The U.S. Forest Service is a federal agency that manages 193 million acres of land, an area about the size of Texas. Next year, the agency will have to manage that land without its seasonal workforce, according to a report by Backpacker magazine.
In September, the agency announced that it would be suspending all seasonal hiring for the 2025 season, a decision that will cut about 2,400 jobs. Nearly all of those positions are field-based jobs, ranging from biologists and timber workers to trail technicians and recreation staff. In addition, the agency is freezing all external hiring for permanent positions. The only exception to the hiring freeze are the roughly 11,300 firefighters hired by the agency every year.
According to the agency and its partners, the effects of these staffing cuts will be far-ranging and severe. In the Sept. 17 all-employee call where he announced the hiring freeze, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said “We just can’t get the same work done with fewer employees.” Though the Forest Service has been shedding jobs for decades — about 8,000 jobs in the last 20 years, Moore said — this will be the largest single-year staff cut in recent memory.
Click here to read the full report by Backpacker magazine.
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