February 27, 2025 11:21 AM UTC

Republican State Senator Sounds Alarm Over Forest Service Layoffs

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Ali Longwell reports for Grand County’s Sky-Hi News, the current and prospect of many more layoffs as part of the Trump administration’s Elon Musk–engineered reduction in force of federal employees, many of them seemingly without regard to the important responsibilities of these workers leading in some cases to their rehiring, continues to cause alarm in Colorado’s backcountry where the loss of dozens of local Forest Service workers is causing major anxiety ahead of summer’s tourism and fire seasons:

“It is reckless. It is shortsighted and ultimately could prove dangerous for our communities in the Western Slope and every corner of our state,” said Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse, who represents Colorado’s 2nd District.

The cuts to the Forest Service labor force were among broad layoffs ordered of probationary employees. Employees were let go en masse at federal land management agencies, including others under the U.S. Department of Agriculture and several under the Department of the Interior. This included at least 2,300 cuts from the Interior’s National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management as well as around 1,200 from the Agriculture Department’s National Resources Conservation Service…

On Feb. 14, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis reported that at least 90 Forest Service employees in Colorado were impacted by the layoffs. Reportedly, the cuts were mostly to the agency’s recreation and timber positions but also hit other positions relating to fuels, public affairs, wildlife and more.

In response to all inquiries about these layoffs across the nation, the USDA released this canned statement:

“Secretary Rollins fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people. We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy.

As part of this effort, USDA has made the difficult decision to release about 2,000 probationary, non-firefighting employees from the Forest Service. To be clear, none of these individuals were operational firefighters. Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary IRA funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. [Pols emphasis] Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.”

Either downplaying the importance of the workers who lost their jobs or blaming Joe Biden for hiring them to begin with is certain to offend a large cross-section of stakeholders. Despite this, almost all of the elected officials quoted in this extensive report pushing back against the administration are Democrats like Rep. Joe Neguse and Sen. Michael Bennet. The sole exception, at least among those willing to go on the record for this story, is Republican state Sen. Marc Catlin of Montrose:

State Sen. Marc Catlin, R-Montrose, said the Forest Service is already understaffed at a time when public lands visitation is at record levels. Officials for the White River National Forest — the most popular in the country — saw visitation rise from 12.5 million in 2017 to 18.4 million in 2022, representing a roughly 50% increase.

“We’re public land heavy, so I don’t want to see us get cut back to the point where we’re not able to take care of the local community and all different forms of our economy,” Catlin said. “The pressures are getting bigger, so I’m worried about being understaffed.”

Who should we believe? Republicans in Washington who say these workers were superfluous Biden hires, or the Republican in Montrose who says the Forest Service was already understaffed before the Trump administration’s mass layoffs? Given the administration’s zealous policing of the Republican ranks for the slightest hint of dissent, it took courage for Sen. Catlin to speak up about the true effects of these layoffs. But Catlin’s courage springs from urgent need: far from being redundant help brought on with “no plan in place to pay them,” these workers were backfilling an already severely stretched federal workforce. Musk’s philosophy of “cut until it breaks and then fix it” is set to leave our state vulnerable to disaster while that process plays out–and depending on how successful Musk is chainsawing his way through the career civil service, for many years to come.

In the meantime, we’ll stop calling Sen. Catlin “MAGA Marc,” a nickname he earned on the campaign trail last year. That is, unless he’d rather us keep using it for his own good.