reduction in force aka firing permanent status employees
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From an older Fed Firefighter,”Reduction in Force”. The old way of saying layoffs.
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That’s not what I think it is. But I will refrain from anything further
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Maybe it’s just me ( probably not) but i unpolitically feel that there has been no “political motivated and slanted posts” in this thread. If you feel that I should be banned to the end of time for my “slanted post” ( does that mean disagreeing with others to promote conformity in thinking?) than so be it. But please don’t prevent others from conversing.
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One thing that is missing from the conversation here is the current impacts to ‘partners’ (NGOs, fuels/logging contractors, planners like myself). Here is an interview we just did on the topic (Confession: I am not an unbiased interviewer here, as Tanya is a friend of mine).
I know a lot of the impacts of funding freezes may be temporary, but the Forest Service is generally not seen as a reliable partner by most of the folks I have worked with in timber, conservation, or fuels, and the current turmoil isn’t helping on that front.
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That’s going to be tough since we fired all our seasonal timber staff. Oh and one of our tribal partners laid off 15 folks due to uncertainty with funding already in an agreement. We have 2 stewardship agreements on hold due to concerns over payments going through, including planning efforts for a 57K acre project.
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Imo… Since up is down & down seems to be up in #merica right now - all i’m hoping for is that this action or something similar will allow for fast post fire salvage on public lands. Lastly, the part in the order about #merica’s “inability to fully exploit our domestic timber supply” is as frightening & ignorant as it is comical.
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Are you saying that other than fire salvage, we don’t have enough trees to harvest ?
Oh not at all. Quite the opposite in fact imo. It seems to me that our history is one of fully exploiting ALL resources - and we do it in amazingly creative and often times extremely destructive ways. Exploiting each thing we touch to the point of public outcry for conservation & protection! Our history - like ice cores - do not lie… imo.
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Remember, there is only 1 person who is elected in charge of the U.S. Government, President Trump. Everyone else is appointed by the President to fill their roles. Just like the head of the Forest Service, Elon Musk is an appointed position in DOGE. That appointment comes with rules and authorities. So, yes, Elon does have the power given to him by position under President Trump. Agencies just can’t ignore direction given to them by a government appointee who has higher authority. It comes down to what powers Trump gave Elon, period.
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When it comes to government positions… yes. Congress has the power of the purse… when congress passes a budget it is signed into law. No one is above the law, which means if your boss tells you not to spend money that the congress has allocated to be spent you have a tough decision to make.
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An important point of the design of the United States Government is that no one person, nor any single branch of the government, is “in charge”.
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Agree, that is what is confounding… there seems to be a shortage of understanding of three separate but coequal branches of government. Once a budget is passed and funds appropriated it is a law.
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In my understanding, the budget “allocates the funds” which means they they are available to be spent by that agency… Come the end of the year, agencies spend all their allocated funds, not necessarily on what it was budgeted for.
If what it was to be spent on was law, then there would not be the mad rush to spend the money at the end of the budgetary year that exists every year.
I do not think it is “ law “ that the money has to be spent, just everyone wanting to get what they can and not have their budget decreased for the following year.
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The law part comes once it is passed as a bill. You are correct not all the encumbered funds need to be spent, but in a typical government based operation… if you do not spend it your budget is reduced by that amount the following year. Year end spending results from a variety of contributors. Good management, bad management, unforeseen windfalls( think covid money) early retirements etc. No one likes the end of the year spending, but the point is that the funds were allocated. No one is going to Hawaii on the end of the year spending.
The issue with the current situation is that the time honored tradition of blaming the workers is occurring. It is a derivative of the “divide and conquer” strategy. We saw this in 2008. We( the fire service) were still well liked, then by 2009 we and all public employees with pensions were the reason for the economic downturn… not the hooligans on Wall Street.
Now it is the federal employees.
The damage being done will take a decade to repair. When you summarily fire an entire generation of probationary employees you upset the succession plan. Specific to the DOI agencies they are already experiencing some challenges in hiring… this will only exacerbate those issues.
The total force concept is what keeps IMT’s staffed. These cuts will reduce the availability of those non-safety personnel.
Currently the NWS and NOAA are being gutted… with no suggested replacement. The IMET course was canceled last week and today there is a narrative that the building housing the supercomputer which runs the GFS American forecast model will not have its lease renewed. That means relying on foreign models( not quite America first). The portions of the NWS being impacted now include Doppler radar center in Norman OK and the modeling program in College Park MD.
This will impact the fire service through a loss of qualified IMETS. Long range forecasting will become more expensive( you need a subscription to the Euro).
The study of climate will end( look down) and our understanding of how our environment is changing will go dark. All of that science will be reduced to the “Na ah” argument.
The impacts for our DOI partners will be long lasting.
Sledge hammers can do a lot of work… but that work is not precise. It just smashes and the cracks radiate outward in a very unpredictable fashion.
As far as one person being in charge… any organization which can only operate with one single person is on a collision course for failure.
What is worse are leaders who only want good news. Boardrooms and battlefields of the world are littered with the remains of leaders who dictate what they want to hear rather than the facts.
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A temporary stay has been issued…
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This just reinforces the fact that this is not based in any type of evidence based decision to reduce the workforce. This is a pubic show to make a point, the fine details will not get the press coverage that these positions were reinstated. Like opening a dam and dumping water into a dry lake bed while screwing farmers out of the water for the growing season, but telling people that it went south to fight fires… a ridiculous publicity stunt.
People are not pawns to move around in a game. There is always room to scrutinize an operation and move to realign it. But summarily terminating them at least on paper does not actually solve any problems it just kicks the can down the road.
It is not what you do… but how you do what you do that counts( at least in the real world).
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Imo… It seems to me that we are a citizenry that for the most part does not know how many jobs there are in the public vs private sector and certainly mostly ignorant to what the breakdown of percentages are. The rough numbers as i understand them;
Total Jobs in the USA = 70% are private sector. 13.5% are public sector (local, state & fed). 6.5% are non-profit jobs & 10% are self employed. The public sector jobs break down like this; 6.4% local, 4.5% state, 10.4% fed. Imo, no mater what actions or how many heads “we the people” want to see eliminated - the resulting “savings” / consequences will obviously not help a darn thing in terms of americas economy and/or perceived level of swampyness! end of report…
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Yes, it’s definitely the transgender rat studies that are bankrupting us.
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