U.S. Forest Service employees illegally fired in South Lake Tahoe by Nadia Tase
Elon Musk’s U.S. Department of Government Efficiency has been active in its quest to dismantle the federal government under the guise of rooting out corruption, fraud, and waste. Since the inauguration, DOGE emails have taunted federal employees, stating they are unproductive and offering so-called buyouts to resign. Over President’s day weekend, 3,400 U.S. Forest Service (USFS) employees and 1,000 National Park Service employees still in their probationary period of hire were terminated illegally by the Trump administration, including many individuals that accepted the “Fork in the road” Musk buyout offer. While permanent federal employees are easier to fire while in probationary status, there still must be cause. The cause provided? “The [Forest Service] Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”
This would be fine if it were true, but it is not. Here on the local forest, the Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit (LTBMU), 11 people working in trails, watershed restoration, vegetation management, wildlife biology, fisheries, and public services who had only positive performance reviews were illegally terminated. Individuals who have been with the forest working as temporary seasonal employees without benefits for years, decades even. Nobody can accuse these individuals of being lazy. No. These individuals worked many years with stagnant wages and no benefits, with no real incentive in fact to do any work. Yet they returned year after year after year because of their love for the hard work in the outdoors and their USFS family. Only in the last year did they finally receive long overdue permanent jobs with benefits and were therefore on probation.
If this purge were truly about government efficiency, these would not be the individuals to target. These are some of the hardest working people, the most dedicated, the most productive worker bees that simply put, get stuff done. They hike for hours, days, carrying heavy packs and equipment, doing backbreaking work. Building world class hiking and biking trails, cutting hazard trees, constructing new stream channels and restoring meadows, eradicating non-native fish from our streams, locating sensitive bird species, flagging out thinning and fuels reduction units, scrutinizing over which trees to cut and keep to ensure optimal health of our forest, identifying resources that need protection, and serving our public. These are not the high-level bureaucrats. These are hard-working Americans who would rather do anything than sit around and be unproductive. By the numbers, 11 people doesn’t sound like many. But collectively, the LTBMU and the Tahoe community has lost decades of experience. Many of these individuals were also fireline qualified and provided extra resources when we are running out of firefighters. Oftentimes, these individuals are called up specifically to provide firefighting coverage for local Tahoe Basin fires through Crew 45. Losing these individuals puts our community at greater risk and puts greater strain on our already taxed firefighters.
Our forests are in crisis with impacts from climate change becoming more and more severe. Drought and increased temperatures, coupled with the overly dense forests from a century of fire exclusion and removing Indigenous stewards from the land, have led to larger and more severe wildfires and insect mortality events. There are varying opinions on the role of federal and state government, the size of government, and whether federal lands should be federally managed at all. I recently listened to California state house assembly member, David Tangipa, from District 8 covering Calaveras, Fresno, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa, Mono, and Tuolumne counties, speak about how California can manage our forests better than the federal government. While that’s a nice sentiment, the reality is that our state agencies do not have the infrastructure, systems, and funding in place to manage 19 million acres of federally managed forests, particularly when several million acres are in high and very high fire hazard risk.
The people working for our federal land management agencies have been tasked with doing more and more with less and less as Congress has been unable to pass budgets for more than a couple months at a time, and as federal hiring freezes have abounded under both red and blue administrations. They are working with their rural communities, with the environmental groups, with the loggers and with Indigenous land stewards to do right by the forests and the people who depend on them. The work of natural resources management is not glamorous, it does not pay well, and arguably federal civil servants may be the most acutely aware of the federal government corruption, fraud and waste, as it comes down from the highest levels of our government and cripples their ability to get anything done. Yet they still get so much done despite these hindrances, if they don’t get driven away by the workload first. The ones that stayed despite all the challenges of being a federal civil servant were just illegally terminated with more reductions in the permanent workforce likely to come for the rest.
Let us not forget the impacts our beloved places saw during the covid-19 pandemic, when our seasonal federal workers were reduced to essential workers only and there was a limited federal presence on our forests. Trash piled up on our Tahoe beaches and trailheads. Human excrement and waste accumulated all over the land as bathrooms were unable to be maintained. Fuels reduction work slowed. USFS temporary seasonal hiring was already frozen under the Biden administration as they contended with a $750 million agency deficit and this recent blow of illegally firing thousands of individuals will only serve to hamper the public lands and the services they provide that we all love so dearly.
There are no easy solutions, but if this were about efficiency, ask our civil servants how to do things better, which red tape to cut, what can we live without. We all have so many ideas. These illegal terminations affect real humans, real individuals that are part of our community, and ultimately affect all of us who love this place. We have been told that to solve the wildfire problem in California, we need to rake our forests, but our rakes have been confiscated. The hypocrisy from Washington is astounding. Kevin Kiley is the U.S. House Representative for District 3 which includes the Plumas, Tahoe, Eldorado and Inyo National Forests as well as the LTMBU and portions of Yosemite and Death Valley National Parks. He claims to care about restoring forest health and safeguarding our communities through cosponsoring the Fix Our Forests Act. His district is dominated by federal land and recreation and tourism built on the splendor of the vast natural resources on these lands. Yet his silence is deafening against the wrongdoings towards the actual humans employed to work on these lands he claims to care about. He states that “the Fix Our Forests Act will provide agencies with critical tools to implement the most vital forest management projects immediately.” But words without action and acts on paper do not increase the pace and scale of forest restoration or support rural economies. Humans do.
Photo: U.S. House Representative Kevin Kiley’s district 3, dominated by public lands, yet the Congressman is silent on the illegal termination of thousands of U.S. Forest Service and Park Service employees.
–Nadia Tase South Lake Tahoe