Stop the Destruction & Salvage the U.S. Forest Service
By Suzanne Cable
The US Forest Service is headed for obsolescence due to recent personnel reductions, proposed budget cuts, and re-organization plans. The ability of the US 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 like the US Forest Service, including staffing changes where appropriate, but what we have seen occur over the last several months to the US 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, despite a lack of accurate information provided by the administration. What has not been daylighted, however, and specifically in the case of the US 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 fifty percent of the remaining agency workforce. That includes personnel that serve as recreation specialists, wilderness managers, 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 are 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, law enforcement, and infrastructure maintenance is reduced or absent while summer public visitation to our 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 water quality, wildlife, and vegetation that in the most fragile and heavily used areas will never recover.
A local and especially acute example on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest is in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. The cherished Enchantments area of the Alpine Lakes is one of the busiest wild land destinations in Washington state for outdoor recreation with up to 100,000 people hiking there each year in the short summer and fall season. There are usually ten to twelve Wilderness Rangers that patrol and 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 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. Usually, the District has 2 or 3 full crews not only doing their own work to maintain trails but also working with and supporting volunteers, youth crews, and professional partner crews to accomplish trail maintenance.
This is a situation that will result in not only irreparable damage to Wilderness character and natural resources but will lead to unsafe and unsanitary conditions for visitors as unmitigated human waste, trash, parking congestion, blocked access for emergency vehicles and search and rescue operations are widespread. Unlike the impacts to public lands due to visitation during the COVID pandemic in 2020, 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 US Forest Service to deliver services to the American public.
The gutting of the US 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 and protect our wild landscapes from destruction, including re-creating a functional US Forest Service nationally and right here at home in central Washington.
About the Author: Suzanne Cable retired in January 2024 after a 30-year career with the US Forest Service. She finished her career as the forest-wide program manager for Recreation, Trails, and Wilderness on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Wenatchee, Washington.
Disclaimer: Wenatchee Outdoors shares this article in the interest of fostering thoughtful conversation around public land management. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of our organization. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, we remain nonpartisan and do not engage in political advocacy.
