Creeping dread. A sense of disarray. Disrespect. Fear for the future.
That’s just some of what employees at federal agencies and their partner organizations in Southwest Colorado are feeling in response to news of widespread firings in the workforce and President Donald Trump’s orders to freeze hiring and spending.
At least six (and likely more to come) San Juan National Forest employees were fired Thursday, multiple sources confirmed, as officials in Washington, D.C., made broad, indiscriminate cuts to the U.S. Forest Service. Politico reported plans to fire 3,400 people from the agency – about 10% of its workforce. The firings across numerous government agencies have targeted probationary employees, who are typically those in their first year of service.
“It feels like the floor has turned like eggshells,” said a federal employee in the region. “Everybody’s just nervous and uncertain.”
The Durango Herald spoke with numerous federal employees at multiple agencies and granted them anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media and feared retribution.
The imprecise efforts to excise government bloat – a task that is warranted in some cases, federal workers say – will ultimately cost taxpayers money as projects get kicked down the road. And, the workforce reductions are likely to have long-lasting detrimental impacts on recreation opportunities and, critically, the region’s ability to respond to a catastrophic wildfire.
“One hundred years of fire suppression? We were already not keeping up with that,” said a second federal employee in the region who is familiar with public lands. “We were already not mitigating fuel and implementing prescribed fire and logging at the rate we needed to.”
There are approximately 2.5 million acres of federally managed public lands in Southwest Colorado, primarily under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. The federal Bureau of Reclamation also manages water projects that store and deliver the critical resource to farmers and tribes across the Southwest. The Environmental Protection Agency performs environmental regulation and cleanup work at sites such as the Bonita Peak Mining District surrounding Silverton.
The San Juan National Forest employs 200 people, of which nearly half are dedicated to fighting wildfire and are exempt from downsizing. The National Park Service did not answer questions about staffing levels but provided a boilerplate response to questions from the Herald.
In a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, five of Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers urged for the reinstatement of the 3,400 Forest Service employees reported to be fired.
Federal land managers work to fulfill broad mandates, which include facilitating recreation, natural resource extraction and wildfire management.
The San Juan National Forest alone contributed over $148 million to the nation’s gross domestic product in 2019, according to one study. And Mesa Verde National Park generated an estimated $75.6 million in economic output in 2023, according to the National Park Service. Visitors spent nearly $60 million in nearby communities that year.
Inside federal offices in Southwest Colorado, workers who haven't’ been fired say it feels like bureaucrats in Washington are trying to force them out.
First came a sudden return-to office order; then the “Fork in The Road” email arrived, which offered over 2 million federal employees the opportunity to resign, with pay through September. The legality of that offer and probability that the federal government will hold up its side of the deal has remained unclear.
“When somebody asks you to resign through an email that’s auto-generated, it doesn’t make you feel valued in your job,” said the first federal employee, who said they refused the offer in an act of defiance.
Public service has historically been a stable, albeit underpaid, career path.
“I really am passionate about my job and I love it and I don’t make a ton of money, but I make enough to live in Durango,” said a third federal employee. “And I’m, frankly, pretty pissed off that we’re being demonized right now, because we work – pretty hard.”
There are definitely places in the federal workforce where fat can be trimmed, she said. Clunky regulations often mean the government spends more on things than it should. But it seems to her that the executive branch and the Department of Government Efficiency, operating at the discretion of tech billionaire Elon Musk, is trying to hurl out both the baby and the bathwater.
That’s likely no accident.
An executive order issued Tuesday lays out a plan to shrink the federal workforce by attrition, and says that each agency subject to the order may hire no more than one employee for every four who leave. It also dictates plans for widespread reductions-in-force for nonessential jobs.
The employees fired from the San Juan National Forest on Thursday were all on probationary status, people familiar with the events said. Those people were fired – not asked to resign – meaning they are likely ineligible for unemployment benefits.
Cuts are impacting federal land management agencies across the state, another person said. That means that members of the next generation of public lands stewards are being shown the door, and others aren’t joining the civil service in the first place.
“They’re like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ They don’t want to work for us,” that federal employee said.
In a statement posted Thursday on X, formerly known as Twitter, Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet slammed the move as a “misguided action” that will have “devastating consequences.”
“The USFS was already a chronically understaffed agency, and this will hinder important forest management and wildfire prevention effort,” he wrote.
Federal employees and partner organizations say they share that concern.
The federal workers still on the job say that rather than using winter to prepare for a busy field season, they’re in a holding pattern.
That’s going to cost taxpayers money, they say.
“Talk about inefficiency,” one worker said. “… When you push a project out a year, the cost immediately increases.”
In the case of large water projects, the funding freeze could mean not only higher costs, but delayed access to a reliable source of drinking water for the eastern section of the Navajo Nation, southwestern portion of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the city of Gallup, New Mexico. That is likely to jeopardize the already tenuous trust that exists between tribal nations and the federal government.
Organizations such as the Mountain Studies Institute, which receives about 30% of its $2 million annual budget through federal grants and agreements, say there’s a lot of uncertainty around the work they’ll be able to do – and that’s the hardest part.
MSI is a year into a three-year wetland restoration project on BLM land near Animas Forks, north of Silverton, said Executive Director Melissa May. The organization is working to restore high-elevation fens that store both carbon and water – a “best-case scenario for headwaters restoration,” she said. But those funds are frozen, and it’s unclear if the organization will be able to continue with the work this year.
Recreation services are taking a big hit as well.
“We’re running on a skeleton crew as federal agencies for the most part already,” said a federal employee in the region familiar with public land management. “And so talking about reducing workforce has the obvious impact of reducing services to the public.”
In December, the Forest Service announced that it would not be hiring seasonal workers, who do anything from hydrology field work to maintaining campgrounds to clearing roads and trails.
At that time, the San Juan Mountains Association – a vital partner of the SJNF – said the organization was preparing to pick up that slack, but warned that access would be threatened. The organization’s executive director, Stephanie Weber, said she was prepared to have only three seasonal workers funded through the forest, who typically help patrol wilderness areas and encourage stewardship at popular sites.
Now, those three positions are in jeopardy.
“Nothing feels solid anymore,” she said.
As minor as it may sound, access to recreation opportunities such as camping (and the millions in economic output generated by visitors) can hinge on something as simple as whether there’s enough staff to clean toilets.
“People aren’t going to be super stoked about recreating and coming to Durango when there’s no toilet service,” said the same federal employee.
MSI and the Wildfire Adapted Partnership are among numerous organizations in Southwest Colorado that leverage federal funds to perform cross-boundary watershed resiliency and fire mitigation work, including on private properties that abut public land.
“Watersheds, forest fires – they don’t care where the line is of Forest Service land versus private land,” MSI Director May said.
Wildfire Adapted uses federal money to match property owners’ contributions to incentivize them to do fire mitigation work, which can protect a home or even a neighborhood from a catastrophic wildfire. The organization has over $500,000 in agreements that it cannot use right now, said Executive Director Ashley Downing.
That means that fewer acres may get treated this spring, less outreach occurs, and the momentum – a critical element in convincing entire neighborhoods to undertake costly but crucial mitigation measures – slows.
Firefighters are theoretically going to be exempt from the freeze on hiring for seasonal positions, but hiring has nonetheless stalled for the time being. And people involved in other elements of firefighting, from those who run fire camps on complex incidents like the 416 Fire, to other Forest Service employees who are certified firefighters and step up in an emergency, are in jeopardy or have already lost their jobs.
“That is the work that keeps communities safe in the worst of times,” a federal worker said.
Just as fuels reduction work on private lands through nonprofit partners is on pause, the work of burning fuels on the landscape in a controlled manner may or may not continue in the immediate future.
This sets public land managers up to fight fires when they arrive – but not prevent them or limit their severity in the first place.
“We don’t want to be putting the fire out at the screaming limit,” a federal worker said. “We want to be preventing it to begin with.”
All these fears, workers and organizational partners say, are exacerbated by the absence of certainty.
“Everything is changing every day,” May said. “Uncertainty has been the hardest part.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
