President Donald Trump and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's pledges to shrink the size of the federal government are reaching well beyond Washington, D.C., and into Wyoming.
A number of people have been laid off in Wyoming as a result of the U.S. Forest Service firing around 3,400 recent hires nationwide, according to Reuters. The National Park Service is terminating about 1,000 employees as well under Trump's push to cut federal spending. The move only targets employees who are in their probationary period, which typically lasts 1-2 years.
Official numbers for the number of employees laid off have not been provided to Cowboy State Daily after multiple requests to the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service.
Wyoming Look
Lander resident Bill Lee, who worked as a paid seasonal employee with the Washakie District of the Shoshone National Forest until last October and still volunteers with the agency, said eight employees have been let go in his district, exactly half of the district’s office staff. He believes the Washakie District has lost the most employees out of any national forest district in Wyoming.
Most of the probationary employees were permanent seasonal employees, working jobs like trail packer and ATV managers, but Lee said two full-time, year-round employees were also cut.
“The people they’re letting go are the people on the ground that have the day-to-day interactions with the general public, that impact the general people day-to-day” he said. “These are not the folks that make management decisions, not the people that write policy. These are the people that execute that policy.”
Mary Cernicek, a representative with the Bridger Teton National Forest, said her department still didn’t have a number for total employees laid off as of Monday afternoon.
Probationary Only
Lee explained to Cowboy State Daily that although probationary employees are usually relatively new, they also can include long-serving employees who move or are promoted into a new position. As a result, former President Joe Biden’s administration’s decision to convert long-term seasonal Forest Service employees into permanent seasonal employees likely contributed to the job cuts.
Lee, who worked for 44 years with Shoshone as a seasonal recreation specialist and fire protection staffer, said no fire responders were let go as a result of the cuts.
Mostly Quiet
Cernicek also commented that the national press desk for her department seems to get news about employee cuts a little faster than her own department.
Fear to say anything about what’s going on, Lee said, is highly prevalent right now within the Forest Service ranks. He said minimal communication is occurring between the different levels of the Forest Service, and the little communication that is occurring is taking place over the phone where it can’t be traced. Lee believes the actions that have been taken amount to a “slow motion coup.”
“There’s a lot of fear, people are watching what they say, what they communicate by email, or on their accounts for fear of retribution,” he said. “If someone wants to help somebody else, if it’s on the record or a paper trail or anything, they feel that they could get in trouble.”
One person who has spoken out is Kristie Thompson, a Cody resident who works remotely for the U.S. Forest Service and has worked for the agency for nearly 13 years. Thompson issued a tearful post on Facebook on Saturday about the situation, speaking as a private citizen and not a representative of her agency.
“People need to understand that this is what it feels/looks like to be dealing with the daily anxiety of not knowing if you will have to terminate another valued team member and to not know if I will have my career (it is so much more than a job) in the coming days,” she wrote.
Thompson also complained that the federal workforce was being singled out when its salary only makes up about 4% of the overall budget.
What’s The Cause?
Wyoming’s congressional delegation has spoken highly of Trump’s efforts to downsize the federal government. There are around 8,100 federal workers in Wyoming.
Trump has made cutting government waste a cornerstone of his new administration.
In January, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management wrote a “Fork in the Road” memo to federal employees, offering them paid leave through the end of September if they quit their jobs, while mentioning widespread cuts would be imminent. Employees planning to accept this offer had until Feb. 6 to announce their resignations.
The resignation offer excused those who accepted it from “all applicable in-person work requirements” while paying them through the end of September. For those who would not resign, the letter stated, “we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency.”
Last Friday, U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis spoke before the Wyoming Legislature, saying Trump is “working with lightning speed to make major changes that are going to be so good for Wyoming.”
“It’s an absolute new day in Washington,” Lummis said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Employee performance did not appear to be taken into consideration with the cuts.
“These cuts are the definition of arbitrary,” Lee said. “They just did wholesale.”
Musk recently shared a post on social media where he offered praise for the cuts and said they’ll only negatively affect people dependent on government programs, who he called the “parasite class.”
“Without us "parasites" as we have been called, you won't have access to your federal lands, it will be harder to reach someone to help your parents with social security issues, and a million other things we do every single day for the people of this country,” Thompson said.
In addition, one of Trump’s executive orders also put a hiring freeze on all federal positions starting Jan. 20. The hiring freeze resulted in the National Park Service rescinding thousands of job offers to the seasonal employees, positions that are typically filled in the mid-winter months.
The Washington Post reported last week that the National Park Service will exempt some workers from Trump’s freeze on the hiring of civilian employees across the federal government. The exemption will apply to seasonal employees with law enforcement positions, including law enforcement rangers and public safety dispatchers. It is unclear whether the exemption will eventually be broadened to include all seasonal employees.
It is unclear whether the exemption will eventually be broadened to include all seasonal employees and how it will affect the hiring of the thousands of seasonal employees for the national parks.
What About The National Parks?
Neither Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly nor Grand Teton National Park Superintendent Chip Jenkins responded to Cowboy State Daily’s request for comment.
Rob Wallace, the senior-most official in Trump’s first administration from Wyoming as the former Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said he believes the severity of the cuts to the National Parks Service are being a little overblown. NPS, which operates in a separate agency from the Forest Service within the Department of Interior, he said, doesn’t appear to have been hit as hard with the cuts.
“I don’t think anyone knows the impact yet,” he said. “The stories I have heard that the sky is falling, I don’t think that’s the case.”
Gabe Skiera runs a bed and breakfast and rock-climbing guide company just outside Devils Tower National Monument.
Skiera said Devils Tower only has around 10 full time employees and heavily relies on around 30 seasonal staff to boost their ranks for the summer season, where they host hundreds of thousands of visitors. He’s aware of at least one full time employee that was cut, one week shy of getting past their probationary status.
Skiera said the park staff is now trying to figure out how it can manage its upcoming summer season if not allowed to hire any seasonal staff. He said the park is considering shutting down for a few days a week if the hiring freeze remains in place, a move that would be devastating for the local business community. Gateway communities like Cody and Jackson would face an extremely similar scenario.
“We have a five-month season, you shut down two days a week, that’s 28% of the summer gone, of the full year,” Skiera said. “That would be devastating to the Devils Tower community, to our economy.”
In addition, seasonal employees perform critical duties like education, visitor outreach, search and rescue, cleaning bathrooms and picking up trash. He said only one full time maintenance person exists on the entire Devils Tower staff. Without the ability to hire seasonal staff, this person will be on their own to handle the 500,000 people that visit the park each year.
“They’re great folks, they just need more staff,” Skiera said.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
