Senators: Trump hiring freeze means wildland firefighting jobs are going unfilled

Posted by author February 12, 2025 Jobs

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Weeks after the devastating California wildfires, wildland firefighters around the country say they’ve had job offers rescinded or frozen in the wake of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 federal hiring freeze.

Although the freeze exempted public safety workers, federal wildland firefighters were not covered by the exemption. Multiple Democratic members of Congress are demanding the Trump administration expand the exemption and explain the hiring freeze.

Trump has repeatedly attacked California’s leaders, among others, for not adopting policies he believes will reduce fire risk. Trump issued a similar hiring freeze when he first took office in 2017, but exempted wildland firefighters.

Firefighters and their supporters are trying to understand why this time is different.

“The administration must not sacrifice the safety of the American people for the benefit of implementing a political agenda,” a group of 15 Democratic senators wrote to the Department of Agriculture. “We will be woefully unprepared to fight the fires to come and instead will continue to see record levels of damage, ultimately costing communities and taxpayers even more at a time when the cost of living is already too high.”

The Agriculture Department, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, last year hired more than 11,300 wildland firefighters. Most of them are temporary hires, with the positions filling and then empting as wildfire season ramps up for the summer and then winds down by winter.

The U.S. Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, the equivalent to the size of Texas. During large fires, it dispatches teams from across the country to converge on the flames, including “Hot Shot” crews and more than 300 “Smokejumpers” who parachute into fires in remote areas.

Hiring all those firefighters can take months, in part because they have to pass physical fitness checks.

Trump’s hiring freeze is delaying the hiring process, members of Congress said, reducing the number of federal firefighters available to be dispatched. While the wildfire season used to run only a few months in the summer and fall, experts say it should now be considered a year-round danger, particularly in California.

Last month, catastrophic fires near Los Angles burned more than 57,000 acres and destroyed more than 16,200 houses, businesses and other structures, killing at least 29 people.

“Such fires also no longer stick to a particular season, meaning that we must be prepared 365 days per year to fight fires, putting even more stress and strain on a workforce that desperately needs additional support and higher pay,” the senators wrote to Trump.

A separate group of Democratic senators asked the Trump administration to explain the legality of halting firefighting grants that local governments across the West had been promised by Congress. Some of those grants are used to pay local firefighters who travel to help fight wildfires in other states.