Seasonal Depression

The U.S. Forest Service axes seasonal jobs for 2025

Last week the U.S. Forest Service held an employee-wide phone call to announce that it will not be hiring any seasonal workers outside of wildfire in 2025. Many folks who read this newsletter understand immediately just what this means, how much this will affect every parcel of the National Forest system, and how disastrous it will be for our public lands in the coming year. But those unfamiliar with the agency, its work, and the nature of its seasonal workforce may not. To use the phrase of one of my comrades, this announcement is a “flash flood apocalypse.”

As it happened, I was in the process of drafting a story about the importance of district-level, seasonal field workers when I heard the news. A friend on Twitter who’d asked me about how to find seasonal jobs a few weeks before sent me a reddit post. “Did you see this,” she said, “Does this mean…?” The post shared an all-employees letter from the Regional Forester in the southwest—Region 3 in agency speak—with the benign subject “FY 2025 Temporary and Seasonal Hiring.”

I remembered similar bad-news letters from my last year in the agency as I read the first few paragraphs outlining efforts “to stabilize and grow our workforce,” “provide our workforce certainty and better benefits,” and “ensure the agency as a whole benefits from a more permanent workforce to accomplish work on behalf of the American people.” The letter assures employees that, “as a region we have done an exceptional job of adhering to our [fiscal year] 2024 plan.” Finally, in the third paragraph, it gets to the “difficult measures.”

“In FY 2025 we will not be hiring (1039) temporary employees outside of fire.”

As I’ve written before, “temporary” employees may sound like reasonably expendable pieces of the Forest Service’s mission to those unfamiliar with the agency. The shock, anger, and grief I’ve heard recently from those within the agency, including from permanent employees, hints at why this is not the case. These people know that the Forest Service runs almost entirely on seasonal, “temporary” workers. Unless you’re a logging, mining, or ski-resort company, virtually everything you’ve ever seen or visited on a National Forest was built, maintained, or provided by the agency’s seasonal workforce. Campgrounds and trails; bathrooms and signage; answers to your mundane or detailed questions by the kid at the front desk of the ranger station. Not to mention less visible work that not only ensures your enjoyment of your public lands, but helps you sleep at night afterwards: wildlife monitoring, fisheries management, forest management, and more.

The reddit poster who shared this letter said the announcement would likely spread nationwide over the next few weeks, a prediction which has been confirmed by my friends and former coworkers in at least four other regions, as well as during the all-employees call with the Chief mentioned earlier. This was hardly a surprise. The agency’s ongoing budget crisis has hung like a dark cloud over seasonal hiring and planning since the beginning of this year, when a hiring “pause” dragged out into a complete hiring freeze after the “unanticipated” discovery of a $740 million budget shortfall. The foreboding vibes at the district level only worsened after an announcement earlier this month that 2024 seasonals in several regions would be laid off on October 1 without the commonly offered opportunities for extension.

For seasonals especially, the writing has been on the wall since the announcement of the agency-wide shift to “permanent seasonal employment,” or PSE’s, which aimed to replace temporary jobs altogether. Explaining the difference gets into the weeds of federal job classifications a bit too much, but think of it like being a teacher: a permanent employee with a long (winter instead of summer) break. In theory, these would provide seasonals much-needed job security and healthcare in the off-season. In practice, the Forest Service’s dysfunctional hiring processes led to confusing or missed application deadlines, uncertainty about duty stations, and widespread pay cuts for experienced seasonals forced to take lower-grade PSE offerings. (And often worse, but that’s a topic for another post.)

And yet this latest announcement of a freeze on all non-fire seasonals still feels like the agency has crossed a new, dark threshold. The devil is in some of the details I’ve learned from people in the agency this week. At least three regions have announced a freeze not only on agency-funded seasonal workers, but on externally-funded ones too. You may be surprised to learn that many, if not most, recreation departments in the Forest Service are funded not by taxpayers, but by state or nonprofit grants. Another region has made these externally funded positions dependent upon review “by the office of the Chief.” The reason for cutting even seasonal employees paid for with outside funding sources is still unclear, or at least has not been widely communicated.

Another current employee told me that even some recently-hired PSE’s (again, permanent seasonal employees) may lose their jobs as well, which was echoed by another friend who works closely with the agency. As each National Forest and Region structures its funding and workforce slightly differently, the cuts will hit some areas harder than others. The Northeast, for example, moved to an entirely PSE seasonal workforce around 2022, while some forests in the northern Rockies still relied almost entirely on temporary seasonals this past season. But many Regions that hired more PSEs than others last year faced HR backlogs that left some PSE jobs open and unfilled. A commenter in the trail work subreddit mentions they have only one PSE in their district’s trail program charged with maintaining over 700 miles of hiking trails.

As I wrote about in my last post, the economics of building a trail work career have been getting harder for a long time:

We need drastically more professional trail and conservation workers in the agencies, or soon the newly-trained Corps workers will have no worthwhile public service careers to pursue.

This latest blow to the Forest Service seasonal workforce may have come as a surprise, but it was far from unpredictable. Of course, the Forest Service is not entirely in control of its funding. Democrats and Republicans alike have failed to meaningfully secure adequate funding for land management for several decades—it’s how we got to this point in the first place. Still, one wonders if higher-ups at the agency could have done things differently. As several of my friends in the agency have pointed out, many Forests used the temporary funding provided by the Great American Outdoor Act and Biden’s infrastructure bill to hire scores of permanent, high-grade employees at the upper levels for several years. These critical vacancies have no doubt plagued important regulatory work in the agency for a long time. And yet it’s hard to hear the agency’s line on filling these “highest-priority” positions without wondering if it had given any thought to the agency’s priorities at all. What is a land management agency without workers out on the land? Unfortunately, we are about to find out.

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I’ll keep reporting on this as I hear more updates from my old comrades in the trenches. In the meantime, I’m offering a special subscription discount offer in honor of the agency cutting its staff in half since the 1990s: 50 percent off for monthly and annual subscriptions until October 1. Appreciate all your support. Write your congressperson and hug a trail worker today.