By Bob Doucette
I’ve seen a mix of DOGE fanboy and fangirl praise, along with people who are angry at the “work” DOGE is doing. I figured I’d chime in with an insider’s look.
DOGE got going with the idea of cutting fraud and waste. I’m sure there is both in the federal government, but DOGE isn’t doing that. They’re just cutting to cut.
At the Forest Service, we lost 3,400 people, mostly recent hires but also some more established workers. The vast majority of these folks aren’t Washington bureaucrats, but people working in rural America. Almost all of them having nothing to do with any “agenda” the new administration is gunning for.
Here’s who we lost:
Trail crews. Biologists. Foresters. Front desk help at ranger stations. Engineers. Surveyors. GIS specialists. Hydrologists. Researchers who study anything from plant and animal species to wildfire behavior. Recreation specialists.
Losing these people means forest roads don’t get maintained. Trails will be closed. So will campgrounds. Wildfire prevention projects will be delayed or shelved. Timber stands will be unavailable for logging.
In these rural (and often conservative) communities, the Forest Service and other federal land agencies provide good jobs to places where opportunities are few. Local sawmills will lose business. Communities that depend on visitors who hike, camp, ride, and boat will lose income when services are scaled back. In Trinity County, that means more hardship for the poorest county in California.
I’ve talked to several people around the area and I hear similar stories. Partner agencies are worried that joint projects focusing on wildfire prevention are in jeopardy. Farmers, ranchers, and loggers are increasingly angry that USDA and other federal contracts are being delayed or scrapped. Some of these folks face ruin.
In the words of a colleague still with the agency who is a longtime firefighter now in the communications field, “I voted for Trump. I support the things he wants to do. But I didn’t vote for this.”
What he’s feeling is echoed elsewhere. Another colleague says her forest is at 36 percent workforce staffing. You simply can’t manage a forest with so few people, and that’s where a lot of forests are at.
Elon says DOGE has saved taxpayers $55 billion. The real number is more like $8 billion, and even that number doesn’t square for this reason: It doesn’t measure the cost associated with cuts. You lose services, you lose value.
Think of it this way. You’ve got a car or truck that doesn’t drive as fast or haul are much as you’d like. If it was lighter, it would have less weight to hinder performance, we’re told.
But instead of taking a hard look at the vehicle’s design, a bunch of untrained mechanics start removing parts. A bearing here, a gear there. Take out that belt. Lose a fender and a seat. And who checks transmission fluid anyway? Rip the system out. And lose some of that wiring. On the bright side, you’ve lightened the vehicle by 300 pounds. But now the vehicle won’t start, or when it does, it seizes up and won’t run anymore.
That’s what DOGE is doing. There’s no thought behind these cuts. Look at how they’re trying to rehire Energy Department workers they fired who oversaw our nuclear stockpile, or scientists who were tracking the bird flu epidemic. No “auditing” is being done. That would be work, after all. Half the time, these people are making snap judgments based on information they don’t understand, then yelling “fraud” based on those erroneous conclusions.
The deep state hunt will have impacts. Back in my neck of the woods, our forests will become less healthy, less accessible, and with the delay in seasonal fire hiring, less safe. Winter rain and snow assures a ton of spring growth, but we’re not far from the hot, dry season that will turn these forests into a tinderbox.
I can’t speak for the impact of other agencies’ cuts. But nothing in our forests is being made great again. It’s putting them in greater jeopardy of seeing catastrophic wildfire, where the scenes we saw in Paradise, Lahaina, and Los Angeles could be repeated with our communities less able to defend themselves.
I’ll close with this: Just because this doesn’t affect you now doesn’t mean it won’t soon. It will. If that bothers you, call your congressional representatives and senators, especially if they’re Republicans. They need to know, and they need to feel some heat. Get vocal before the whole enterprise crashes on our heads.
This was originally posted by Bob Doucette on Feb. 19, 2025. Bob serves as a public affairs officer with the U.S. Forest Service.