By admin 
The U.S. Forest Service has suspended hiring for many seasonal positions this year due to anticipated limits on its budget, which is expected to affect services and programs in forests in Colorado and across the country, including things such as trail work and campsite management.
The agency currently is “operating under a continuing (congressional) resolution, and we anticipate a budget limited environment,” it said in an emailed response to questions from The Daily Sentinel to agency media representatives.
As a result, for the 2025 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, it is restricted in its ability to hire additional seasonal nonfire employees, beyond those people for whom offers of seasonal jobs already had been made.
The Forest Service is continuing with hiring its core temporary firefighting force of 11,300 for this fire year, it said.
The seasonal hiring freeze is expected to impact about 29 positions in the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison national forests. The decision could affect up to 30 nonfire seasonal positions in the White River National Forest, said David Boyd, spokesman for that forest.
“These seasonal positions cover a wide range of field work that occurs on the White River National Forest, including fuels reduction, fire prevention and education, front country campsite management, public contacts and education, biological field work, trail maintenance and construction,” Boyd said.
“Seasonal employees typically perform a range of important activities,” the Forest Service told The Daily Sentinel.
“… The Forest Service’s budget is provided primarily through discretionary appropriations provided by Congress each year. As an agency, we have a responsibility to plan for the most conservative funding picture and these actions reflect that reality. We are currently working on how this will affect the forest, and we will do everything we can to limit those impacts.”
The Forest Service had asked for $8.9 billion in discretionary funding for the 2025 fiscal year, but the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee in June proposed $8.43 billion in funding, and the Forest Service for the time being is planning its spending based on that amount.
The Forest Service says it has worked over the past two years to stabilize and strategically grow its workforce. This included converting almost 1,300 nonfire temporary employees to permanent status, providing them job certainty and better benefits.
These include about 25 jobs in the GMUG forests that were converted over the past two years. The White River National Forest converted 15 such positions over the last fiscal year. The conversions mean those jobs aren’t affected by the current hiring freeze.
The freeze was one factor behind the White River National Forest’s recently announced decision to close its supervisor’s office in Glenwood Springs to the public because of lack of staffing. Boyd said that most recently the visitor information positions there have been seasonal, so the Forest Service currently is unable to fill them.
“It’s also part of the larger, ongoing challenge the White River faces in filling positions because of the high cost of living and lack of affordable housing in this area,” he said.
The Forest Service has implemented two cost-of-living pay adjustments for its employees totaling nearly 10% over the last two years, which along with growing its workforce has impacted its personnel costs.
The Forest Service last year didn’t open its Grand Mesa Visitor Center for the summer season, but hopes to open it this summer. While pre-existing Forest Service budget limitations didn’t help the situation with the visitor center, a main reason it was kept closed was because the Forest Service had lost the facility’s longtime manager and hadn’t yet found a replacement. It has since found a person to manage it and hopes to reopen it this summer. The Rocky Mountain Conservancy helps staff the facility.
Not including fire-related funds, the Forest Service’s fiscal year 2024 budget went down 4% from the previous year, or essentially back to fiscal year 2022 funding levels, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said last March.
Grand Valley District Ranger Bill Edwards last spring said his office was dealing with budget-related staff shortages then. Those shortages continued when he spoke to the Sentinel again in October about the budget situation.
He said he wasn’t too concerned about the status of fire mitigation work the ranger district is working on doing. He said with the help of partnerships with other government agencies, private landowners and nongovernment organizations, planning for such projects is going forward, and implementation dollars are still available to do some of it via means such as contracts and timber sales.
But he said budget shortfalls are affecting things such as the Forest Service’s local recreation program and basic office functions. He said the shortfalls result from conflicting congressional direction: Congress several years ago gave the Forest Service a fairly large budget and told it to hire a lot of people, and then budgets got cut and the agency ended up stuck with more people than it can afford right now.
“This just goes directly to nationwide we don’t have the budget to pay for the persons that we have so we’re trying to get to a balance point there largely through attrition,” Edwards said.
He said the public is going so see fewer people in the woods interacting with them next summer and doing things such as maintaining trails, and the Forest Service will have a harder time getting restrooms cleaned and serviced in a timely fashion.
He said Forest Service staff are doing their best to keep up with things, but the level of service will be less this year than people are used to experiencing.
“I would just ask the public to be patient with the folks they do see on the ground,” he said.
Edwards said agency employees remain dedicated to serving the public and managing the landscapes the Forest Service oversees.
“We’re going to continue to do that as best as we can, recognizing that we have some limitations,” he said.
The locally based Western Colorado Conservation Corps employs people from 17 to 28 years old and works with partners including the Forest Service on projects such as trail work and riparian-area restoration. Its director, Jeff Roberts, said WCCC already has some contracts in place with the Forest Service with previously secured funding for this year, so he doesn’t anticipate any big impacts from the Forest Service’s budget situation this year but doesn’t know for sure what will happen.
“I would say if anything, if there are major budget cuts and they affect the contracting moneys that we could get, I probably won’t be impacted by that until 2026,” he said.
Budget cuts ultimately could mean more contracts for the WCCC. Roberts said in the past, when the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service haven’t been able to hire as many seasonal, part-time employees due to budget cuts, they have received other funding resulting in more contracts with the WCCC to do work they couldn’t do themselves.
He’s waiting to see what happens in terms of finalized Forest Service funding after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
“It’s kind of like anything else when we transition from one president to the other, it’s kind of just wait and see,” he said.
The Forest Service said in its email to the Sentinel, “We are … working closely with our partners to explore creative solutions to fill gaps where we can. We are hopeful for more hiring options if additional funding becomes available.”