Trump Federal Hiring Freezing stops aboard federal fire crews before the fire season – CNN

Cnn
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The federal freezing of hiring applied by President Donald Trump, influenced the hiring of a decisive group of federal workers: firefighters.

Freezing comes at a critical moment when firefighters across the country usually get on thousands of seasonal federal firefighters in the preparation for wild fires in the spring and summer.

“It will be really bad, really fast,” says Ben McLain, captain of the federal crew and a member of the board with Wildland Wildland firefighters.

“We will have a lack of staff when the fire season goes,” McLain told CNN on Friday. “The precedent we have seen in the last few decades at this point makes us almost sure that this will be a big fire season again.”

Federal freezing hiring, initiated through one of the executive orders that the president signed on his first day of service, dictates that new federal civilian positions cannot be created and vacancies cannot be filled.

Federal firefighters are an essential part of the ability of national fire. The Interior Department hired 5 780 Federal Firefighters of Wildland in 2024, while the US Forest Service operates over 11,300.

Federal firefighters “respond to fires across the country and internationally,” according to McLain. “The federal government is the only resource that makes this so smooth and nimble.”

The bigger part of the federal government firefighters are seasonal, hired as permanent or temporary employees, according to Mclane. Every year, before the summer fire season, these employees must be redirected, he explained.

“All this is stopped right now,” McLain said. And in the graph there is no “there is no place to wave” to restart the process of hiring on a later date and guarantee the crews are ready for the height of the fire season.

“We don’t have the ability to click our fingers and just get these people back,” he said.

Freeze means that fire trucks in Utah can be left with two people on a truck instead of four or five – and some trucks will not be staff at all, according to a CNN KSL branch.

The Department of the Interior, which operates firefighters through the land management bureau, told CNN in a statement that “implementing the executive order of President Donald J. Trump through the federal civil workforce. ”

The US Forest Service told CNN that “wildlife fire positions are considered to be public safety positions” and the department is actively working with the staff implementation and management office.

Cal Fire, who described the Forest Service as an “important partner”, told CNN that it was “unknown at this point how this freezing would affect the protection of the federal lands in California.”

Disadvantage and unpaid

Freeze also comes as firefighters across the country are already faced with a shortage of staff. In Los Angeles, where the devastating fires killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes in January, the fire department is less staff than almost any other large city, with less than one firefighter per 1,000 inhabitants.

And federal firefighters also struggled to maintain staff, to a large extent because they are “terribly unpaid”, according to Steve Gutierrez, who is federal firefighters and other Earth management officials for the National Federation of Federal Officers. Federal Firefighters can only make $ 15 an hour, starting, according to Gutierrez, who has drawn attention to the bill is currently in the congress, which will collect the pay for the firefighters.

“Nobody does this to become a millionaire,” he told CNN on Saturday. “They save lives every day, preventing communities from burning.”

Freezing “trusts” in the federal government among federal firefighters, said Gutierrez, who worked as a firefighter in the wild for 15 years.

“The only people who have their backs right now are their union,” he said.

The longer the freezing continues, the greater the chance of firefighters waiting to be redirected for the season, to take work elsewhere.

“We are very likely to lose all these qualified employees who are qualified resources that US taxpayers pay, to other subjects and never recover on this issue,” Gutierrez said. “We will never see the return on our investment.”

Trump’s executive order states that it does not prohibit rentals from “maintaining basic services and protecting national security, internal security and public safety.”

The effect on firefighters comes because the White House did not say that firefighters fall under these “basic services” and thus guarantee the release from freezing, according to Mclane.

“We have to understand soon if we intend to release the firefighters from the wild from renting freezing,” he said.

In the same way, Gutierrez said, “We have not heard anything from the agency, whether they have filed a release or not because there is no communication,” citing the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Agriculture.

McLain said freezing produced “prolonged uncertainty” and anxiety among federal firefighters who are already working under dangerous, highly tense conditions, traveling around the country in the short term to fight dangerous fires.

“Emergency reactors do not perform better when they are heroes in the political theater and feels that we are us,” he said.