History of Recent Forest Service Employee Numbers: Recap and Context: Opportunities for Learning

Many new people have recently signed up for TSW, and I would guess that they are interested in the FS employee questions, so I thought for new folks I would lay out the recent history, at least what I see and what I’ve heard. Others are welcome to their own observations. I’m intentionally spending more time on these topics due to the nature of this time period and folks’ concerns. So people who miss the regular programming, know that that will be back at some point.

I think it’s important to track budget as well as number of employees.  Like our Wildfire colleagues, I think there’s much good in being a learning organization/public  rather than a blaming organization/public. All the entities (Congress and Admins) had their own parts to play.

(1) As we saw in the last post on this, it appears that FS numbers were relatively consistent from 2018 to 2023. (budgets and employees were apparently at equilibrium, even if numbers were suboptimal.)

(2) Then came a giant influx of funding via BIL and IRA.  Congress thought it was a good idea to spend lotsa bucks, supposedly for climate, but everything can be related to climate.or climate equity, or climate justice.. so everything was included. Perhaps they did not consider the difficulties of agencies spending so much suddenly, and to be able to scale up with adequate oversight? And here we are.. perhaps they could have been more careful and possible achieved better outcomes ultimately with less funding.

(3) The FS (Biden Admin) decided to take a bunch of the funds (FOIAs have been unsuccessful at finding out how much exactly, but 400 mill or so?) and obligate it to NGOs (non-competitively, and not requiring a match).  This was intended at least in part to “build capacity” which required the NGOs to contract or hire to get work done. I don’t know the status of these agreement, but I do know NGOs hired people to do work formerly done by employees, and we have covered some of that previously here.

(4) The FS (Biden Admin) also hired a bunch of people via a major hiring effort.  At the time, I recall employees were telling me a) they were told to hire as many as they could, and b) some folks (even those in ROs) complained that many of those people were bulking up SOs, ROs and the WO.  Some folks also questioned new positions that did not previously exist and didn’t seem directed at the most critical needs. Of course, that’s in the eye of the beholder. From the previous post.

In 2023, 3080 were added of which 740 were fire.
in 2024, 2780 were added of which 690 were fire.
So in two years, 23 and 24, the FS added 5860 permanent positions, of which 1430 were in fire? If we take, say, 28,500 (the average of 2018-2022), that would be about a 20% increase in perms in two years?

If, as said in that post, 1400 non-fire positions were conversions from temps to PSEs; we don’t know how many fire positions were conversions, but probably not all.

So if we add 1400 non-fire conversions to all 1430 of the fire positions (acknowledging that some of them were also conversions) we get 2830. If we subtract that from 5860, we get 3,030 additional employees who are neither fire nor conversions from temps.

So the FS is still up from previous years in terms of what we might call “non-converted from temps and not fire” recent hires. Of course, this does not help any individual units, who may be down or never have been fully staffed.

Now, since the FS knew that some of this was short-term funding, they could have put a cap on the hiring (if the databases were up to it). But as anyone can imagine, it’s easier to let the dogs out than to get them back in. And in a quasi- decentralized organization,  it’s up to whomever is doing the hiring and what they think is important.

My own experience is that given a chance to hire perms, we would always do that.  Because the next time you’re in a budget discussion, you have the ultimate card to play “I have to cover salaries for perms.” Plus it’s only rational, if you see others (staffs, forests, districts) hiring for what you think are relatively less important positions, why not get in on it, and not  leave your own staff out in the cold?  For a federal agency, the budget winter is always coming, and it makes sense to bulk up.  Everyone was acting perfectly rationally.  It may be that the new budget process affects this kind of behavior, though, I don’t know.

There was also the effort to convert temps to permanent seasonals, which we’ve discussed before.  This approach makes a lot of sense, and is better for the employees, but, as a result, it costs more. One observation  in the previous comments by Anonymous was that

But generally, in my experience, programs that used to hire four 1039 seasonals were able to advertise around three PSEs.

(5) And so it went, until the Biden Admin (Sec of Ag?) decided to use the House marks (reduced compared to 2024 final) for the 2025 budget.   A budget reckoning occurred, and the FS found itself $750 million short.

(6) Realizing this, the FS (Biden Admin) said it would not hire any temporaries for 2025 to make up the budget deficit. If, in fact, most (fire and non-fire) temps had been converted to permanent seasonals, this might not have had an unduly bad impact.  But it probably varies quite a bit by unit.

(7) Trump Admin comes along and fires all probationary employees including the newly permanent seasonals, but got them back due to judge’s order, at least for now.  Original idea being to save federal bucks, perhaps intentionally, before the agency heads were confirmed and began to fight back.

(8) Trump Admin asks for Agency Reorganization Plans (ARRP), which includes employee numbers as well as other stuff (I hope someone will share, so we can discuss here):

Phase 1 (Due by March 13, 2025)

This phase focuses on initial agency cuts and reductions. These plans should identify service delivery subcomponents, statutory requirements, and potential eliminations or consolidations. They should also outline efficiency tools agencies intend to use to achieve efficiencies, including hiring freezes, attrition, and RIFs, with specific targets and timetables

(9) Now that we have a Chief and Sec of Ag in place, we will see what the FS (Trump Admin) comes up with in their ARRP.

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Now, back to Congress, which is often its own cluster regardless of Admin. Maybe in addition to the the Dogpile of Powers, we can also have a Joint Cluster among branches…

(9) Congress passes CR (or doesn’t?)

(10) Congress might increase firefighter pay (good idea, but costs more) and hopefully would include that in budget, but who knows?

(11) Congress might also start a move of firefighters into a fire agency within Interior (for very logical reasons, as there are many interagency clusters involved with wildfire, at least according to fire folks, e.g., Kelly Martin, which we can only imagine..)  with unknown impacts to remaining work for FS.

(12) This is a bit off the employee topic, but also relevant:
The general problems with managing agencies by Continuing Resolution (remember how the decision not to hire temporaries for FY25 was initiated by the Secretary telling the FS to abide by the House marks (#5)) . The general problems were described in 2018 in an article by Jeff Neal for Federal News Network.

The bottom line on this is that the federal budget process is broken. Agencies are not getting appropriations until too late in the fiscal year. They operate under continuing resolutions that limit their ability to plan and to start new work or to hire new staff. Contractors are left not knowing if work will continue or terminate, and everyone in the contracting process (government and industry) crams most of the contracting process into six months of the year or less. The impact is significant. In a 2017 letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Defense Secretary Mattis said: “Long term CRs impact the readiness of our forces and their equipment at a time when security threats are extraordinarily high. The longer the CR, there greater the consequences for our force.”

That’s my take of the history. What did I get wrong? What have I missed?