With more than a third of Colorado — some 24 million acres — preserved as public land, the news last week of mass firings in some of the agencies tasked with managing those lands has prompted concerns about the capacity of remaining employees to regulate use and prevent deadly wildfires.

Mikayla Moors, 27, was nine months into her permanent position as a forestry technician with the U.S. Forest Service based in Fort Collins when she got the news her job was cut. In her role, she traveled throughout the region to assist understaffed districts in Colorado, South Dakota, Wyoming and Nebraska. She recorded data in the field, served as an extra set of eyes for sensitive species and assisted in forest regeneration surveys.

Moors previously spent two summers with the National Park Service at Rocky Mountain National Park and then worked as an intern for two winters with the Rocky Mountain Conservancy, the park’s philanthropic partner. She finally got her foot in the door with a permanent position as a forestry technician — something she says is hard to achieve — and is now unemployed.

“I put in my work as a dedicated, passionate civil servant, caring for the land and serving the people,” Moors said. “I just want to try and find the place where I belong and where I can do my best work and because I'm so early in my career, I was still looking for that.”

Moors was one of more than 90 U.S. Forest Service employees who received termination notices in Colorado last Friday, part of a purge of 3,400 workers nationwide in the Forest Service, according to a statement by Gov. Jared Polis. The cuts have also targeted at least 2,300 employees from various agencies within the U.S. Department of the Interior including the National Park Service, according to Reuters . Other published reports put the number of jobs cut in Colorado as high as 150.

Originally, more than 5,000 seasonal jobs at national parks were also on the chopping block, but The Associated Press reported Feb. 20 that the National Park Service confirmed it would reinstate those jobs. A day later the NPS said it would employee a total of 7,700 seasonal employees, higher than the three-year average of 6,350. About 50 permanent jobs had also been reinstated, the service said. The Park Service has about 20,000 employees.

The directive to cut the U.S. Forest Service jobs came from an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in his first days in office, aiming to “ significantly reduce the size of government .” Most cuts targeted workers who were, like Moors, in a probationary period , either as new employees or after moving to new positions.

On Feb. 13, Moors received an email that said she was being fired. Part of the emailed memo read: “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”

The same sentence has been widely reported in the termination emails sent to other federal workers nationwide. Moors received “exceeds expectations” on all categories in a recent performance report she shared with The Gazette.

“It's a lot of time that we spend dedicating ourselves to working on furthering our careers for the mission of the agencies we choose to work for,” Moors said. “I can't imagine doing any other kind of work. It is just so fulfilling, and it's really my life's mission to serve others.”

Facing uncertainty

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, one of four in Colorado, has been making do with less for years as crews monitor the steep, deep canyon gouged by the Gunnison River in the western part of the state, with its extreme vistas.

The Valentine’s Day layoffs just cut a significant chunk of the park’s staff, said Sheridan Steele, an executive council member for the Coalition to Protect America's National Parks , an advocacy group founded by National Park Service retirees. Steele was previously Black Canyon's deputy superintendent.

“That, of course, has all kinds of ramifications," Steele said. “This is in the face of tremendous increases in visitation since COVID and a decline in budget anyway … it’s putting people in a bad spot.”

Steele said there are 74 total permanent staff member positions at Black Canyon, 14 of which were already vacant and could not be filled before the federal layoffs. The National Park Service, like all other federal agencies, has had a freeze on new hires with few exceptions since Jan. 20.

The probationary layoffs numbered 10, and three Black Canyon staff took the “fork in the road” buyout referring to emails sent to federal employees offering a “deferred resignation” dated for September of this year.

The losses bring the total number of vacancies to 27, leaving just 47 full-time employees to monitor the 30,000-acre park.

Steele said the immediate impacts in the park could be longer entrance lines, overflowing bathrooms and limitations on campgrounds. Diminished staff could also indirectly dampen tourism numbers, an economic driver for the area, he said.

“There (would) be some economic impact to the surrounding community. Black Canyon depends on the local community for the motels, the restaurants, souvenir shops and gas stations,” Steele said.

A question of safety

Steele said he was also concerned about the potential impacts of lower staffing numbers on safety in the park system.

The park, like many rugged parts of the state’s federal land system, is a draw for extreme outdooring. The park’s sheer canyon walls and whitewater rapids both attract thrill-seekers, sometimes resulting in rescue operations or even fatalities. The park has seen 43 reported public safety incidents since 1988, some involving deaths and all requiring some intervention by park staff.

Those numbers are eclipsed many times over by Rocky Mountain National Park, the most visited in the state. Steele also served as the deputy superintendent of that park during in his career.

Steele said the number of visitors has gone up well over 50% since 2012, while the number of staff has gone down around 16% before any federal layoffs. With further decreases in staffing anticipated, Steele thinks safety in Colorado's signature park is at risk.

“In a place like Rocky Mountain, where we had 40 to 60 major rescues a year, you've got to have trained staff ready to make those rescues or meet the emergency medical needs,” Steele said.

“If you have fewer staff with that expertise, response times will be slower, or could (take) longer to get help, and that would be, in some cases, really unfortunate.”

When asked if a decrease in staff or a lack of seasonal workers could cause visitor deaths, Steele said it would be hard to prove a direct cause but thinks it could be a “contributing factor.”

Because of a lack of staffing, Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument some 35 miles from Colorado Springs announced it will now be closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

The Facebook announcement had garnered more than 46,000 reactions and more than 10,000 comments in less than 24 hours.

Stretched thin

Understaffing in Colorado public lands is not new. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, announced a hiring freeze on seasonal employees outside of firefighting due to ongoing budget constraints. The agency has also increasingly allocated its finite resources to fighting wildfires.

Bill Kight, a retired public affairs officer for the White River National Forest, said that the Forest Service has been cutting positions and equipment for a decade.

“Over the last 10 years, the budget has been decreasing instead of increasing,” he said.

Before her dismissal, Moors filled in around the region in places the Forest Service was understaffed. She said that the Forest Service was “chronically understaffed” and underpaid, with starter and seasonal wages near the poverty level.

“I was living on poverty wages my entire career just to get that one position where maybe I can make a little more and live semi-comfortably still serving the people,” Moors said.

A recent statement from the USDA said that Secretary Brooke Rollins supported the firing of “probationary, non-firefighting employees” in the mass layoff this month, but some Coloradans close to the issue say the cuts put already decreased firefighting capacity in danger.

“I can't see how the number of people being dismissed is not going to affect the fire season,” said Kight.

While firefighters were meant to be exempt from the cuts, most Forest Service and National Park Service employees contribute to fire prevention and mitigation, said Kight.

Non-firefighters also monitor for fires and educate the public on safe practices, he said.

Wildland fire response is a collaborative effort shared by a variety of entities, from tiny local fire districts to massive federal agencies. In Western states especially, the feds play a crucial role.

While state agencies have invested heavily in their own wildfire crews, they say the federal agencies are critical partners.

Before the layoffs, Brad White, chief of Grand Fire Protection District No. 1 in Grand County, already had concerns about his federal partners in firefighting efforts. Seasonal hiring is an important part of the federal firefighting effort each year, with hiring and training typically a months-long process ending in mid-spring. The last time White heard from local Forest Service officials, he said, he seasonal hiring process had not yet begun for 2025.

While large fires have broken out across public lands, the responding ability of federal firefighters and equipment is also relied upon in major incidents beyond those lands to provide mutual aid to state and local partners.

Wildfires that require an interagency response have been an increasingly grave concern in Colorado in recent decades. Four of the five largest wildfires in the state's history occurred in the period between 2018 and 2020, according to state figures .

White said no one was answering the phones at his neighboring ranger district in the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests as of Thursday.

Grand County used to have three Forest Service fire engines and one for the National Park Service in the area, according to White. Now, the federal firefighters have one engine to share among zones, a strategy that White worries may spread resources too thin.

“The way fire danger works is not that one county has fire danger, and the rest are low,” he said. “Typically, you’ve got whole regions that are experiencing heat and wind.”

Taking up the slack

Dan Williams, a Teller County commissioner, has some of the same concerns about his county, which includes a large percentage of federal land including the Pike-San Isabel National Forest. He also has not heard from federal officials since the layoffs.

“Let’s just say there’s a big fire out west of us in California,” he said. “We do the right thing and send our people, our equipment and our airplanes, and then we look to our left or right and we get a fire, and we find out that not only has (the federal government) not sent firefighters, but there’s also a significantly reduced workforce here.”

White and Williams said they expected state and local firefighting and prevention resources to attempt to take up the slack this year.

The day after Labor Day in 2024, volunteers with a local fire protection district canvassed part of national forest land in rural Teller County looking for improperly doused campfires. They found 58, according to Williams.

“We’re not going to let the forest catch on fire,” he said.

Now, in light of layoffs and freezes on some federal funding related to mitigation work , Williams fears the community may come to rely more on piecemeal efforts.

“'What do we do?’ is really the question,” he said. “Do we expect money to come from somewhere else, or are we expected to shoulder the burden? Because everyone is facing cuts right now.”

“All Forest Service employees work fire adjacent in some way,” Moors said. “Whether that's educating people and ensuring campfire safety, working on preventing wildfires in the first place, on all 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, (those employees) are being called to the front lines to fight the fire when it happens.”

Moors said her house was saved last summer by wildland firefighters and fellow Forest Service colleagues.

“I wonder if the people who saved my house still have a job,” Moors said.

'Reckless endangerment'

The Trump-mandated layoffs have seen some pushback by Colorado elected officials.

On Friday, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet introduced several amendments to the Senate fiscal year 2025 budget resolution. One includes reinstating roughly 5,500 recently fired National Park Service, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management employees.

“Senate Republicans have made it clear they are willing to turn their backs on hard-working Americans in order to cut taxes for the wealthiest in this country,” stated Bennet in a news release Friday.

In a statement released Feb. 14, Gov. Jared Polis called the firings “reckless endangerment.”

However, Republican U.S. Rep. Jeff Crank, who represents the El Paso County-based 5th Congressional District, said he has “faith” that the executive mandates are clearing the way for a “more efficient and effective government.”

“President Trump is following through on his commitment to root out waste, fraud and abuse across the federal government. While the President’s process is in its early stages, I am closely monitoring the impacts to Coloradans,” he said in an emailed statement to The Gazette.

Teller County's Williams said he was joining the National Association of Counties in Washington in a few weeks to lobby for federal staffing and funding for public lands. He said that beyond the layoffs, millions in funding for wildfire mitigation projects in his county are also at stake.

He said that organic material previously collected for pile burns, a standard fire mitigation measure, cannot sit idle in the Pike-San Isabel National Forest.

“Those piles of ever increasingly dry wood just become fire risk to the community,” he said.

Legal challenges to the layoffs and firings have had mixed results so far, ranging from temporary stays to outright denials. A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the National Treasury Employees Union and others on Feb. 12 challenged multiple executive actions, including the directive to fire hundreds of thousands of new federal workers.

The lawsuit, according to a statement released by NTEU, asked the judge to declare that the mass firing of probationary and other employees and the deferred resignation program, collectively, are unlawful. The suit was denied.

NTEU National President Doreen Greenwald said in a statement that “federal employees will get their day in court.”

“The public may not feel the pain immediately, but come spring and summer, it will be chaos,” Rocky Mountain National Park tour guide Rod Strand predicts.

“These aren’t just jobs; they’re callings. And now, those who have dedicated their lives to protecting and educating the public about our national treasures are being tossed aside under the guise of 'performance issues.' It’s an insult, and it’s a loss that will be deeply felt — by the staff, by visitors, and by the communities that depend on these parks.”