A year post-DOGE, Wyoming forest workers still feel uncertainty and chaos

On the Monday after Easter, an employee of the U.S. Forest Service who lives in Wyoming opened a surprising email from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. 

At the top of the agency-wide missive, above an illustration of a rock-hewn cave, were the words “Christ is Risen” in ornate font.

“Happy Easter – He is Risen indeed!” the email began. “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.” 

To say it was shocking would be an understatement, said the employee, who agreed to speak to WyoFile on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution. Receiving an overtly Christian message from the federal agency brass used to be unheard of, the employee said, as separation of church and state was a long-held agency principle. 

“This is crazy inappropriate,” the employee recalled, particularly when thinking about how it would impact employees of Jewish, Muslim or atheist beliefs. “I was shaking because it was so off-putting.” 

The following day, another unexpected email informed staff of a significant agency reorganization that would entail moving headquarters to Salt Lake City, replacing nine regional offices with new state-based ones and consolidating dozens of research stations into a single organization headquartered in Colorado.  

That change will impact hundreds of Washington, D.C.-based colleagues and diminish research opportunities, the employee said. It’s upsetting, “thinking about how many career Forest Service people we would lose, how much institutional knowledge we will lose with this.”

It’s been more than a year since President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency upended operations with layoffs and cuts across federal agencies in Wyoming — throwing into uncertainty everything from education grants to humanities funding and land management agencies. 

While much of the initial disruption has died down and some cuts have been restored, employees and supporters of the Forest Service — which experienced some of the biggest impacts — say the atmosphere in Wyoming’s district offices remains uneasy and under resourced. The agency oversees the management of more than 9 million acres of national forests in the state. Staffers are doing their best, they report, but struggles persist with Washington decisions and behaviors that feel erratic, inappropriate or unsafe for the future of America’s public lands. 

“These announcements are coming out without any real thought behind the impact that they will have,” the Wyoming employee said. Even if the major shakeups stop, the employee said, “the changes that have been made are long lasting, and they’re going to be really hard to reverse.”

‘Shotgun’ approach

On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order that created the Department of Government Efficiency, a program aimed to identify and eliminate fraud, waste and abuse in the federal government. It wasn’t long before reports of funding freezes, program eliminations and layoffs hit from the State Department to Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency. 

In Wyoming, where nearly 50% of the land is managed by the federal government for public use and enjoyment, the cuts and policy changes made waves in the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service. It has been difficult to identify how many jobs DOGE impacted, as federal agencies declined to share that information. Anecdotal reports, however, indicate several district offices in Wyoming’s eight national forests were hardest hit. These reports include staff reductions that feel untenable, growing backlogs of maintenance projects and confusing messages from Washington brass.

Lander resident Bill Lee retired from the Forest Service in 2024 after working summer seasonal jobs for four decades. He agrees that in some areas, the agency was top-heavy. “That needed to be changed,” Lee said. But “they took a shotgun instead of a scalpel.”

When job cuts gutted the Shoshone National Forest’s Washakie District office in Lander in February 2025, forcing it to close temporarily due to insufficient staffing, Lee followed the events with great concern. 

Worried particularly about the lack of seasonal employees who do the work on the ground, Lee spent the 2025 summer season volunteering on the forest. Along with volunteer Del Nelson, Lee repaired docks, secured loose signs, cleaned bathrooms and educated campers about fire rules. Another retired staffer, Barb Gustin, volunteered to man the vacant front desk at the Lander office.

An internal federal report that surfaced in December underscored Lee’s concerns. The report revealed grim warnings from Forest Service personnel about the future of the agency’s recreation amenities unless issues like critical vacancies, depleted staff, unfunded contracts and chaotic communication are addressed. 

By the end of 2025, DOGE was disbanded. But during the first half of 2025, the Forest Service lost 5,860 employees, or approximately 16% of its total workforce, according to USDA’s Office of Inspector General.

Looking ahead to the second summer season after the DOGE disruptions, Lee said, many Forest Service employees still worry about completing their mission with few resources. 

“Day-to-day things are getting done as best they can with what they’ve got,” Lee said. “And again, they’re still short, they’re still understaffed.”

The agency is hiring up to 2,000 summer seasonal employees nationwide for the 2026 season. While that is positive news, Lee said, it’s more of a symbolic gesture than a meaningful step.

The latest news about the agency reorganization only exacerbates what is already a fraught environment, he said. 

“They are tearing everything apart,” he said of top decision makers. The reorganization created new worries about the future of research and the agency’s ability to will and maintain crews — including fire crews in what is expected to be a busy wildfire season. 

Closing, consolidating 

In addition to moving the national headquarters west, the Forest Service will replace nine regional offices with 15 new state-based offices. A combined Northern Plains State Office, overseeing North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Wyoming, would be located in Cheyenne. The decision also consolidates multiple research stations into a single national research and development center, headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado.

When the reorganization was announced, Gov. Mark Gordon praised it as a way to place agency leaders closer to federal lands they oversee. Critics, meanwhile, have called it ill-advised. 

The reorganization will not include changes for forest or district offices or their staff, according to the USDA. In the wake of the decision, the agency published a “Setting the Record Straight” page on its website to address concerns. The shift will not result in state director roles becoming political positions, nor will it halt research activities, according to the page. 

“The reorganization does not eliminate scientific positions, cancel research programs or reduce our national research footprint,” the page states. “Staff and programs will continue their work, relocated into fewer facilities while maintaining research presence across the country.”

Of the agency’s approximately 30,000 employees, the reorganization will require around 500 to relocate, according to the USDA page — mostly from the Washington, D.C., office. 

Skeptics, however, think it will lead to further staffing reductions and the loss of institutional knowledge. Former BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning called it a “destructive” plan. She observed that when the BLM attempted a similar reorganization in 2020, the vast majority of D.C. employees declined to move, which pushed them — and their combined experience — out the door. 

“It will hurt forests, wildlife and communities that rely upon our public lands and waters,” she wrote in an op-ed. 

Another critic, the conservation advocacy group More than Just Parks, called the reorganization “the largest forced purge of a federal land management agency in American history.”

Forest reinforcement

Last summer, Friends of the Bridger-Teton, a nonprofit that helps the Bridger-Teton National Forest manage growing crowds with initiatives like volunteer ambassadors, created what it dubbed the “Forest Corps” in response to the federal layoffs. The five-woman team was formed explicitly to help the agency with summer-season field projects. 

The corps worked with each of the 3.4-million-acre forest’s six districts to identify a high-impact project to assist with, said Scott Kosiba, executive director of the Friends group.

“The Forest Corps was really born out of the dire need from the forest and all the seasonals being terminated,” he said, but it quickly became apparent that, regardless of yearly funding and capacity, “a program like this is a value add.”

Friends of the Bridger-Teton is continuing the Forest Corps this year, Kosiba said, and expects it will become a core part of the nonprofit’s programming. Even with the roughly 27 seasonal employees the Bridger-Teton National Forest is expected to hire this season, he said, it’ll be difficult to tackle all the anticipated work plus backlogs. 

For his part, Lee plans to scale down his volunteer work for the Washakie district. Instead of going out regularly to do maintenance work, he and his wife will pick up a weekly sample for hydrology monitoring. His longtime colleague Del Nelson is not planning to return to a volunteer position. Meanwhile, the office front desk position back in town still isn’t filled.