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Forest Service Layoffs and Frozen Funds Increase the Risk From Wildfires [1]
['Christopher Flavelle', 'Austyn Gaffney']
Date: 2025-02-15
Despite being in office for less than a month, the Trump administration has already made the United States more exposed to catastrophic wildfires in ways that will be difficult to reverse, current and former federal employees say.
On Thursday, the administration fired 3,400 employees from the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 193 million acres of land, about the size of Texas. This comes on top of a funding freeze also ordered by the administration that has interrupted work designed to clear national forests of vegetation that can feed wildfires.
That work has grown increasingly important as wildfires become more frequent and intense because of drought and other conditions linked to climate change.
The job cuts, which amount to roughly 10 percent of the agency’s work force, could hobble the Forest Service, which was already struggling to remove vegetation across its vast land holdings at a pace that matches the growing threat from fires, according to current and former federal employees, as well as private companies and nonprofit organizations that work on thinning forested lands.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/climate/us-forest-service-layoffs-wildfires.html
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