By Suzanne Cable
The U.S. Forest Service is headed for obsolescence due to recent personnel reductions, proposed budget cuts, and reorganization plans. The ability of the Forest Service to meet its legislatively mandated multiple-use mission to the American public is being systematically dismantled.
I, and many Americans, welcome thoughtful strategic reform of federal agencies, but what we have seen occur over the last several months to the Forest Service is nothing like that. We’ve seen an agency systematically and deliberately dismantled by indiscriminate firings, forced retirements, and coerced resignations. And the chaos is not over with a reduction in force and drastic structural reorganization planned and looming in the future, but currently on hold by a federal judge and awaiting a ruling by the Supreme Court.
The large number of personnel leaving the federal government has been widely reported in the news media. What has not been daylighted, however, and specifically in the case of the Forest Service, is that since firefighter and law enforcement positions were not eligible for the various incentives offered to encourage employees to leave, nearly all the employee reductions have come from the far less than 50 percent of the remaining agency workforce. That includes personnel that serve as wilderness managers, recreation specialists, fisheries and wildlife biologists, botanists, archeologists, research scientists, and the many varieties of forestry technicians doing work on the ground.
The short-term impact of personnel reductions will be seen this summer when all remaining employees and resources are devoted to responding to wildland fire upon reaching national preparedness level 3 (we’re currently at level 2). This is after thousands of qualified call-as-needed firefighters and fire operations support personnel have lost their jobs. This will come at the expense of the many other mission-critical responsibilities of those remaining employees.
We’ll also see the impact when recreational access, information and education, and infrastructure maintenance is reduced or absent while summer public visitation to national forests surges. Not unlike 2020 in the first year of the COVID pandemic, agency personnel are again directed by their leadership to keep open all recreational access and facilities regardless of whether they can safely and responsibly operate those sites and facilities to established standards. Instead, we will see unmitigated damage to nature from unchecked visitation to sensitive landscapes due to unmanaged recreation. We’ll see impacts to wilderness character, water quality, wildlife, and vegetation that in the most fragile and heavily used areas will never recover.
An especially acute example of reduced staffing with the potential for irreparable damage is on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington state. The cherished Enchantments area of the Alpine Lakes is one of the busiest wildland destinations in Washington state for outdoor recreation with more than 100,000 people hiking there each year. There are usually ten to twelve Wilderness Rangers on rotational patrols that care for the Enchantments each summer. Due to staffing reductions, the Wenatchee River Ranger District has one Wilderness Ranger on duty this summer to patrol not only the Enchantments but also the other 150,000 plus acres of designated Wilderness on the district. Additionally, the district now has one trail crew leader and no trail crew.
This is a situation that will result in not only irreparable damage to wilderness character and natural resources but will also lead to unsafe and unsanitary conditions for visitors as unmitigated human waste, trash, parking congestion, and search and rescue operations are widespread. This is an entirely self-made crisis by the current administration due to implementing a poorly planned and executed, deliberately destructive take-down of the ability of the Forest Service to deliver services to the American public.
The gutting of the Forest Service is just one example of a national crisis that will take years or decades to recover from once we, as a society, choose to stop the damage to our federal system of governance. We must individually and collectively speak out to all our elected officials and demand a stop to the out-of-control damage being done. We need to begin to rebuild a federal government that we can rely on to deliver critical services to the American public, including the Forest Service, and protect our wild landscapes from destruction.
Suzanne Cable retired in January 2024 after a 30-year career with the Forest Service. She finished her career as the forest-wide program manager for Recreation, Trails, and Wilderness on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. Suzanne continues her advocacy for wilderness stewardship in central Washington, including volunteering for local conservation organizations. She has recently joined the Board of Directors of Wilderness Watch.