Tahoe/Truckee’s Forest Service Fire Drill
It’s been about 5 months since Feb. 14, which in some circles has become known as the Valentine’s Day massacre, when 10% of U.S. Forest Service staff was laid off.
Since then, amid appeals and investigations, some of those fired as part of the government-wide mass termination have been reinstated, though project and grant funding in many cases remain frozen. More cuts are possible as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to reduce federal funding for forest management and hand off such responsibility to the states. Yet following a recognized playbook, the feds show continued interest in military-like responses to combatting catastrophic wildfire.
In the Truckee/Tahoe region, agencies, organizations, and individuals brace themselves for the hottest months of the year and the highest number of visitors to the region, when any hairline fractures in the infrastructure could widen.
Information about direct impacts to the two national forests within Moonshine Ink’s coverage area, Tahoe National Forest and Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, remains murky. Media requests sent to the public information officers for both agencies — individuals who have long histories of exchanges with the Ink — now must coordinate responses with the national office, whose replies are vague.
Thus, external and anonymous sources are needed to paint a picture of USFS’s situation in the region.
On its face, it’s business as usual. “When it comes to the Forest Service and staffing, we actually held a meeting with the leaders of all the national forests in my district, all seven of them,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley, whose congressional district runs along the eastern California border, from Plumas National Forest south to Death Valley National Park. “I asked them each specifically, how are the staffing issues right now for you? All of them said that when it comes to fire prevention, their staffing has never been better.”
Brian Newman, a Cal Fire assistant chief for the Amador-El Dorado Unit, echoed the sentiment. “As part of the Lake Tahoe Regional Fire Chiefs Association, talking through all those abilities to respond, the Forest Service has been able to articulate that their staffing on the fire response side is good, as far as I understand.”
On a national level, the message is the same. “At [the U.S. Department of Agriculture] we are ensuring the entire department is geared to respond to what is already an above normal summer fire season. We are providing the resources needed to ensure the Forest Service has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world,” said USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins in a mid-May press release.
Probing further, however, shows likely long-term impacts from the USFS’s cuts to Truckee/Tahoe, even as an army of Tahoe-devoted agencies have stepped up to assist.
While the frontlines of firefighting were spared from the mass terminations, those in secondary firefighting support roles, as one example, were not.
“When you fight a fire, especially when you fight a long-term incident, it requires a lot of people in support roles,” explained one individual closely connected with local USFS operations and with a long history of firefighting. “On a larger fire, one that’s going to go for days or weeks, there are so many of these support systems people have no idea about … providing vehicles, providing meals, places for people to rest, showers. The ratio of support personnel to people on the tip of the shovel is 4 or 5 to 1 on a large incident. So many people who filled those positions are gone.”
This person asked to remain anonymous because of ongoing relationships with the Forest Service and will be identified as “Pat” through the rest of the article.
At the same time, long-time local USFS partners like Reno-based Great Basin Institute, which supports environmental research projects and education throughout the West, including prominent work in the Tahoe Basin, find themselves lacking the usual Forest Service financial support.
The ratio of support personnel to people on the tip of the shovel is 4 or 5 to 1 on a large incident. So many people who filled those positions are gone.”
~ anonymous individual closely connected with local U.S. Forest Service
“The Forest Service as a whole has not released a single new dollar in 2025 to GBI,” the institute’s CEO, Peter Woodruff, said. “[That’s] tens of millions of dollars in what could be work that could be happening in 2025. The agency has the money, [but] they have not been allowed to release the funds yet to take on the stewardship work. And we’re now a month and a half into the proper field season for most of this to take place, so we’re looking at suboptimal conditions for work getting accomplished because it’s just being held up.”
Woodruff commended local USFS leadership for putting its best foot forward and trying to maintain positivity, “but you’ve got to remember, they’re looking at record visitation, and they’re looking at a devastating blow to their workforce. That’s just unsustainable. That’s the bottom line. You can’t keep asking more of these public servants who are here, not because they’re paid well, but because they care [enough] about these places to perform heroics when all the forces are against them.”
There’s also the morale factor. As Annabelle Monti, program manager for the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team, put it, “I spent 15 years in the Forest Service. I grew up in the Forest Service, so all of my friends are being affected by this. This is a huge deal … And when people are losing their jobs with almost zero notice and then being brought back on and then that’s still in flux, how are you supposed to feel about your contribution?”
“At the whim” of the politically powerful
Many of those interviewed commented on the mentality that comes with working for a federal agency: “It feels like we’re at the whim of the administration,” said a former USFS worker who will be known as “Logan.”
Pat added to this, describing the difference between working for the Forest Service under Democrat or Republican guidance. Namely, that Republicans tend to reduce budgets for the USFS and Democrats provide more.
“[Under Republicans] you see a lot more emphasis on resource extraction. There’s less emphasis on … a holistic approach — working with the forest, trying to make things better,” Pat said. “When it comes to fire stuff, doing forest management and fuels management is really key. They’ve abandoned all that … and throw more money at the reactive stuff. ‘We don’t care about taking care of the stuff, but when it burns, we’ll throw more [tools] at it’ … Helicopters, airplanes, big money, big profits.
“Going out and raking the forests, doing fuel management, saving the animals — that’s tree-hugger shit,” Pat joked. “Guys against a wall of fire, dropping flame retardant from planes … That’s more macho, more badass, but not [effective long-term].”
There’s also the overarching umbrella of the fire-industrial complex, a federal-private partnership that is financially and politically motivated to continue the war on wildfire.
Slate criticized this approach in a 2021 article titled, The U.S. Government Is Wasting Billions on Wildfire Policy That Doesn’t Work: “Faced with such catastrophic wildfires, it seems only natural for fire services to respond with every resource available. But according to many of the country’s most respected fire experts, there is little evidence that most of these fire suppression campaigns are effective.
“These critics say that the current practice of trying to suppress every big wildfire is foolhardy, especially given the huge, climate-driven fires more and more common in the West. Some blame this policy on what they call the fire-industrial complex: a collection of the major governmental fire agencies and hundreds of private contractors, who are motivated by a mixture of institutional inertia, profiteering, and desperation.”
Pat’s job with the Forest Service was swept up in the early 2025 upheaval, though he continues to work with the agency. Some staff were encouraged to retire — an approach, Pat added, that isn’t new: “They’ve done this for decades. If somebody’s on [a list of identified positions to cut] and they’re retirement-eligible or even if they’re not, they’ll say we want you to retire, and we’ll give you $25,000.”
Two states, five counties, all of these people, everybody cares about Tahoe. That seems so overwhelming. But in situations like this, that provides you this huge base of a variety of partners that have the flexibility to advocate for Tahoe.”
~ Annabelle Monti, Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team Program Manager
This is known as a Reduction in Force, or RIF. The $25,000 amount is also standard procedure, per the U.S. Office of Personnel Management: “The Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority, also known as buyout authority, allows agencies that are downsizing or restructuring to offer employees lump-sum payments up to $25,000 as an incentive to voluntarily separate.”
How many local employees have been affected is unclear, even to partner agencies. One source said they heard that those initially laid off from the LTBMU were all brought back. Both Pat and Logan guessed that between 20 and 30 Tahoe National Forest staff members were fired but weren’t sure how many, if any, have returned.
The official USDA response to the Ink’s questions was, “It would be inappropriate for us to comment on pending congressional legislation.”
Safety nets
Regardless of how potential wildfires might be tackled, representatives of Cal Fire and the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team said as of the end of June 2025, they’re confident they have the frontline staff to do the job.
“Our fuel reduction projects and prescribed pile burning and brush cutting and those types of things, we’ve continued on as agencies — state, local, federal — altogether moving forward with those and those have continued at the pace that we would normally expect to see,” Cal Fire’s Newman said.
This is an example of the Tahoe Basin’s many jurisdictional foundations proving to be a boon.
Monti spent 15 years working for the Forest Service in the Carson Ranger District, just east of the Basin, before joining the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team this past March.
“Having worked in the area for my entire professional career, looking into Tahoe from the outside,” she said, “it was always like, Oh my gosh, that seems like such a nightmare. Two states, five counties, all of these people, everybody cares about Tahoe. That seems so overwhelming. But in situations like this, that provides you this huge base of a variety of partners that have the flexibility to advocate for Tahoe.”
She gave such examples as the League to Save Lake Tahoe (aka Keep Tahoe Blue), California Tahoe Conservancy, and Tahoe Resource Conservation District as groups that took on advocacy and hosting roles.
“The pieces were in place in the Tahoe Basin specifically to do that,” Monti continued. “And that doesn’t exist in a lot of other places. I think that’s the vision of the future. All resources are limited — funding, resources, people, workforce, all of these things. And so, I think this collaborative approach is really starting to gain momentum, but Tahoe in particular seems to be 20 years ahead of the curve.”
Those just outside the Basin are making their voices heard as well. On April 18, decision-makers from Truckee, Nevada City, Grass Valley, and Mammoth Lakes met with Rep. Kiley, urging him to advocate for the reinstatement of forest health and wildfire mitigation federal funding.
A May 9 follow-up letter by the jurisdictions provided, as requested by Kiley, a list of impacted projects on the cusp of proceeding such as the Five Creeks Project and Alpine Meadows and Olympic Valley Fire Protection Project. On June 6, Town of Truckee Mayor Jan Zabriskie sent a second follow-up, requesting an update on advocacy efforts, as well as expressing disheartenment that “Tahoe National Forest operations continue to face critical operational challenges, including staffing shortages and difficulty procuring basic supplies. Specifically, campgrounds and recreation programs in Tahoe National Forest continue to be critically understaffed.” This information came to Zabriskie, he said, via town staff meeting with USFS staff.
A June 2025 My Shot in this newspaper by Town of Truckee Council Member Courtney Henderson also posed concerns for a lack of update.
Similar to the stalled shovel-ready projects, the Great Basin Institute is experiencing its own rollercoaster with the Forest Service. The institute has partnered with the agency to perform forest and biological surveys and inventories, forest timber sale preparation, hand crew support for fuels reduction, and more.
There are two pots of funding from the USFS that have affected GBI this year. First, obligated funding, which had been fully authorized and should have been available but was not during a 6-week lapse in February and March. “It was ruled by injunction that the holding back of those funds was essentially impoundment,” Woodruff explained.
The vast majority of that funding, “in the millions,” he said, has since been distributed — except for about $900,000 Bureau of Land Management dollars that was canceled for conservation activity in Elko, Nevada.
Second, tens of millions in USFS funds have been “authorized for use,” Woodruff added, through the agency’s grants and agreements department, “but has not been released through an executed agreement with GBI.” (This grants department was also highlighted in the aforementioned letters to Rep. Kiley.)
“It’s held up from being obligated to GBI,” Woodruff explained. “The agency wants to move forward, we want to move forward, they have the money. It’s just not clearing this administrative hurdle to get executed.”
In some of these cases, staff has already been hired to work on the not-yet-funded projects.
“We’re using other prior pots of funding to keep projects going. We’re getting creative,” he said. “GBI also writes and competes for quite a few non-federal grants. If we’ve got that in the pot, we can try to use non-fed money before we are dependent on the fed. But in many cases, that work just won’t happen this year if it takes much longer to be administratively executed.”
In a late-June press conference, in response to a Moonshine question, Kiley said he has “absolutely expressed” his concerns to the administration about project advancement, as well as on the house floor.
“We want to make sure that our national forests and our national parks have the personnel they need,” he added. “We’ve advocated for giving greater autonomy to the local forests specifically with our district and the parks to enable them to deal with these issues more promptly.”
On a similar wavelength, Monti acknowledged the opportunities that have come about with a refiner’s-fire mindset: “I think that a lot of people have taken the federal funding aspect for granted for a long time because it was so secure. And this has really shown that that might not be the case. So, to mitigate those effects in the future, we really need to take a step back and rethink how we’re approaching these things so that we have even more safety nets built in.”
