Federal layoffs have created chaos for Northwest public lands, and a cascade of damaging environmental consequences appears imminent
That’s rich: The federal government has decided it’s time for Americans to make do with less. Photo: Brandon Bell/Pool via AP
By Nick Engelfried. April 3, 2025. Every summer for decades, seasonal Forest Service employees have headed into some of the Pacific Northwest’s most rugged terrain to survey for threatened spotted owls.
Under the Endangered Species Act, timber projects on public lands must not jeopardize essential spotted owl habitat.
Understanding where the birds live and nest is therefore vital for maintaining the delicate balance between endangered species protection and logging in the region.
This year, though, the Trump administration’s federal hiring freeze may mean the surveys can’t go ahead.
“We were unable to hire field crews for the season,” says Dr. Taal Levi, a researcher at Oregon State University who works with the Forest Service to analyze audio spotted owl data. “That means we can’t do surveys, or it’ll be a skeleton crew of people trying to get it done.”
The lack of spotted owl monitoring may seem unlikely to concern most voters who helped put Trump in office. Some may even celebrate the demise of threatened species research on public lands.
However, the Forest Service’s inability to say where the imperiled birds are could have far-reaching, unintended consequences.
If scientists don’t know where spotted owls are present, logging projects in the Pacific Northwest may be unable to move forward, affecting timber industry jobs. In a worst-case scenario for the industry, a judge could halt logging across the region, something that hasn’t happened since the 1990s.
That’s just one of many unexpected ways the Trump administration’s recent federal hiring freeze, spending cuts and mass layoffs could affect what happens on public lands in the Pacific Northwest.
Conservative estimate: The Northern spotted owl has been at the center of environmental debate for half a century. Photo: Rhett Wilkins/Oregon Wild
“Owl surveys are really just the tip of the iceberg,” says Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Any survey work done by seasonal employees on federal lands will be affected this year, whether it’s related to salmon, Oregon spotted frogs or any other endangered species.”
A reduced federal presence on public lands will certainly hinder efforts to conserve and restore imperiled wildlife, and it may impact the timber industry.
It will also affect the experiences of millions of people who flock to the Pacific Northwest’s national forests, national parks and other public lands each summer.
“Many of the folks who’ve lost jobs in these last few months are the on-the-ground staff on these lands,” says Kindra Ramos, chief programs officer for Washington Trails Association. “They staff trail crews, clean bathrooms or greet you in ranger stations when you walk in. Their loss will impact visitors in real, visible ways.”
Organizations like WTA, which work closely on public lands issues, are only just beginning to understand the full ramifications of the administration’s actions.
Some impacts may not be known for months.
However, they may not always be what architects of the cuts intended.
National parks lose stature
When the Trump administration announced, on its first day in office, a freeze on hiring of most federal civilian employees, it created a crisis for agencies that manage public lands.
Since then, a separate freeze on government spending, plus mass layoffs across the federal government, have further complicated the picture for land managers.
While court challenges have forced the administration to backtrack on some funding and personnel cuts, at least temporarily, entities like the Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management remain in a state of uncertainty about what resources will be available going into summer.
These agencies rely heavily on seasonal employees to fulfill vital functions, from endangered species monitoring to trail clearing to wildland firefighting.
Meanwhile, many existing employees have already been fired or pressured to take early retirement.
“We’ve heard of about five, six people fired at Olympic National Park, a similar number at Mount Rainier and likely a few at North Cascades National Park,” says Rob Smith, Northwest regional director for the National Parks Conservation Association. “It’s hard to find a park site that hasn’t had someone forced into retirement or fired. And we expect more to come.”
According to Smith, Park Service employees forced out of their positions have included the scientist in charge of grizzly bear reintroduction at North Cascades National Park, an Olympic National Park employee developing educational materials about climate change and the ranger stationed at the high-elevation Camp Muir on Mount Rainier, whose job included assisting with rescuing climbers trapped in glacial crevasses.
“These are people with unique skill sets who aren’t easy to replace,” says Smith.
Out with the old: The Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park is housed within Seattle’s historic Cadillac Hotel. For now. Photo: NPS
In addition to four National Parks—Olympic, North Cascades and Rainier in Washington, plus Crater Lake in Oregon—the Pacific Northwest is home to over a dozen national historic sites, monuments, and recreation areas, many of which are also affected by recent federal actions.
Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, in downtown Seattle, is among 34 Park Service sites nationwide whose building leases the federal government wants to terminate in what it says is a cost-cutting measure.
The park occupies one of the oldest brick buildings in Seattle and commemorates a time when prospectors used the city as a gateway to Alaska.
“For people who can’t make the journey to Olympic or Mount Rainier Parks, this is their hometown, downtown park that serves as an entry place to finding information about the wider National Park system,” says Smith.
National forests have, if anything, been even more affected.
About 260 federal employees have so far been laid off within National Forest Region 6, which spans Washington and Oregon.
Mount Baker-Snoqualmie Forest lost over 30% of its workforce. Okanagan-Wenatchee National Forest has shed 46 employees, while Gifford Pinchot National Forest has lost 15.
That’s according to a March 7 letter sent by Democratic members of Washington’s Congressional delegation to the heads of the Forest Service and Department of Agriculture. The letter asks the agencies to reinstate fired Forest Service employees, citing the importance of national forests to Washington’s economy.
Of course, tallies of laid-off workers don’t account for seasonal positions that are simply going unfilled.
These include Park Service and Forest Service employees who are normally hired to maintain facilities and interact with visitors in the busy summer season.
It also includes the seasonal workers who gather spotted owl data for the lab Taal Levi runs at OSU.
Legal problems
At some point between now and summer, the federal hiring freeze may be lifted, at least partially.
Even if that happens, though, land agencies will struggle to catch up on hiring for seasonal positions, spotted owl surveyors among them.
“The Forest Service would normally be hiring around forty-five surveyors to do this work across Washington, Oregon and northern California, beginning in spring,” says Levi.
Northern spotted owls, a subspecies found only in mature forests of the Northwest, were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 due to logging of their habitat. This prompted a court injunction the following year, which put a moratorium on most public lands logging across the region.
Kindra Ramos of the Washington Trails Association. Photo: Kindra Ramos
The Northwest Forest Plan, adopted in 1994, allowed some logging to restart while protecting essential habitat for spotted owls and other imperiled wildlife, like marbled murrelets and salmon.
The plan requires that the Forest Service conduct yearly monitoring to find out what habitat the owls are using.
In the early years, spotted owl surveyors hiked through forestlands manually identifying trees where the birds nested. This method became impractical as the owls kept declining and became ever harder to find.
Today, researchers rely on data collected by around 4,500 audio recorders distributed by surveyors throughout the subspecies’ range.
The continued drop in spotted owl numbers is partly due to the spread of a related species from eastern North America, the barred owl, which competes with and even preys on its smaller relative.
The barred owl’s advance into spotted owl habitat has hindered the threatened subspecies’ ability to recover, even after the end of most old-growth logging.
Levi’s lab analyzes vast amounts of data collected by audio recorders, searching for spotted owl vocalizations. The same data is used by researchers tracking the movements of marbled murrelets, songbirds and other species.
“Monitoring isn’t, in itself, a conservation action,” says Levi. “But it’s essential for assessing the effectiveness of conservation work, like proposed efforts to remove barred owls from spotted owl habitat.”
The audio data is also used to show logging projects on public lands comply with the Endangered Species Act.
“If the Forest Service can’t hire surveyors this year—which I don’t see how they could, at this point—then affected logging projects can’t move forward without being in violation of federal law,” says the Center for Biological Diversity’s Greenwald.
With no way to effectively monitor spotted owls, courts could order a full or partial reinstatement of the 1991 logging injunction.
It’s unclear how the Trump administration, which has openly defied other court rulings in a manner unprecedented in modern U.S. history, would respond. However, the possibility of a clash in the courts complicates administration goals like a March 1 executive order calling for increased logging in national forests.
“Executive orders don’t override legislation passed by Congress,” says Greenwald. “If they try to move forward on logging projects without doing what’s required under the Endangered Species Act, they’re going to face legal challenges.”
How cuts might hamper wildland firefighting
The elimination of public lands jobs is part of what the Trump administration says is a wider push for a slimmer federal government, spearheaded by the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, told Columbia Insight that department leadership “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people.”
Rob Smith. Photo: National Parks Conservation Association
However, drastic staffing cuts could hobble some administration priorities, as well as critical functions like wildland firefighting that have strong bipartisan support.
The administration has been careful to emphasize its job cuts do not include positions currently focused on firefighting.
The USDA’s statement said it “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.”
However, eliminating large numbers of staff could still interfere with fire response.
“What the people making these cuts don’t seem to appreciate is that the same employees who are the interpretive rangers or trail maintenance crews of today could be the wildland firefighters of tomorrow, this summer,” says the National Parks Conservation Association’s Smith.
As fire seasons have grown increasingly severe, due to climate change and other factors, it’s become common for employees in a variety of positions to switch to firefighting-related duties when conditions demand.
This summer there will be a reduced pool of staff to draw on.
“Shooting themselves in the foot”
Trails used by thousands of people to access wild areas will also suffer.
Concern about the state of trails has helped spark increased interest in volunteering among members of the public. However, much trail work is already done by volunteers.
Ramos, of Washington Trails Association, says her organization logged over 70,000 volunteer hours last year.
“Volunteers can’t do everything, though,” says Ramos. “We partner with the Forest Service on trail projects, and what we’re seeing as recreation staff are cut is there’s no one for us to coordinate with or help facilitate logistics.”
Even the Trump administration’s goal of ramping up timber production could be hampered in ways that go beyond an inability to gather endangered species data.
The letter from Washington lawmakers to the USDA and Forest Service cites administrative positions focused on timber as being among those affected by recent layoffs.
“The people they’re firing include those at the Forest Service and BLM who plan timber sales,” says Greenwald. “This administration is shooting themselves in the foot with their own objectives, and any project they want to do in western Washington is likely to be affected.”
What did you expect?
For forty years I have foretold this collapse of rational common sense land management. People just called me crazy. They still do, so what at wheat at $5.69/bu.
Global warming is on purpose, to open the Northwest and Northeast Passages for ‘oh my’ “trade.” Something the House of Wettin has worked on for 572 years. You think those nasty little oligarchs would give up after Islam shut down most of their destruction by desertification on the Old Silk Road.
Nope! They just hand-picked one petty despot after another for 571 years. The latest being another FASD afflicted freak Donald John Trump on the national scale, and the Mid-Columbia’s open freak show Songer on the local level.
When it all gone folks, hey, who is crazy? Sad to say, most of you are, on both sides of the issues. Particularly women, who will end up in an Afghanistan type hell which there is no way out of.
Regarding the statement in the article “it’s become common for employees in a variety of positions to switch to firefighting-related duties when conditions demand” this is not a new policy, it has been the expectation for generations of Forest Service employees.