"We just can't get the same work done with fewer employees," Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a September call. In that same call, he announced they'd have to. reports the agency last month announced it would halt all seasonal hiring for the 2025 season, a move that will reduce the size of its workforce—which oversees 193 million acres of land—by about 2,400 jobs.
They're almost entirely field-based positions, which Backpacker reports run the gamut from biologists to timber workers to trail technicians. (The agency's 11,000 seasonal firefighter positions won't be impacted, reports .) There's a chance things could change.
The Forest Service's budget for next year is still not finalized, but what the House Interior Appropriations Committee has proposed could leave the agency with "a budget hole of nearly a billion dollars next year." And Moore explained the agency had to prepare for the most conservative outcome, per . While the Forest Service has been slowly trimming its size for years—Moore said the last two decades have seen about 8,000 jobs go—he described the 2025 move as the largest single-year staff cut in recent memory.
Moore added on the call, per , "We're going to do what we can with what we have. We're not going to try to do everything that's expected of us with less people." It will exacerbate a decade-plus maintenance backlog that exists for America's trails (made especially worse by Hurricane Helene, which left more than 2,000 trees to clear from t.