In the 1960s and 1970s, ranchers and champions of extractive industries throughout the American West tried to buck the confines of federal regulation and transfer public lands to state control in a movement known as the Sagebrush Rebellion.
The recent dismantling of federal public lands agencies, this time from the top down, is reminiscent of that effort, said Ryan Schroeder. He was a rangeland management specialist at the Bureau of Land Management’s Tres Rios Field Office in Dolores until he was fired Feb. 18, six weeks into the job, as part of a sweeping effort by the Trump administration to cull the federal workforce.
“It’s organized unorganization,” Schroeder said.
At Mesa Verde National Park, the loss of employees to resignation or indiscriminate firings is expected to lead to a slow decline in customer service and a degradation of archaeological and natural resources – the park’s main attraction – a former employee said.
The park has been operating with about 65 employees in recent memory. That’s only two-thirds of the positions it should have. Now, an estimated six to eight employees have either resigned or been fired, according to a former employee included in that departure who agreed to speak to The Durango Herald on the condition of anonymity.
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“They’re literally cutting the people who bring money into the park,” they said.
Credit cards issued to National Park Service workers at Mesa Verde have a $1 spending cap now.
“Buying office supplies – you can’t even do that without getting permission from someone at the regional level,” the former employee said.
If the park runs out of toilet paper and has to close a bathroom, but needs to buy printer paper to make a sign informing the public of the closure, even those purchases would need the approval of a higher authority.
At the Bureau of Land Management, Schroeder warned that serious impacts of his firing could arrive quickly.
Part of his job was to administer over 100 grazing permits on 600,000 acres of BLM-managed lands spanning Pagosa Springs, Cortez and Naturita. The work involved conducting comprehensive reviews of the allotments to ensure that the grazing permits were in accordance with the current capacity of the ecosystem.
“Within some of these ecosystems out here, it can only take one season of overgrazing to have decades-long implications,” Schroeder said.
Nationwide, employees of federal agencies, especially those that manage public lands, have been subject to wholesale firings.
President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who leads the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (which was not established by Congress, the only body authorized to create new federal offices), have made it a priority to reduce government spending. However, the service has vastly overestimated its savings. And its approach, current and former employees have said, is akin to using a chain saw for a job that should be done with a scalpel.
Cuts to federal agencies first targeted probationary employees, like Schroeder, who was just six weeks into his 12-month probationary term. Rosalee Reese, a forest fisheries biologist with the Rio Grande National Forest, was fired Feb. 15, about four months shy of completing her two-year probationary period. She had five years of civil service under her belt before a break in federal employment.
“I think leadership was pretty surprised, and it didn’t seem like they had really any say in who ended up being on the list for these initial cuts,” Reese said. “It was pretty much just straight from the Washington office.”
A federal judge on Thursday temporarily put the firings on hold, but that has done little to inspire hope among terminated employees. The ruling came a day after the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum ordering federal agencies to plan for widespread workforce reductions in the coming months.
Employees who have been fired for poor performance – without evidence – or resigned under duress describe their departure in lugubrious terms.
“There’s a deep grief and sadness in me in losing my job, because I love my job, and I loved what I was doing, and I felt that I was getting a lot of important work done on the landscape,” Reese said. “And it is also completely devastating to my family, because my son is due in seven weeks, and I just lost my income, my benefits (and) my maternity leave.”
The Feb. 26 OMB memo said “the federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt,” and claimed that “tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens.”
Former federal employees, such as Reese, Schroeder and the unnamed Mesa Verde worker, argue otherwise.
“I don’t know anybody at Mesa Verde who isn’t necessary,” said the former park employee.
The terminations, which included someone responsible for collecting fees at the park’s front gate, are likely to hasten the degradation of the park’s resources and the visitor experience, the former Mesa Verde worker said.
The vault toilets on Coal Bank and Molas passes may not open this year, Columbine District Ranger Nick Glidden told La Plata County commissioners during a public meeting Wednesday. The district spends $55,000 a year to pump vault toilets, he said. If funding remains uncertain, he doesn’t want to risk the possibility that the toilets go unpumped and crack during the next freeze. It also means the forest may not have the $20,000 it spends annually on rental toilets at the popular Ice Lake trailhead.
As many as 11 employees were fired on the San Juan National Forest, people familiar with the matter said, although at least one person in timber sales has been reinstated, Glidden told the BOCC.
On the Rio Grande National Forest, Reese said her work was critical to species conservation. She helped stock fisheries, designed wildfire buffers using riparian corridors, and signed off on fuel treatments and timber sales to ensure compliance with environmental protection laws. With Reese’s firing, alongside another colleague and a third who took an offer for deferred resignation, that work falls to the Fish and Wildlife Program’s two remaining employees.
“We’re chronically understaffed as it is,” she said.
Schroeder, the former rangeland management specialist, was brought on to fill a position that had been vacant for two years.
The agency is obligated to approve grazing permits without changing the terms or conditions if it lacks the resources to go out and do statutorily mandated assessments of the allotments. With only two employees left in the region to work through a two-year backlog, Schroeder thinks it is likely the office will have to approve new permits without doing that analysis.
Even without enforcement, most of the permit-holders are good stewards of the land, Schroeder said. But as the region slips into drought conditions again, he worries that the lack of rangeland oversight could lead to overgrazing, lawsuits and the long-term degradation of the ecosystem.
“If things were to get messed up by grazing, by increased oil and gas development, by increased invasive species that are already germinating and going, increased pressures that we can’t monitor, then that will have an impact on the bottom line of the ranchers,” he said.
As the scope of federal firings has become clearer, leaders at public lands agencies are increasingly concerned about the impact cuts will have on firefighting capacity, and are issuing worrisome predictions for the fire season ahead.
Federal firefighters have been exempt from the firings and resignation opportunities – but only full-time fire crew members.
Many employees at federal public lands agencies don’t work fire jobs full-time, but still hold “red cards,” meaning they are certified to work as firefighters on the fire line during an incident. Reese was among them. Schroeder, who has worked fire in the past, was in the process of getting recertified so he could deploy in the event of an emergency.
“When we have an incident on-forest, it’s all-hands-on-deck,” Columbine District Ranger Glidden said this week to county commissioners.
Employees with red cards can are assigned front-line fire jobs, while those without that training get pulled into organization operations, such as finance, logistics and incident management. Several terminated employees on the SJNF had firefighting certifications.
“Certainly any reduction of an overall team approach impacts firefighting,” Glidden said.
The BLM’s Tres Rios Field Office has two vacant positions on one of its fire engines right now, including the engine captain, Field Office Manager Derek Padilla told the BOCC in the same meeting. And although the hiring freeze doesn’t apply to firefighters, the human resources department has not been able to post the positions.
All this comes as officials gear up for what they fear could be another historic and devastating fire season. Both the BLM and the Forest Service have canceled prescribed burns because of high-risk conditions, and agency officials don’t expect to get much burning done during the spring season.
“We feel like we’re going to have a busy fire season as is,” Glidden said.
Eyebrows raised in the county board room when he said that forest conditions are similar to those in 2002 and 2018 – the years of the Missionary Ridge and 416 fires.
“We are pretty close in alignment with the moistures that we saw during those years, so we are definitely worried,” he said.
La Plata County Commissioner Marsha Porter-Norton did not mince words in response.
“It’s felt like there’s a lot of sand being put in a lot of gas tanks,” she said, calling the cuts “about the most shortsighted thing that I can imagine.”
With short-term fears of raging wildfire, inadequate resources and environmental degradation, some are also concerned about the long-term ramifications of the current administration’s approach.
“The long game for this is to make people further disgruntled with federal land management and get to the point where they’re like, ‘the feds suck at doing this,’” Schroeder said. “… I fear that lack of capacity, lack of leadership … is going to have repercussions in the long run (that will) degrade the appetite for holding onto federal public lands and increase the likelihood that they will be sold off, disposed of … and make it become a pay-to-play sort of a system.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
