Fighting Wildfires Is Hellish Work. It’s Even Worse Under Trump.

The administration’s claims about being well-equipped to fight fires are  selective, at best. Of the estimated 4,000 U.S. Forest Service employees believed to have taken the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s deferred resignation offer earlier this year, about 1,600 were believed to hold red cards—“a drivers license to fight fires,” according to Warner Vanderheuel, a USF firefighter and the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees-Forest Service Council. Large fires require “a whole camp set-up,” Vanderheuel said, that can involved several thousand people to make sure equipment is working, track hours, and manage contracts for things like catering, laundry, and portable toilets. “All of those positions require qualification, but 95 percent are not primary firefighters,” i.e. those actually building firelines and suppressing flames. Often, the firefighters are the lowest-paid people on site.

In the best of times, that is, wildland firefighting is thankless work. It’s hot, dirty, and dangerous. Hotshot crews—elite firefighters dispatched like the Special Forces to blazes around the country—scramble up mountains with axes and chainsaws. Smokejumpers skydive into fires in remote areas. For all the risk involved—and the obvious benefit to the public of keeping flames away from homes, towns, and cities—many federal wildfires still earn as little $15 an hour, work hundreds of hours in overtime to make ends meet, and often resort to passing around GoFundMe links to cover the expense of injuries incurred on the job. At the end of fire season, temporary firefighters are typically laid off; many go on unemployment.

During the Biden administration, in 2021, lawmakers approved a temporary retention bonus for federal firefighters, providing them with the lesser of either $20,000 per year or 50 percent of their base pay. In March, Congress voted to make pay hikes permanent. By way of a continuing resolution to keep the government funded, Capitol Hill furnished wildland firefighters with a more than 30 percent raise compared to 2021 levels. The raise was a massive win for Vanderheuel’s union, and one that was hard to celebrate given other concerns. Federal firefighting has long been plagued by bureaucratic struggles; Forest Service regions each have different protocols and approval processes, and coordinating among federal land management agencies, including the Department of Interior, can be challenging. The Trump administration has brought new genres of frustration. Limits of $1 on federal credit cards made buying supplies, equipment, and hotel stays virtually impossible, requiring firefighters to wade through a thicket of red tape. In some cases, just a single federal employee was tasked with approving purchases for the entire forest, whether for trail maintenance, recreational facilities, or firefighting. While many cards have been restored, Vanderheuel said, “it’s still very limited.”