so, we began the process of trying to really honor being an employer of choice by converting a number of our seasonals to permanent.”

When the mass firings began under President Trump on Feb. 14 — a date that some workers with an appetite for gallows humor have dubbed the “Valentine’s Day massacre” — it wasn’t immediately clear how many employees were affected, or from which agencies. There are an estimated 220,000 probationary employees in the federal government, representing about 10% of the civilian workforce. The most current estimates are that the U.S. Forest Service fired around 3,400 workers while the National Park Service terminated about 1,000, according to widely cited figures, including by a lawsuit that six federal labor unions filed Feb. 14 seeking a temporary restraining order to enjoin the firings in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

As of Friday, D.C. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper had not issued a ruling.

Even though firefighters and law enforcement personnel are reportedly exempt from the firings, scores of workers who support public safety and firefighting initiatives in collateral roles were let go, which narrows the scope of the exemptions.

Ed Levert, of Libby, has spent his entire life in forestry, including a 32-year career with the national forest in fire and fuels management. More than two decades ago, he took a part-time job as the Lincoln County forester, a position whose primary responsibilities center on wildfire preparedness. From this position, he organized the Lincoln County FireSafe Council, obtaining fuel reduction grands and training local fire departments to conduct fire-wise assessments. Although he retired in 2018, he’s still active with the council, which discussed the consequences of the federal layoffs at its meeting on Thursday night.

“We’ve got to wait until the dust settles because there’s a lot of unknowns, but this meat cleaver approach is not rational at all,” Levert, a former district ranger, said. “I can’t imagine any rational person saying that this is the way to go trimming the government down. They say the fire positions aren’t being terminated, but it’s boots on the ground. When you’ve got any sort of a fire event going, there are a lot of folks besides fire people that are going to be involved. It’s going to create a big hole for the Kootenai.”

The newly minted permanent employees weren’t the only workers culled from the federal payrolls when the firings targeting probationary employees took effect, according to people familiar with the layoffs. Two types of U.S. Forest Service employees are generally considered probationary for either one- or two-year periods: “Competitive employees” are permanent federal employees with competitive status, meaning they are eligible for competitive hiring processes and have the right to compete for positions within the agency. They remain probationary in their first year. Meanwhile, “excepted service employees” include the appointment of eligible disabled veterans through the Veterans Recruitment Appointment (VRA), and are considered to be in a trial period for their first two years.

In the week since the layoffs began, media questions normally fielded by a local spokesperson have been directed to a regional spokesperson, who deferred specific questions about the volume and types of workers fired in Montana to a national spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees the U.S. Forest Service. The spokesperson, USDA Acting Deputy Director of Communications Audra Weeks, declined to provide figures detailing the classifications of the fired workers, writing in a prepared statement that USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people. We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy.”

Weeks continued: “As part of this effort, USDA has made the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters. Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary IRA funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”

If the strategy is to cut bureaucratic waste, local stakeholders describe the tactic as misguided.

Doug Ferrell, co-chair of the Kootenai Forest Stakeholders Association, a coalition of recreationalists, business owners, timber mill operators and conservationists that work to support the future of the Kootenai National Forest, was mystified by the administration’s apparent reversal of wildland fire mitigation priorities.

“What will this do in terms of our ability to execute fire-risk reduction projects?” he said. “It’s unknown. But there is reason to believe that our ability will be impaired because they can’t work on environmental assessments. It’s like we are stuck in the water and it’s a totally opaque, wait-and-see process.”

And because most of the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation’s (DNRC) fuels reductions projects are funded by federal grants, the spending freeze will also stymie fire mitigation projects on state parcels, according to Levert.

“This is going to have repercussions to fire mitigation and the timber sale program,” Levert, who also chairs the Montana Forest Stewardship Foundation, said. “It just doesn’t make sense to expect timber sales to pick up when you’re taking out the people who work in these forests. That’s just common sense.”

“And the other big thing is the grant programs,” Levert continued. “That’s really going to affect a lot of things related to fuel mitigation. Some of the funds are already out there and guaranteed, but if you don’t have money in the bank right now, I guess we’ll stay tuned to find out whether there is going to be anything else coming. I’m talking to guys at the DNRC who have to make these decisions, and they don’t know if the money for these fuel reduction projects is coming or not. There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty going on.”

Tim Love, the former Seeley Lake District Ranger on the Lolo National Forest and a member of the Society of American Foresters, said the indiscriminate nature of the cuts could backfire.

“Every new administration has strategic goals; how they are carried out tactically is the key,” Love said. “When you reduce the workforce, you want to make sure they are appropriate. That the cuts make sense and are in the right areas. You have to think it through. What I’m seeing happen instead is a ready-fire-aim approach. That’s a hard way to do things and it’s going to be tough on people, tough on morale. But one thing is for sure, the workload won’t decrease. Trails and roads have to be maintained, and the workforce might not be there. I’m all for more efficiencies. But there’s better things that can be done to make it more efficient.”

If the cuts have a paralyzing effect on wildland fire mitigation and forest fuel reduction projects, Levert and Love say they remain optimistic Montana’s congressional delegation will intervene, if they’re not already quietly working behind the scenes.

Still, the delegates have largely remained silent, despite having pledged to support wildland fire mitigation, timber and recreation on public lands.

A spokesperson for U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, Montana’s ranking senator who serves on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and is chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on National Parks, issued a prepared statement in response to questions from the Beacon.

“Our Forest Service and National Park employees work hard every day to manage our lands and support our Montana outdoor way of life … I have seen firsthand the issues facing our public lands and I’m always looking for ways to address these issues,” according to the statement. “I’ll continue to work with USDA and the DOI to make sure we have personnel in place to protect our lands and our outdoor way of life.”

The spokesperson did not answer questions about whether or not the senator supports the cuts, of if he’s taking steps to ensure that critical positions don’t remain vacant, saying only that Daines is “aware of the cuts, which is why he said he’s working with [Department of Interior] and USDA on this.”

U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Montana, who on Feb. 20 introduced the Modern Employment Reform, Improvement, and Transformation (MERIT) Act to “reform and modernize the federal workforce by emphasizing merit-based hiring and retention while aligning dismissal processes with private-sector standards,” lay the blame for the federal cuts squarely on the Biden Administration.

“Years of reckless spending from career politicians has put our country over $36 trillion in debt, fueled inflation, and driven up prices for every hardworking American,” according to a statement that a spokesperson for Sheehy sent to the Beacon. “Blindly continuing down the path we’re on is simply unsustainable. As your Senator, I will fight to ensure Montanans have access to the critical resources and support they need, and I look forward to working with President Trump and his administration to restore fiscal responsibility and better stewardship of hard-earned taxpayer dollars to lower costs, unleash prosperity, and make Montana and America affordable again.”

If Montana’s elected leaders want to restore merit to the federal hiring process, Lyle Olsen isn’t sure why his position ended up on the chopping block. Like many temporary workers, Olsen has used seasonal work to supplement numerous other jobs through the years, including a 12-year stint as a public school educator in Pablo and Fortine, decades of carpentry work, and as the author of two children’s books, “Thought Soup” and “In Grandma Rita’s Garden.”

His performance evaluations have always been rated “highly successful.”

When Olsen received the memorandum terminating his employment on Feb. 18, he was taken aback not only by its unceremonious delivery, but by how it undercut his performance.

“The agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest,” Olsen said, reading from the memo.

“After 21 straight seasons with the U.S. Forest Service in the Tobacco Valley, and 10 or so assorted earlier seasons here and there, I’m terminated based on my performance, all of which is annually recorded and has never been below par,” he said.

Jeff Mow, who served as former superintendent of Glacier National Park between 2013 and 2022, said blaming the “indiscriminate mass firings” on an individual employee’s performance evaluation “is dishonest.” He also said the administration’s strategy of pressuring federal workers to retire through a so-called “Fork in the Road” offer two weeks ago was an insult to public service.

“It places that idea of public service as second rate, as less productive to society, and it’s abhorrent to see that they are not only terminating people but telling them that there is better things to do in life than public service,” Mow said. “That’s a really sad state of affairs.”

Having shepherded the “crown jewel” of the National Park Service through destructive wildfires, government shutdowns, the crush of record-breaking visitation, and a once-in-a-century pandemic, Mow said inflexibility in hiring a seasonal workforce can hobble a park the size of Glacier.

“At a park like Glacier, you’ve got between 120 and 130 permanent employees and then you bring on 350 additional workers seasonally,” he said. “A lot of people pair it up with another job. It’s just the nature of managing a park like Glacier. It doesn’t make sense to have almost 500 employees year-round, but you want a reliable workforce when you do need them. A million people come through the park in July and over 900,000 come through in August, which averages about 30,000 people a day coming through the park. That’s about half the size of a Taylor Swift concert every day for two months. Think about the staffing you need for those kinds of numbers.”

Since retiring three years ago, Mow has joined the executive council of The Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, and several weeks ago traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with Montana’s elected leaders, as well as Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. His intent, he said, was to help people in key leadership positions gain a better understanding about the National Park Service, which is a diverse and complex organization.

Mow also recently spoke to members of a local Rotary Club about what he described as “the indiscriminate mass firings and the impacts they would have in Glacier and the Flathead.”

“Glacier could be pretty functional this summer, but I doubt it’s going to open on time and there could be some rough starts,” he said. “Campgrounds may not open when then normally do. The road crews who plow the Going-to-the-Sun Road might not start plowing in April when they normally do. The fact that the superintendent didn’t even see the list of employees who were terminated until after they were terminated, that’s frightening.”

A few days after receiving the news, Olsen stood in the middle of Rexford Bench Campground on the south shore of Lake Koocanusa, observing the destruction of an early-winter snowstorm that deposited bunches of toppled ponderosas in pick-up-sticks arrangements across the most highly developed campground on the Kootenai National Forest. It has 54 sites, a day-use area with a swimming beach, a boat ramp, and a swimming area.

“This is magnitudes worse than I have ever seen it,” Olsen said. “I don’t see how they’ll get it open. Our recreation department has been gutted. It would be impossible for the two people remaining to even get a single campground open let alone maintain them all summer.”

Olsen’s been enjoying Montana’s public land since his college days, when he attended the University of Montana, graduating in 1974 with an environmental biology degree. He bought property “two air miles from downtown Eureka” in 1977 and moved to the Tobacco Valley in 1980.

“I fell in love with this valley and the smartest thing I ever did other than marry my wife is buy land here,” Olsen said. “But it’s already just about impossible for this generation to buy property or own a home, and now they can’t even keep their jobs in public service.”

“I have no idea what they’re going to do. It makes me emotional,” he added. “So, I buy lottery tickets.”

Denali Sagner contributed reporting to this article.

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