The Forest Service is lifting a temporary hiring pause and adding some new hires, but will not proceed with other candidates who received tentative job offers, citing budget shortfalls.
Forest Service Chief Randy Moore at a Message to the National Leadership Council of the agency Last week, he said the agency will move forward with 157 tentative job openings for positions unrelated to wildfires.
These positions, he added, include line officers, administrative staff such as forest supervisors or district rangers, law enforcement officers, resource assistants and some “hard-to-fill mission-critical positions.”
The Forest Service will also continue to recruit recent Pathways Program graduates, Presidential Management Fellows, and some positions under specific noncompetitive hiring authorities.
But beyond these new hires, Moore said the remaining applicants who received a provisional job offer will not receive a final job offer. He added that his office will approve future hiring of external candidates.
Forest Service spokesman John Winn told Federal News Network that about 350 external applicants will not move forward with job offers for permanent, non-fire-related positions.
“We will focus on the highest priority positions necessary to protect public health and safety, to meet critical mission objectives, as well as positions that are highly specialized and/or have proven very difficult to fill internally,” Moore wrote.
The Forest Service’s restricted hiring efforts do not apply to its wildland firefighting workforce.
People enrolled in student employment programs will continue to be transferred to permanent positions with the Forest Service. Moore said the Forest Service will also “immediately resume” internal hiring.
Moore wrote that all Forest Service units should complete workforce planning in the coming weeks, which “will allow us to project and prioritize our workforce needs relative to our expected fiscal year 2025 budget.”
The Forest Service is asking Congress for a $8.9 billion budget for fiscal year 2025 — an increase of more than $658.5 million over its current spending.
“For non-fire positions that remain in the system but have not reached the stage of a tentative job offer, each region/station/deputy area director must work with a human resources officer to prioritize these jobs and move through a prioritization process with strict criteria and centralized approval for any outside hires,” he wrote.
Moore is also directing the Forest Service to designate new employees as temporary or term employees if they were hired using funds received in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act or a recent supplemental spending package for disaster recovery.
“We are at our best when we face challenges together. We lean heavily on our core value of interdependence as we lead the whole and share leadership across the agency to address these changes while supporting our workforce,” Moore wrote.
Moore announced in April a temporary pause on hiring for permanent, full-time, non-layoff positions while the Forest Service conducted a strategic hiring assessment to gain a “clear understanding of exactly what is in the system, including the number of new Forest Service employees we expect to add in the coming months.”
“I want to be clear that this is not a hiring freeze, but rather a strategic assessment of hiring,” Moore wrote in his April memo, adding that the Forest Service would not withdraw any final job offers it had already made.
The assessment, Moore wrote, found that the Forest Service’s current attrition rate is below 5 percent, well below the agency’s historical attrition rate of about 9 percent.
“On the one hand, we should celebrate that our staff stays because they feel connected to the mission, they feel heard, and they are committed to improving our nation’s forests and grasslands,” Moore said. “To stay within budget and continue to fulfill our core mission, we must implement stricter controls on internal and external hiring.”
The Forest Service has added 4,000 non-fire-related positions over the past two years. Moore told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month that the Forest Service has lost about 40% of its non-fire-related workforce over the past 20 years.
“The contracting actions we undertook were necessary to rebuild the agency back to its basic functionality and to meet the heightened expectations that the historic investment of BIL and IRA funds brought to the agency,” Moore wrote in his April memo.
Federal employees received an average pay increase of 5.2% in January 2024, the largest annual increase they received in More than 40 years.
Moore, however, wrote that Congress did not provide the Forest Service with funding to justify the pay increase, other than its wildfirefighting operations.
“We must therefore find ways to absorb the increases within our limited budget,” he wrote in April.
As part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act of 2021, federal wildland firefighters also received a temporary pay increase that lawmakers are seeking to make permanent.
To address pay disparities between federal firefighters and their state and local counterparts, the legislation gave them the lesser of two options: a 50% increase in their base pay or a $20,000 pay increase.
He Wildland Firefighters Salary Protection Act It would offer workers the lower of a 50% base pay increase or a $20,000 pay increase.
Lawmakers have included the Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act in one of the fiscal year 2025 spending bills moving through the House of Representatives. The House Appropriations Committee’s Interior subcommittee approved the spending bill containing this provision last Friday.
The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) applauded the bipartisan support for this permanent pay increase.
“With the increasing intensity of wildfire seasons, as a country we cannot afford to lose experienced firefighters to state and local fire departments because their pay becomes unsustainable,” NNFE National President Randy Erwin said in a statement. “It should be apparent to all members of Congress that the wildfire crisis is not slowing down anytime soon, so a permanent solution to wildfire firefighter pay is necessary and it needs to happen very soon.”
The Forest Service is requesting $216 million in its fiscal 2025 budget to support increased levels of wildland firefighting.
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) said the increased pay for firefighters thanks to the infrastructure bill has been an important recruiting and retention tool for the Forest Service, but warned that the agency still faces vacancies in fire-related positions and overall staffing gaps in non-fire-related positions.
“Those gaps tie directly to project delays and agency-wide management challenges that my Republican counterparts often attribute to the legal burdens of environmental review,” Kamlager-Dove said at a hearing earlier this month held by the House Natural Resources Committee’s subcommittee on federal lands.
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