Amid staffing cuts, Forest Service wants seasonal firefighters to work more hours this year

The U.S. Forest Service is taking the unusual step of allowing its temporary staff to work for more than half the year, waiving a statutory cap as it enters peak wildfire season after shedding thousands of personnel. 

The seasonal employees are typically capped at 1,039 hours, one hour less than half the year assuming a 40-hour work week. After receiving special permission from the Office of Personnel Management, the firefighters and fire-adjacent staff can now work 1,560 hours—the equivalent of a 30-hour work week. 

The Forest Service has said that by the end of July, it had 11,364 firefighters on board, exceeding its goal for 2025. Still, it acknowledged that total would not meet its needs. 

“Even though this isn't enough capacity to meet the needs of the continuing wildfire crisis, this is the number of firefighters we are able to support with existing infrastructure, funding and other resources,” the agency said. “We boost wildland firefighting capacity with other agency staff and administratively determined emergency workers qualified to support fire management activities.” 

USFS has incentivized employees to leave through the deferred resignation program—which has enabled staffers to sit on paid administrative leave through September before leaving government—and other separation perks. While firefighters were exempt from those offers, other agency personnel with “red cards”—employees who hold certifications for firefighting duties and deploy as needed to wildfires—left in droves. 

All told, nearly 5,000 USFS employees have accepted incentive offers to leave the agency. About 1,400 of those held red cards, and USFS last month asked them to volunteer to return for the current fire season. It has also reassigned between 600 and 700 employees to move laterally to serve in critical areas, USFS Chief Tom Schultz told Congress in July.

Employees across the Forest Service have voiced concern about staffing levels, saying the agency had shed institutional knowledge in droves and incident teams that deploy to fires were still short key personnel. The agency has faced bipartisan pushback on its workforce plans. Workers previously sounded that alarm that new layers of review by USDA and the Department of Government Efficiency led to contract renewals for areas ranging from janitorial services to firefighting equipment to take as long as six weeks to complete when it previously took minutes.

Last year, USFS announced it would not hire seasonal staff in 2025, though it exempted fire-related positions from the freeze. As part of the Agriculture Department’s reorganization, the service is in the midst of phasing out its nine regional offices and four of its five Research Stations. The Trump administration proposed slashing USFS staffing by 26% in its fiscal 2026 budget proposal, not accounting for a request to consolidate federal firefighting within the Interior Department.

One Forest Service employee said in his 20-year career with the agency, he could only remember the agency waiving the caps for temporary seasonal staff a couple times, and even then only in extreme fire years. The agency last authorized the waivers in 2022. 

“This administration is scrambling to keep people available for fire after losing so many earlier this year,” the employee said. 

While the approval was specifically for “temporary seasonal fire employees,” the range of positions granted exemptions to the hours cap ranged from firefighters to biological technicians, archeologists, vehicle dispatchers, engineers, supply technicians and others. 

USFS stressed that the extensions were optional and it would not affect employees’ eligibility for unemployment. It added, however, the extra working hours would not impact the staffers’ future employment or service time. 

A USFS firefighter said the 1,039 hour limit is generally sacrosanct, but the agency is “scared as hell about staffing.” 

“They just know that the [early retirement offers] and [firings] have hurt fire militia numbers badly,” the employee said, referring to red card holders, “and they want a stopgap because this fire season is unlikely to ease up much in the fall with how poor rainfall totals have been.” 

Bobbie Scopa, a long-time federal firefighter and former USFS operations section chief who now advocates for her former colleagues as part of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said it was particularly unusual for the service to waive the hours cap when the government has not yet set national wildfire preparedness level at five, the highest on the scale. The nation is currently at a level four. It is also unusual to waive the cap so early in the season, Scopa said. 

“They’re recognizing that ‘we don’t have the staffing that we thought we did’ and they’re trying to get ahead of a possible trainwreck,” Scopa said.