‘A Cascading Effect’: Forest Service, Park Service Workers in Montana Who Lost Jobs Amid Mass Layoffs Explain Rippling Fallout
Five nationwide unions representing federal employees have gone to court in an attempt to stop workforce reductions
By Joseph T. O'Connor and Amanda Eggert for Montana Free Press
When Allison Borges was hired on as a weeds specialist with the U.S. Forest Service in May 2024, she was thrilled. She moved to Bozeman from her home in Washington state, spending the drive thinking about how she would finally be able to afford new furniture. Being a permanent employee on the Custer Gallatin National Forest was a dream, and five seasons at Mount Rainier National Park as a noxious weeds specialist paved the way.
“I love this job,” Borges, 37, said in a February 18 interview. “Finding work like this [on the Custer Gallatin with] a permanent status, you’re paid all year round. You’re promised a job for life, not just for … a season. I felt extremely, extremely lucky.”
In January, Borges began hearing the rumors. She received a memorandum from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on Inauguration Day about the potential instability for federal workers in their first or second year of probationary employment. On February 13, her dream came crashing down.
“That Thursday morning, we had a meeting with the forest ranger and there was no news,” she said. “There was no warning. And so I was like, ‘Well, I’ve survived another week. I can relax until next week.’”
Then she saw news coverage that 3,400 Forest Service employees were going to lose their jobs. She started receiving text messages about how colleagues were being let go.
“That’s when it hit me,” she said. “I lost my job immediately. It was a cascading effect of realizing everything I’m losing — this job I worked so hard to get. My income was immediately taken away from me. I moved here by myself and … it feels like I’ve lost everything.”
Federal workers across several agencies are losing their jobs at a breakneck pace. In Montana, Wyoming and Idaho — across Greater Yellowstone and beyond — employees with the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service and more are concerned their positions may be on the chopping block. The layoffs are coming fast from the Trump administration at the direction of its Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire and Tesla founder Elon Musk.
Some employees are being told about their terminations by their supervisor. Some are getting emails. In all cases, the reason cited for the layoff is the same: the employee was under-performing.
“The [Forest Service] Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the emailed memorandum provided to Mountain Journal reads.
Sophia Draznin-Nagy received her letter on Valentine’s Day. “We all felt the love, for sure,” she said sarcastically. A certified emergency responder on a trails crew for the Jackson Ranger District on Bridger-Teton National Forest, the 28-year-old had been with the Forest Service for four seasons. Her former crew of six people has been reduced to one.
“I think a lot of people are wondering how [DOGE] can, just across the board, say that we had poor performance when within our employee files, our performance reviews say the opposite,” Draznin-Nagy said. “I’m reading that my supervisor said I met or exceeded standards.”
The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), the union that represents employees of the Forest Service and other federal agencies, has raised a similar claim in a lawsuit seeking to halt the firings, which will eventually threaten the jobs of 500,000 federal employees, per the union’s count.
In a filing before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, five nationwide unions representing federal employees argue that the “mass firing of probationary employees” described in a DOGE Workforce Optimization Initiative issued on February 11, and in an executive order President Donald Trump signed that same day, fail to consider the tenure, length of service and performance ratings of the affected employees. The unions argue that is in violation of a law outlining how large-scale federal workforce reductions must be handled.
The unions also argue the executive branch has usurped power that properly belongs with the U.S. Congress.
“There is no statute that expressly authorizes the President to slash roughly one-quarter of the federal workforce, imperiling the statutory missions that Congress has assigned to federal agencies,” the unions argue in a February 14 filing. “The Executive Branch’s attempt to hobble the federal agencies that Congress created and to which it assigned missions through mass firings and a pressure campaign for resignations violates separation of powers principles.”
The court held a hearing on Tuesday weighing the unions’ request for a temporary restraining order to halt the firings against the claims made by Trump’s attorneys. The president’s legal team asserted that the union groups are unlikely to experience “irreparable harm” if the workforce reduction proceeds and that blocking the layoffs would “interfere with the President’s ability to manage, shape and streamline the federal workforce to more closely reflect policy preferences and the needs of the American public.”
The judge assigned to the case, the honorable Christopher R. Cooper, told the parties participating in the hearing to expect an order soon, according to Rob Arnold, a business representative with the NFFE.
The National Park Service is seeing similar workforce cuts to the Forest Service, said Michelle Uberuaga, Yellowstone National Park’s senior program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association. This is the time of year Yellowstone normally hires approximately 350 seasonal workers and Grand Teton brings on as many as 500. Those employees need time to get trained for the busy summer tourist season in the West, Uberuaga said.
“That’s on hold,” Uberuaga said February 14 from her office in Bozeman. “They cannot move forward with their hiring right now. And the hiring process for the federal government is not a quick process. They started in September. Once they make offers, then they have to onboard people.”
Uberuaga said on February 14 she expects 40 Yellowstone employees have been or are about to be fired. The reasons are simple, she said: “Across agencies folks are receiving a similar email, basically blaming performance, despite folks receiving very high-performance reviews. It’s pretty demoralizing.”
One such recipient was Richard Midgette, a 28-year-old IT specialist with National Park Service based out of Yellowstone. He received the news on February 14 that his position had been terminated. The letter from the Park Service arrived 15 minutes after his supervisor ordered him to leave his office. It used the same language as the one Draznin-Nagy with the Forest Service received. At the end of the first page, it stated that the termination was performance-related.
“Call me cynical, but I’ve done great work for the past two months of employment with the Park Service,” said Midgette, who helped optimize Yellowstone’s communication systems and developed computer code to streamline onboarding and offboarding employees. “I don’t think that’s a waste. I don’t think that is poor performance. It’s just a legal way that they’re trying to cover their ass. And say that they’re doing things by the book, but they’re not. There’s nothing legal about this.”
On Wednesday morning, Midgette was driving north to Helena. He didn’t want to miss the Rally for Public Lands, an event that fills the Montana Capitol every other year during the legislative session with advocates for access. He cares about open spaces, he said, because of the value he provided as a public servant, a value he says was stripped with his layoff. “Working for the National Park Service, working for the federal government, I can help operate things better and provide a better experience for the American people, and actually work to protect and defend our public lands.
“It feels like if nothing is done to prevent this administration from dismantling our public lands and the support behind them, we could very well lose access to the trails, the mountains, the plains and the wildlife that we all love so dearly.”
Arnold, with NFFE, said the Bureau of Land Management, the nation’s largest land manager responsible for overseeing 245 million acres, is starting to see cuts to its probationary workforce as well.
“I think there’s more to come this week [from] the BLM, and other agencies as well,” he said in a Wednesday morning interview.
The Department of the Interior, according to a February 14 press release from NPCA, plans to lay off 1,000 permanent, full-time NPS employees, while exempting 5,000 seasonal NPS workers.
“The National Parks Conservation Association and park advocates across the country are demanding the Trump administration put an end to devastating staffing cuts that will wreak havoc on the National Park System,” the statement said.
Staff left standing don’t know what to expect next. Workers who haven’t taken the “Fork in the Road” buyout — an option given to federal workers to resign by February 6 and get paid out through September — or haven’t yet received an email notifying them that they’ve been laid off don’t know if they’ll survive subsequent rounds of cuts. The reason people are provided for why they’re being fired, according to Uberuaga, may be linked to how much an employee supports, or doesn’t, the current presidential administration.
“People are worried that there may be loyalty tests to decide who is on the chopping block for the next round of layoffs,” she said in a Monday email.
Park employees often live in “gateway towns” like Gardiner and West Yellowstone in Montana, and Jackson and Cody in Wyoming to the south. The parks offer massive economic support for these small communities. Tourism is a $5.45 billion industry in Montana, according to the University of Montana’s Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research. In Yellowstone country, it’s $1.5 billion. In Park County alone, visitors to the park bring in $500 million.
“It’s really important that we speak up for Yellowstone, because it is our livelihood,” Uberuaga said. “It is our way of life.”
Dale Sexton has lived in Livingston all his life and worked at Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop much of that time. He started as a senior in high school in 1983 before moving to Alaska to become a fishing guide. Sexton moved back to his hometown in 1996 to start an outdoor company, then in 2020 bought Dan Bailey’s. The fly shop and guide service is a community staple and has been for nearly nine decades. And Livingston is a tight-knit community. But implications for what a stripped down workforce in Yellowstone could look like have Sexton worried — and angry. He’s turning those emotions into action.
“I’ve been somewhat in shock and denial since the election, and I’ve kind of been hiding out trying to figure out what it all means, if anything,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “I haven’t been very engaged. And so when this came up, I was like, goddamn it. Now it’s time. It’s time to get off the bench and get back out in the field and engage.”
He and a group of galvanized residents are mobilizing to help their distraught neighbors. They’re asking the Park County commission to call delegates. They’re holding meetings to learn how best to help.
“At this stage, we’re just kind of coming to terms with where we’re going to go and what’s going to happen,” Sexton said. “But our discussion initially has been around how do we support these people who have been impacted and have lost their jobs? Do they need mental health assistance? Do they need job search assistance? Do they need financial assistance? What? What can we do to support them? I mean, they’re valued community members.”
While the stability of his neighbors who lost their livelihoods is top of Sexton’s mind right now, just beneath the surface lurks the fear of what a Yellowstone with limited services — and limited workers — might mean for gateway towns like Livingston that depend on the economics of park tourism.
“I’ve already heard about somebody canceling their summer holiday, canceling their Airbnb reservation, because of [uncertainty] with regard to what the summer is going to look like,” he said, adding that fishing guides are concerned about the upcoming summer season. “Ultimately, our business cannot thrive if the resource isn’t taken care of and protected. Without that, our business is compromised, and that’s what I’m anticipating given the approach that’s being taken.”
Although the Forest Service has said employees who work in a public safety capacity such as wildland firefighters and law enforcement officers aren’t part of the workforce reduction, Forest Service employees interviewed for this story argued that it’s not that simple.
During a Monday afternoon press conference hosted by Democratic state legislators to highlight the job cuts and their impact on Montana families, Michael Maierhofer, a recently laid-off Forest Service employee, said trail maintenance workers like himself also help ensure public safety. In addition to keeping trails in good working order so hikers and livestock can use them, trail workers are often the first agency employees to encounter and extinguish abandoned campfires, and they regularly assist with larger wildfire suppression efforts.
“We are what is referred to as the ‘fire militia.’ If there’s a fire on the district and our crews need back up, the trail crew and the [recreation] crew — anybody [with] the proper fire qualifications gets rolled in and brought in to help,” he said.
Like others interviewed for this story, Maierhofer emphasized the value he places on public lands and the difficult conditions he’s experienced over his seven-year tenure with the Forest Service to maintain nearly 1,000 miles of trail in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
“I’m very passionate about creating access and I think public lands impact us all in wonderful and amazing ways,” Maierhofer said. “It’s something we really need in today’s day and age.”
With the staffing cuts, “there will be impacts to the trails,” he said. “There will be 6-foot, 7-foot-tall piles of dead trees stopping you from crossing the trail. There will be eroded sections of trail that you cannot step across safely. There are going to be unmaintained trailheads with restrooms you won’t want to use.”
Asked about the firings’ impact on Montana families and communities, several of the state’s highest elected officials suggested that while the reduction might be painful, it’s a productive undertaking to ensure efficient government operation.
Republican Troy Downing, who serves as Montana’s eastern district representative in the U.S. House, said it’s appropriate to evaluate staffing structures to ensure “that money is being well spent.”
“Not to discount anybody losing their job, we need to figure out … good solutions for that,” Downing said in a Monday interview. “But we also, we’re at the precipice. We’re spending ourselves into oblivion and we need to start figuring out where we can cut.”
Representative Ryan Zinke, Downing’s western district counterpart in the U.S. House, echoed Downing’s assessment of the situation. Asked if he had concerns about the pace of the workforce reduction, Zinke, who was Secretary of the Interior in the first Trump administration, said it’s “probably a long time overdue.” He also added that he’d like to see “more foresters and less biologists” on the Forest Service’s payroll.
In a Tuesday afternoon Facebook post, Republican Governor Greg Gianforte shared a Wall Street Journal editorial suggesting that public land managers need to revise their strategy to “stanch the hemorrhaging red ink” associated with federal land management. In that editorial, Terry Anderson, who formerly led the Bozeman-based Property and Environmental Research Center(PERC), calls for turning over ownership of “some” federal lands to the states and exploring more of the types of land swaps that created the Yellowstone Club, a private ski resort in Montana that is now, he noted, “worth billions.” [MIN Note: Senator Tim Sheehy was a board member of PERC from 2022 until he announced his run for federal office.]
“Montana has managed our lands effectively and responsibly, but the feds have not done the same,” Gianforte wrote in his post. “It’s long overdue to put the safety of Montanans and the health of our forests first. Glad DOGE is taking a look.”
But Montana Senate Minority Leader Pat Flowers, D-Belgrade, argued Monday that his Republican counterparts in Montana policy circles won’t make the connection between this boots-on-the-ground staffing loss and future conditions.
“I can guarantee you, if we have a banger fire season, the first people they’re going to blame are the Forest Service, the people that aren’t cutting enough trees. Never will they look back at themselves and the cuts that they made of the very employees that are supposed to be doing the work on the ground,” Flowers said. “It’s incredible to me.”
The trump/Musk presidency is a dumpster fire that has had huge consequences for the nation, but also critically in Carbon County.