Trump’s hiring freeze could impact Colorado’s capacity to fight fires
Colorado fire officials are concerned that the uncertainty over a federal hiring freeze implemented by President Donald Trump will have detrimental impacts on the state’s wildland work force ahead of peak wildfire months.
The freeze, which stalled the hiring of some seasonal federal firefighters,x along with last week’s elimination of more than 150 federal workers who help manage more than 24 million acres of public lands in Colorado, could leave the state’s firefighting workforce unprepared, local fire chiefs told The Colorado Sun.
The federal hiring freeze, initiated through one of the executive orders President Trump signed on his first day in office, says no new federal civilian positions can be created and no vacant positions can be filled, except in limited circumstances. It says public safety employees are exempt but questions lingered for weeks around firefighters and those who provide critical support for wildfire operations.
“What I worry about is, better firefighters in high demand are going to go other places. They may end up filling in with a lot of inexperienced firefighters,” Brad White, president of Colorado State Fire Chiefs, said.
In a statement Tuesday, the Forest Service said wildland firefighting jobs are considered public safety positions that are exempt from the hiring freeze and that the agency is working with the Office of Personnel Management to determine the “scope and extent of positions covered by these mandatory exemptions.”
Federal firefighters are a key part of Colorado’s and the country’s firefighting capability. Last year, the Department of the Interior employed 5,780 federal wildland fire personnel, while the U.S. Forest Service employed more than 11,300.
Aside from the vital seasonal positions that often serve as “boots on the ground” during peak wildfire months, state and local agencies work year-round with federal fire personnel to conduct prescribed burns and manage fuels, with the goal of preventing wildfires from growing out of control and mitigating wildfire risk.
In Grand County, which is made up of 70% federal lands, local fire agencies depend on the federal firefighting workforce, said White, who also serves as chief for Grand Fire Protection District.
“A lot of that planning work is not getting done as a result of hiring,” he said.
Come peak fire months, federal fire personnel also typically help run dispatch centers and coordinate firefighting aircraft.
“And so all of that is important when it comes time to fight fire,” White said. “You can drop all the slurry in the world you want, but you still have to have boots on the ground to actually go put the fire out.”
In the past week, White said his department got more than 40 applications for a few open seasonal firefighting positions. He estimated about one-third of them are federal employees looking for a job.
“People in the federal workforce, they’re not feeling secure that their job is coming for the summer and that they’re going to get hired on,” White said.
White anticipates federal resources, like Hotshot crews and federal engines, might not be as readily available, regardless of the severity of Colorado’s wildfire year.
“My gut feeling is that the federal resources aren’t going to be able to move around the state quite as easily as they have in the past, just because you’re not going to have full crews to do that,” White said. “And so I think our state engines, our state aircraft, are going to pick up slack. And I think a lot of our local folks are going to step up and move engines around.”
When massive fires ignite in Colorado, federal firefighters will often set up camp for weeks to help gain containment on the flames. Meanwhile, most local fire agencies, many of them made up of volunteers, don’t work in that type of environment.
“If you think of your average volunteer agency, that most of us are here on the Western Slope and the Eastern Plains, those folks have jobs and family and all that. So they’re happy to go help all structures at risk for a couple of days, like on those fires last summer, but you know they’re gonna have to get home at some point,” White said.
“We’re just gonna have to adapt to spreading the peanut butter a little thinner.”
This year, Colorado is projected to have a 7% vacancy rate among firefighters and support positions in the state’s wildland management section — putting the state in a better position than years past due to recruitment and retention efforts, Tracy LeClair, a spokesperson for the division said.
But even a more robust state roster doesn’t mean Colorado is equipped to fight wildfires and conduct mitigation projects alone.
“The wildland fire problem isn’t just a fire suppression issue, right? It’s creating resilient landscapes, it’s creating fire adapted communities, and it’s having good, effective response and suppression,” Mark Novak, fire chief of Vail Fire and Emergency Services said.
Without federal employees, like watershed, biology and forestry specialists who go into the field to conduct environmental reviews, there is a “chokepoint in the pipeline” to implement fuel reduction projects, Novak said.
“When we see a shortage in those folks, or those positions aren’t hired, or as they move on and go to different forests, then we can’t get projects off the ground around our communities to help protect them,” he said.
There’s also uncertainty around the federal funding that many organizations throughout the state rely on, often through grants, to run local wildfire resiliency projects to help residents build defensible spaces around their homes, provide chipping services or implement fuel breaks, among other projects.
“The wildfire problem’s not going away and now’s not the time to slash funding and then try to put the pieces back together,” Novak said.
“Downsizing happens a lot faster than rebuilding capacity and I’m very concerned about taking a big step backwards and losing a lot of capacity and losing a lot of ground that we’ve gained in creating community wildfire resilience.”
A steady decline
Setbacks in Colorado’s federal firefighting workforce are just another step in a steady decline that White and Novak have seen unfold over the past decade.
Fifteen years ago, Grand County had three Forest Service engines, plus a few state engines, White said. Now, the county is down to one available federal engine that is gone “half the time” to other parts of the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest or fighting fires in other parts of Colorado.
“And so is it worrisome? You bet,” White said. “Is it something new and crazy that we didn’t see coming? I don’t feel like it is.”
About five years ago, the Forest Service defunded one of the fire engines assigned to the White River National Forest, right next to Vail, leaving a federal engine in the Silverthorne-Dillon area and another next to Eagle, more than 60 miles away, Novak said.
“They’re covering some pretty broad expanses of federal land,” he said.
“Rural Colorado does not have an abundance of firefighting resources as a whole, so any additional resource we don’t have is impactful. It takes all three levels of firefighting agencies to really have a successful outcome,” Novak said.
When a wildfire sparks, local agencies are usually the first on scene to provide the initial attack, before state and federal resources are called in.
“We want to protect our communities,” Novak said, “but we are carrying a lot of the burden.”