Department of the Interior Struggles to Employ Wildland Firefighters
Dayton, Wyoming, September 2024—
Wildland firefighter Aidan Dowden, 20-years-old, is deployed near Bighorn National Forest to help contain the Elk Fire, the main contributor to Wyoming's largest wildfire season in 36 years. Drying wildflowers and basin scrub lit aflame, as dwindling numbers of elite interagency “Hotshot” crews fought to create firelines on the burning woodland to the north. By November, most of the nation’s hotshot crews had already laid off their seasonal firefighters, putting the brunt of the work on full-time federal and state laborers who were underprepared for the night’s extreme winds.
“This had been a pretty big ass kicker of a fire. The night crew guys were just getting hammered every time the sun went down,” said Dowden.
Dowden continued to work on the fire for the next twelve days, before returning back to his home in Boulder, Colorado. His department, Black Forest Fire and Rescue, is funded by the state of Colorado, which sets his hourly rate a far cry higher from his federal counterparts. Since 2021, the Wildland Fire Management Budget has nearly doubled from $993 million to a requested $1.9 billion allocation in order to fight wildland fires like the Elk Fire. This year, thousands of wildfires have burned 8,406,135 acres across the United States and tribal nations, an uptick in 7,799,831 acres from 2023. The requested budget will be shared by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Park Service (NPS), and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Amidst rapidly escalating costs to mitigate and prevent forest fires, federal wildland firefighters are coming up with the short end of the monetary stick.
How do we solve this issue? The proposed Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act, first introduced as a bipartisan bill to the senate in July 2023, would make President Joe Biden’s temporary 2022 pay raises for federal firefighters permanent. The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) has strongly advocated for the legislation, but since introduction it has languished on the Senate Legislative Calendar with no action. By September 2023, congress received a comprehensive report from the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission detailing policy recommendations for a sustainable, successful wildfire fighting plan. Within the recommendations of the document, “low pay” was stressed as a decisive factor in weak employee retention seven times.
Rich Gustafson, lead fire management officer for the Southern Ute Reservation, pointed to the pandemic as another stressor that killed the workforce.
“The federal wildland side really struggles to pay people a reasonable amount. The starting pay grade for a wildland firefighter is a GS3, which is 12 bucks an hour. Not great money to be going out and doing it,” Dowden said.
“It also incentivizes personnel to work unsustainable levels of overtime. A permanent solution is essential to retaining the workforce we have and recruiting the workforce we need,” the commission wrote.
“In the past, we’ve had enough people available and not enough money…now we have plenty of money but we don’t have enough people,” Gustafson said.
But with a new administration waiting in the wings, the current funding for wildfire management used by the Department of the Interior could be subject to a firing squad of Trump deregulators. Both low employment rates and reduced agency funding could soon become insurmountable issues to the fighting of wildfires in the United States. Howard Richards, BIA assistant fire management officer and tribal member of the Southern Ute Reservation, said that he has also seen interest in federal firefighting dwindle in recent years.
“It just seems like a new day and age that we're in now with all the other opportunities you can do versus, you know, sleeping out like a wild animal in the mountains.”
A minor influx of wildland fire management related videos and micro-influencers have found success on TikTok and Instagram at amplifying youth recruitment efforts. One particularly influential reel amassed 1.6 million views by targeting young men with the caption, “If she doesn’t want you / the bureau of land management does.”
The effects of these videos are yet to be seen, and hard to quantify, but the high turn-over in wildland firefighting cannot alone be solved by new recruitment strategies. A new Trump presidency threatens all conservation movements in the United States, including upkeep of disaster funding by federal agencies. Richards said that after thirty years in fire service,
“There's a lot of different ways, easier ways to make money.”