The Personal and The Personnel of Public Lands

Cutting the federal government has always meant cutting our communities

By Matt Danielson, Okanogan Forest Sr. Coordinator

I used to work for the Forest Service in Okanogan County. It was 2014, and the economy was just starting to show positive signs of recovery from the Great Recession. I was concerned about my ability to get any job after my first summer of college, and I knew returning to Omak and living with my parents was the best option to avoid paying rent. After navigating a lengthy application process, I landed a job at the Tonasket Ranger District as a wildlife technician. My position was funded through a partnership with the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. In addition to my wildlife duties, I worked across all Forest Service departments to fix fences, mark timber, measure soil, sample water, and, most of all, fight wildfires.

When I joined that summer, I did not know that my community would soon experience the largest single wildfire in Washington State history—the Carlton Complex. Before I could learn how to manage forests, I watched most of the forest I grew up with burn in just two years. As a wildlife technician, I wasn’t on the frontline of every fire. Most of the time, I was filling in the gaps—physically relaying information and communicating between people with downed radio systems, scouting ahead of crews to advise where fire lines could be constructed to protect life, property, and sensitive resources, and identifying water sources for engines and tankers. I helped organize and clean camps for fire crews. Occasionally, I joined a hand crew or a fire engine on an assignment and engaged wildfire directly.

This is the reality of how the Forest Service has been working for decades. Wildfires are fought by the entire Ranger District, not just a select crew. Whether they engage with wildfire directly or not, the entire Forest Service staff steps up. The executive branch claims that federal cuts won’t impact wildland firefighter positions, but the reductions have already affected thousands of qualified workers to fight wildfires or assist those doing so. These misleading assurances overlook the reality that many of the positions being cut are integral to wildfire response and management.

After a decade of unprecedented wildfires in the West, the Forest Service initiated a landscape-scale approach to manage wildfire proactively. The Biden administration launched the Wildfire Crisis Strategy, and for the first time in decades, the Forest Service received funding to address long-standing challenges. Simultaneously, Washington’s Department of Natural Resources announced its 20-Year Forest Health Strategic Plan and the start of its new prescribed fire program. This proactive work was meant to reduce wildfire risk while accounting for all affected resources—or so I thought.

Instead, the current administration has sought to cut funding and jobs essential to this work. Not only do we stand to lose the capacity to fight wildfires, but we will also lose the ability to reduce future wildfire risk. Many projects are half-completed and require multiple phases to be fully implemented—thinning forests, drying the thinned trees, and then burning them in a controlled manner. As it stands, tens of thousands of acres of forest across the West are covered in piles of drying, thinned trees slated for burning this summer. Without the funding or staff to complete these burns, these fuels will remain, increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfires.

The administration appears to assume that increasing logging alone will solve the wildfire crisis. In reality, many forests at high risk of wildfire result from past logging practices prioritizing commercial timber over ecosystem resilience. Timber production plays a role in forest restoration and wildfire risk reduction, but it is only one tool in a vast toolbox. It does not reduce the small, dry fuels that drive rapid wildfire spread. Logging cannot access steep mountain slopes where heavy machinery can’t operate, but where wildfires move fastest. In many cases, logging is possible but economically unfeasible due to the high cost of transporting material to a mill. Mostly, mechanical thinning of trees only reduces wildfire risk when combined with prescribed burning and coordinated wildfire management.

The only certainty in federal leadership right now is chaos and unpredictability. That’s not a certainty I want to live with. It’s not a certainty my community can live with or plan around. Whether you’re a heavy equipment operator, a timber mill owner, a wildland firefighter, or a wildlife conservationist like me, none of our work can be accomplished without understanding where the government is headed.

I worked my last summer for the Forest Service in 2017 after the first Trump administration took office, unsure whether I would even have a job that year due to a hiring freeze implemented soon after the inauguration. I left the Forest Service because I realized that our staff and much of our work were nothing more than political pawns under that administration. I gained some hope during the Biden administration when I saw unprecedented levels of prescribed burning accomplished by both federal and state agencies, leveraging new resources and funding. Now, my outlook for responsible forest management is even more precarious, even as our needs become more urgent.

When I was growing up, the Forest Service was a solid career path for rural kids like me—offering education, community service, and meaningful outdoor work. That has changed quickly, and for the worse. Now, I fear that the current administration is moving toward an agency of contract specialists who are disconnected from the land, the resource, and one another—accelerating commercial interests rather than investing in the long-term stewardship of our National Forests. These cuts do not seek efficiencies; they strike at the heart of the agency and, by extension, the heart of my community.

The Forest Service was never intended to be a self-funding agency, paying for itself through timber sales. It was established with appropriated funds to carry out its multiple-use mandate, serve the public, and ensure access to essential resources—water, air, land, forest products, wildlife, and fish. We must keep it that way.