Federal Job Cuts Hit Workers in Sitka

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Created on Wednesday, 19 February 2025 15:08

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By GARLAND KENNEDY

Sentinel Staff Writer

Projects and staff positions across the Tongass National Forest are in jeopardy, with steep cuts already made and possibly more coming as President Donald Trump’s policy of wholesale firing of government workers came home to Sitka over the weekend.

The terminations, part of the president’s campaign to “cut waste, fraud and abuse” in government, are sweeping through federal agencies of all kinds, many of them having an outsize effect on Alaska, which leads the list of states most dependent on federal programs.

Going into this past weekend, about 3,400 employees of the U.S. Forest Service – around a tenth of the agency’s national staff – had been terminated, but only one was in Sitka.

By the end of the three-day President’s Day weekend, a total of eight USFS jobs in Sitka had been eliminated, two U.S. Forest Service employees who weren’t terminated said. They spoke with the Sentinel, on condition of anonymity, as individuals and not on behalf of the agency. Across the Tongass, more than 90 positions have been lost, and across the state more than 120 USFS workers have been fired. Prior to the firings, there were over 40 Forest Service employees in Sitka and around 600 in Alaska.

Tongass National Forest public affairs staff did not answer questions from the Sentinel, but a USDA spokesperson told the newspaper via email today that the agency “is reviewing all executive orders signed by President Trump and expects to share guidance on implementing them to agencies and mission areas as soon as possible.”

The first Forest Service position lost here was a tribal liaison. Then came the wave of firings that eliminated the Sitka Ranger District’s entire cabins and trails crew and the district’s customer service representative.

At Sitka National Historical Park, which is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, two employees lost their jobs.

One of the Forest Service workers who spoke to the Sentinel said the cuts are deep enough that Sitkans who spend time on the Tongass will notice changes this summer.

“The bigger projects that were planned for the year would be affected or just stopped altogether,” said one, who is also a member of the National Federation of Federal Employees Local 251. Funding for projects like the Lake Redoubt weir, cabin maintenance, trail reconstruction, and up to 70 various projects planned across the ranger district is uncertain.

Redoubt, which is having record runs of sockeye salmon, is a case in point.

“If we’ve got nobody out there counting fish, we can’t prove how many are coming in, then limits would be lower,” the employee said. While the daily limit for subsistence dipnetting of sockeye salmon at Redoubt has in recent years climbed into the 20s and higher, that number, without weir technicians, may drop to 10, they added.

“The funding that runs Redoubt runs through the Forest Service,” the second USFS worker said, and cuts there will likely have a measurable impact on Sitkans’ ability to catch subsistence sockeye.

Funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a Biden Administration statute, has been frozen, as was money from the Inflation Reduction Act, which earmarked funds for such projects as maintenance of the Starrigavan Recreation Area, as well as cabins and trails, including a new cabin at the picnic area atop Harbor Mountain.

“There are uncertainties for the season as to rec – cabins, trails, Redoubt,” the second Forest Service civil servant said.

Earlier in the winter, the Forest Service shut down a critical bridge accessing the Indian River valley because the wooden structure was weakened by rot. It was to replaced with an engineered span, but that project is now on indefinite hold.

“It’s an ongoing contract… No funding is moving forward, no construction is moving forward,” the first employee said. “... The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding is on hold; that impacts things like the Alaska cabin project,” which was slated to finance the construction of about 20 new cabins on the Tongass and Chugach national forests, including the one atop Harbor Mountain.

With the Sitka cabins and trails crew no longer employed, users of the forest’s recreation cabins may no longer find a stack of cut firewood awaiting their arrival.

“You’re bringing your own firewood, you’re hoping your mooring buoy is secure, with hope that the cabin is accessible and open,” the second worker said.

Cabins with damage that would threaten safety, they noted, could be closed per USFS policy, and there are no longer dedicated staff to maintain them.

Sitka’s special uses permitting also may take a hit, the first employee said. Those permits cover a range of activities, from guiding hunters and tourists to anchoring float houses, and some small cruise ship sailings.

The second employee said future USFS involvement in search and rescue operations also is now in question.

Termination Waves

Both staff members said they expect further reductions in force following the firings now under way. Terminations have already left Forest Service staff “angry and confused,” the second employee said.

Emails from the federal Office of Personnel Management, which is the human resources department for the federal government, have often been baffling and confusing, the employees said.

Both brought up the now-infamous “fork in the road” email that offered to pay federal workers to resign from their jobs. “Fork in the road” is the same heading of the email that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, sent to employees of the social media network Twitter when he purchased that company and proceeded to slash a majority of its workforce.

Musk is a close adviser of President Trump, and leads the newly established “department of government efficiency,” which in addition to slashing the federal workforce is moving to access personal data on U.S. citizens that is held at federal agencies including the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.

The initial wave of terminations targeted probationary employees across the civil service, those who had served fewer than one year, or two if they were hired under Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act authority. Alaska has approximately 15,000 federal employees, journalists at National Public Radio reported earlier this month.

“The most vulnerable employees are the ones being most affected right now,” said the first employee who spoke to the Sentinel. They anticipated coming firings of Schedule A employees, many of whom are veterans living with disabilities.

While hard numbers are not presently available for how many federal workers have been terminated nationwide, the independent news agency, The Guardian, reported last week that about 280,000 workers were hired for federal positions in the past two years, many were still in probationary status when termination letters went out.

Mandatory terminations commenced after the “fork in the road” offer expired earlier this month. Fired Forest Service workers in Sitka said their emails came from USFS staff in Washington, D.C., emails signed by human resources director Deedra Fogle.

“The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the second employee said, quoting Fogle’s emails.

The text of the termination emails is posted online by NBC Montana, and other media organizations. 

While the message from the administration is one of “efficiency,” the first employee said the cuts go far deeper than fiscal savings for any agency.

“This story is being spun as a story of elimination of waste and poor performance… That’s a smokescreen,” they said.

They described communications from higher ups at the Office of Personnel Management in D.C. as deliberately “belittling, demoralizing,” and said that they were advised by the NFFE union to obtain hard copies of their personnel files.

The second employee refuted the assertion that the terminated workers had a record of sub-par performance in their job.

“Employees that have been terminated have been invested in extensively. This is not efficient –– these are your community members who make less than $20 an hour and make a huge positive impact on access to your public lands. From my knowledge, these folks have never been less than fully successful in their performance ratings.”

Emails from OPM have also arrived strewn with errors, both employees confirmed, including issues regarding personnel, pay grades and job positions.

The employee said they no longer trust the security of their internal communication systems at USFS.

“We were told we’re being monitored at all times,” they said. Under new policies, USFS emails no longer carry the agency’s motto, “Caring for the land and serving people,” they added, and agency communications no longer include pronouns or Indigenous land acknowledgements in their signature lines.

Less than a month into the new administration there is an aura of fear in the USFS office, said the second employee.

“We don’t know who’s next, that’s the general feeling… You have to watch out what you say because someone might report on you… There’s fear of who you can be open with and who you can talk to,” they said.

Senior staff on the Tongass National Forest have repeatedly rescheduled all-staff calls and meetings, the second employee said, only to cancel them soon afterward.

“There’s fear in every level of leadership, causing Forest leadership to limit communications with staff,” they said.

Local Ripple Effects

Local nonprofits have long worked as partners with the Forest Service to provide services like trail work and cabin maintenance, but following staff cuts and spending freezes, a number of projects are on hold or in limbo.

In addition to large-scale employee terminations, the Trump administration briefly impounded federal grants worth up to $3 trillion, though that freeze has since ended. But other federal funding streams remain uncertain, said Ben Hughey, executive director of the nonprofit Sitka Trail Works. About 40 percent of the nonprofit’s funding originates at the federal level. The news agency Alaska Beacon has reported that about 40 percent of the state budget comes from the federal government.

“I’ve paused some of our work to be cautious,” Hughey told the Sentinel. “We were planning to design the reconstruction of the old CCC trail from Goddard to Redoubt, but that’s a reimbursable Forest Service agreement so we’ve postponed the project.”

Hughey still hopes to hire a trail crew for summer work on the Tongass, but will have to find funds elsewhere to make that possible.

“Since there won’t be any Forest Service crew this season, Sitka Trail Works would like to backfill the need with our own professional crew,” Hughey said. “But if federal funding is also threatened, we’ll have to be creative in how we raise those funds.”

“Maintenance of cabins, trails, and roads in general will suffer because of cuts to the hardworking Forest Service crews,” he said. “If an old growth tree falls on the Fred’s Creek cabin, crushes the roof and they don’t have a crew, they’ll just have to close the cabin. Not having the capacity to address common issues like these threatens our access to these beloved destinations.”

Another local nonprofit with close ties to the Forest Service is the Sitka Conservation Society. Like Hughey, SCS executive director Andrew Thoms is now uncertain whether the federal government will make good on its contractual obligations.

“There’s a wide range of Sitka and Southeast Alaska businesses and nonprofits that are trying to mobilize for the summer field work, and are in a place of uncertainty of if they’re going to get paid for the work or not,” Thoms told the Sentinel. “The contracts are cost reimbursable, and nobody knows if they should move ahead, and if they’re going to get reimbursed for that money or not. And in some cases, some contractors who are doing culvert work and salmon habitat and road work have already purchased machinery and mobilized that machinery.”

Those contractors, he noted, have already incurred six-digit expenses and may or may not receive payment as expected. The Conservation Society, he added, planned cabin restoration work this summer, also with federal money, and those projects are also at risk.

“We’re ordering roofing and supplies from local businesses, and we’re mobilizing local crews, and we have to purchase that material and get things in motion to make the 2025 field season. And this is money that the Alaska delegation put into the Forest Service with their appropriations authority. That’s an investment in the region,” Thoms said. The state’s congressional delegation worked during the last administration to put funding for Alaskan outdoors projects into the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

For now, a cloud of uncertainty hovers over the future of federal funding for Sitka projects.

“Federal funding in Alaska is an investment into our infrastructure and our economy that creates opportunities for Alaska businesses and build the state, and that we’re talking about their investments that benefit the people and families of the state,” Thoms added.