Lanny Flaherty was over 2,000 miles from home setting prescribed burns in Louisiana when he was fired from his Forest Service job.
The termination was immediate and did not include a severance package, Flaherty told WildfireToday. Despite being miles away from his Oregon home on official duty, Flaherty was told he’d have to find his own way home. It took his union fighting on his behalf for the USFS to temporarily rescind his termination so he could get home.
Flaherty’s experience is just one of the countless examples showing the chaos that the Trump Administration has caused in its mass firing of thousands of federal land employees, chaos that will have ripple effects for the nation’s wildland firefighting force, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters Vice President Riva Duncan.
Flaherty was a range ecologist in Oregon’s Wallowa-Whitman National Forest whose primary duties were studying vegetation and fungi. But, like countless other USFS employees, he had wildfire-fighting secondary duties that made up around half of his job.
I pulled end-of-the-year earning and leave statements for the last few years and saw that I was spending around 40% to 50% of my hours on fire incidents,” Flaherty said. “That alone is thousands of man hours that aren’t going to be available the next time a fire pops up.”
Duncan said Flaherty’s experience was incredibly common across the Forest Service. Around 75% of the USFS probationary employees that the Trump Administration fired had secondary wildland fire duties, according to numbers Duncan obtained from the National Federation of Federal Employees’ Wildland Fire division.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) previously told WildfireToday that it didn’t lay off operational firefighters, but the people it did fire provided critical help to wildland firefighters.
“While ‘primary firefighters’ were exempt, the positions that were cut made some pretty huge contributions to operational wildland fire,” Duncan said. “For example, eastern national forests rely much more heavily on these collateral duty folks to do a lot of prescribed burning and initial attack of wildfires…There were people working the LA fires who, because it was the offseason, weren’t primary fire but were filling in on engines and crews.”
The U.S. wildland firefighting force has been critically short-staffed for years, with former Forest Service Chief Randy Moore testifying in 2022 that firefighting positions in some areas were only 50% filled. Union leaders have feared a looming “mass exodus” of firefighters every time a 2021 pay boost is narrowly passed by Congress.
Both Duncan and Flaherty said the recent cuts would only strain firefighters further. Not only will the layoffs deprive firefighters of much-needed help, but firefighters have also since been asked to help pick up the duties of fired personnel, increasing an already heavy burden within the fire workforce.
“The remaining workforce becomes people charged with picking up trash at campgrounds or marking timber while we aren’t having fires,” Duncan said. “A lot of firefighters are concerned that they’re just going to be told to do even more with even less, have more of a burden, and maybe even held back from fire assignments to work on some of those other things, because some areas still do that.”
Despite the turmoil Flaherty’s firing caused, he said he’d still be willing to return to his job if an offer came his way. He still believes in the work he was doing and the importance of land stewardship, even if the current administration doesn’t believe in him or people like him. In the meantime, he hopes a tragedy doesn’t occur with understaffed fire crews.
“This is ultimately going to cost lives and endanger everybody that’s out there on the fire line,” Flaherty said.
Flaherty’s chance may come sooner than he expected. The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), an independent federal court that focuses on government employee complaints, issued a stay order against the USDA on Wednesday. The Board ordered the reinstatement of every position terminated within the department since Feb. 13 to be reinstated for at least 45 days, on the grounds that USDA’s mass and indiscriminate termination was likely unlawful.
It’s unclear how the reinstatement will actually play out, and how many employees will return, according to Duncan.
“No one seems to know what the next steps are or how to re-hire people,” Duncan said. “In other words, nothing seems to have trickled down to the (Forest Service) or (Department of the Interior) regarding this and the process.”
If Flaherty’s job, and the thousands of other public land positions, are reinstated, the process may be as chaotic as the original firing, which doesn’t inspire confidence in the department’s employees and an already strained wildland firefighting force.
USDA was ordered to submit proof it complied with MSPB’s stay by March 10.
I didn’t think my comment warranted 2 dislikes. Wow! What got in your corn flakes?
Though not widely reported, the chaos sown by the incoming administration is indeed having an effect on fire personnel. On the day of the inauguration, the USFS froze all HR actions for incoming seasonal firefighters, and while there has been some movement in the system over the past week, many are still sitting motionless in the system and have not even been sent tentative selection notices. As fire season rapidly approaches, there is very real talk at local districts in R1 of advising these would-be seasonal firefighters to start looking for other summer employment, since their HR actions seem stuck in a black hole and the FMO/engine captain types doing the hiring don’t feel like they can guarantee jobs right now.
Apparently ‘they’ want a smaller population and saving lives goes against that. So we can do the life saving being paid less for a while or we can let them have their way. States need to step up.
I think the commitment to the community is admirable but there comes a time you have to do what you have to for yourself and your family. Get another firefighter job, there’s need and many available.
This is the lowest I’ve ever seen morale going into a fire season. Stories like this should be unbelievable- but they’re not.
The salary on my promotional offer letter after 5-10 years in made me question every life choice that brought me here. My mentors have left fire or are holding on till they retire in 2 years. My peers are interviewing with structure depts, contract crews, or contract medics for if the decision March 14th doesn’t go our way. 30k-40k base doesn’t stretch as far as it used to. This season will be interesting
Riva – no mention of collateral duty folks in the infrastructure bill- no Tim Hart Bill for the trail guy leaving his family and district projects….only to be handed a saw and do the exact same work as other Fire Fighters.
50% of my collateral duty hours were on active incidents as well, only to be told you aren’t an “actual” fire employee and that we need a new US Fire Service…. Get over yourselves?
I think we’re going to find more stories like this in the near future. There are a lot of employees in the Forest Service and Park Service whose primary jobs are not in fire but they are trained in fire and do help out. I did a few years of prescribed fire contracts working with these people in the South. They’re in recreation, some Park Employees, some in wildlife, and even an entimologist. When the person in this story got booted and was told to get back on their own it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.