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A wave of federal-employee layoffs swept the nation Friday, leaving an undisclosed number of Wyoming workers from multiple agencies suddenly jobless and bereft of explanations in its wake. How many people and agencies have been affected, what roles have been eliminated, which communities have been hardest hit and many other basic questions remain unanswered by the government, despite repeated inquiries to multiple offices.
Amid the confusion and chaos, patterns emerged through interviews with a diverse array of fresh-out-of-work staffers and their advocates: concern for agencies’ ability to execute their missions today, and in the future; fear of public harm from lost services and damaged resources; and expectations that Native Americans will be disproportionately impacted, both by lost jobs and broken commitments.
Wyoming’s top elected officials, meanwhile, have largely celebrated the Trump administration’s actions.
WyoFile agreed to let both newly laid-off and still-employed staffers remain anonymous because we found their fears of potential reprisals to be credible and realistic.
In the absence of agency responsiveness, we’ve not been able to independently corroborate everything they shared.
Stability gone
For nearly seven years, a U.S. Forest Service employee based out of a mid-sized Wyoming town worked mostly as a horse packer. In that role, he helped haul timber for bridge projects, transport alpine lake water samples and pack gear for hydrologists, biologists or trail crews.
He loved the lifestyle and had a knack for working with horses. So he was thrilled last year when his job status changed to “permanent seasonal.”
“When I finally became a permanent employee with the Forest Service, I had committed to this being my career,” he said. “It had a lot of stuff going for it in terms of benefits and stability, or what felt like stability.”
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He settled in, buying property with his fiancé and planning for the long haul. Now, however, all that supposed stability “is just gone.”
He was just a couple months shy of completing the mandatory one-year probationary phase of his new position. That left him vulnerable to the thousands of jobs cut by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — the Forest Service’s parent agency — this week as part of an aggressive Trump administration campaign to reduce the federal workforce.
His supervisor called him Thursday to break the news, he said, and he received his formal notice via email on Friday, effective immediately.
He thinks this will likely mark the end of his career with the agency, and said he will seek other work in the area. But he worries about the state of a workforce already stretched so thin it’s barely able to adequately manage an invaluable resource.
“Mostly I’m just concerned for the resource at this point,” he said. “Like the trail maintenance that the community has seen over the years, that is going to be gone. There’s just no one to do it anymore. So I think that’s going to be one of the first impacts that people notice.”
Long term, he said, “I just hope our public lands are still here. For me, that means more than working for the Forest Service, like just having a place to go.”
He studied wildlife and fisheries management in college, and worked his way up through internships and trail crews before getting his job in Wyoming. He is also concerned about the many young people who were starting their careers in the agency — because they represented the future of the Forest Service.
“The people who are getting cut right now are the Forest Service’s future employees, the future leaders of the Forest Service,” he said. “It’s just wrong, what they are doing to people.”
‘A new day’
Meanwhile, in Wyoming’s Capitol building Friday, the state’s U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican, spoke to legislators in both chambers. She described the rapid changes under Trump as having many benefits for Wyoming.
The president, she told the Senate, “is working with lightning speed to make major changes that are going to be so good for Wyoming.”
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Changes she referenced involve energy production and women’s sports. She also lauded the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“What Elon Musk is doing is incredibly important to America,” she said. “He is ferreting out true waste, fraud and abuse.”
“It’s an absolute new day in Washington,” Lummis, who has held state or federal office for decades, said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Deep cuts
That optimism was in stark contrast to the uncertainty expressed by federal employees to WyoFile.
Staffers at western Wyoming’s two largest national forests, the Bridger-Teton and Shoshone, were shaken by the seemingly indiscriminate layoffs that swept across their federal agency late this week.
On the 2.4 million-acre Shoshone — the nation’s oldest national forest — roughly 20% of permanent workers were informed they were out of a job, according to a U.S. Forest Service staffer in Wyoming familiar with the layoffs. The losses hit some reaches of the Shoshone harder than others, with up to 40% of the non-fire staff being cut loose in some ranger districts, they told WyoFile.
A Biden administration decision to convert long-term seasonal employees into permanent seasonal employees likely inflated the number of lost jobs. Those converted federal workers were still considered “probationary” and every one of them who wasn’t a firefighter lost their jobs, according to the staffer.
“None of those people who just got hired permanently last year have a job anymore,” the federal worker said.
Ripple effects from the empty positions will inevitably reach the public, according to the source. Many fields and disciplines will be affected.
“It’s all different fields, from timber to recreation to people who are supposed to be clearing the trails, picking up garbage and replacing toilet paper,” the federal worker said. “Our office is going to have to close our doors to the public, because we won’t have front desk staff.”
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Two federal government employees with connections to the Bridger-Teton National Forest reported that probationary employee layoffs there were also deep. Across the 3.4-million-acre forest, according to the sources, about 30 or more full-time staffers have been informed they’re losing their jobs.
Some ranger districts were hit harder than others, with the Jackson District losing eight staffers and the Pinedale District losing 10 employees, according to the staffer.
Communication about what’s happening from newly minted agency top brass under the Trump administration has been dismal, one of the sources said.
“This is terrible, it’s an absolutely terrible way to treat people,” the source said. “Morale is really low, we’re not getting any information. I find out more from r/fednews on Reddit than I hear from any sort of level of leadership.”
A spokesperson in the U.S. Forest Service’s Washington, D.C. headquarters declined to provide or corroborate layoff figures for Wyoming’s six national forests.
“[U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins] fully supports President Trump’s directive to optimize government operations, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s ability to better serve American farmers, ranchers, loggers and the agriculture community,” the spokesperson said in an email. “As part of this effort, USDA has released individuals in their probationary period of employment.”
A harbinger
The federal layoffs, while hard to swallow for those affected, weren’t completely out of left field. Federal workers were already feeling uncertain after the Trump administration emailed the “Fork in the Road” letter.
The resignation offer excused those who accepted it from “all applicable in-person work requirements” while paying them through the end of September. For those who would not resign, the letter stated, “we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency.”
WyoFile first spoke with a federal employee about the mounting employment situation in Casper on Feb. 7. They followed up Friday to say they were fired.
The prospect of finding another job in Wyoming felt daunting, where options, in their fields of expertise, are slim. There are far more career opportunities outside the state, they added, which means uprooting families, including spouses who work in Wyoming communities.
“You’re going to have to cast a wider net than just Wyoming,” they said. “There’s just not that many specific job opportunities here for those people that are specialized.”
The weeks leading up to the layoff announcement have been uneasy, they said.
The normally interactive, boisterous and friendly daily atmosphere among work colleagues had turned quiet and even suspicious.
“You can feel distrust,” they said. “You can feel low morale and just anxiety in general, because every day, multiple times a day over the past two weeks, there’s been just a barrage of different orders, rulemakings — and they contradict one another. It changes constantly.
“Obviously, people fear for their jobs,” they added.
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There’s also fear about what layoffs mean for Wyoming.
“It’s going to slow down approval processes, permitting — all of that stuff,” they said. “If you lose the people that keep those wheels greased, then stuff is going to grind to a halt, or at least become very slow and tedious.”
Most federal employees in Wyoming are not performing their jobs with partisan politics in mind, they said. Yet those workers are being inundated with a public discourse that paints them as either partisan or lazy — simply on the public dole, they said.
That sentiment is reflected in emails sent from the administration’s higher-ups in recent weeks.
“They have this language that was very clearly not written by a federal employee,” they said. “It has no formality, it has no professionalism and it has these snarky comments like, ‘We’re giving you the opportunity to quit being a lazy employee and you can go be more productive in the private sector,'” they said, summarizing the tone of emails. “The language in those letters is condescending and insulting.”
“I feel like this tactic — by the person who’s instigating it — their concept is that it’s an acceptable way to go about things,” they said. “But in the public- and in the civil-service sector, those are different people.
“For one, you take an oath before you’re hired. Everyone takes a live oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to serve the people of the United States, not an administration. And that’s different [than the private sector]. That feeling of dedication is different, I think, when you’re a civil servant. They’re not just doing a job just to make money and go home. There’s another component to it.”
Support for workers
Federal employee support groups, conservationists and advocates for tribes criticized the indiscriminate slashing. The Native Organizers Alliance said the actions could affect a host of agencies from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the Indian Health Service and Bureau of Indian Education and might be illegal.
“Blanket layoffs … without a process in place to ensure that the federal agencies can carry out the duties … means that these actions potentially violate the law,” said Judith LeBlanc, executive director of Native Organizers Alliance.
“The largest single employer of Native people is the federal government, LeBlanc, a member of the Caddo Nation from the lower Mississippi Valley said in a statement. “The federal government is legally responsible for ensuring that our Tribal programs are funded and run smoothly.”
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National Parks supporters also waved a warning flag.
“Today, approximately 1,000 National Park Service employees lost their jobs,” Phil Francis, former Superintendent of the Blue Ridge Parkway and chairman of the executive council of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said Friday. He called the action to fire probationary employees — those who have been hired within a year or so — “shortsighted.”
“We are losing the future leaders of the National Park Service,” he said.
Theresa Pierno, president and CEO for the National Parks Conservation Association agreed with the former superintendent, calling the widespread firing “reckless.”
The firings “could have serious public safety and health consequences,” she said in a statement Friday. “This isn’t how we treat the places we cherish or those who protect them.”
That the administration backed off its earlier hiring freeze on seasonal National Park workers brought limited relief. “These jobs should never have been in jeopardy,” Francis said.
Parks can fill some visitor services positions, Pierno said. But, she cautioned, the beginning of the visitor season is “just weeks away.”
Another Forest Service employee spoke of how the layoffs will ripple into Wyoming communities where federal workers buy homes, shop and enroll their children in schools.
“These people live and work in our communities,” the employee said.
Wyoming Workforce Services was not aware of federal employee dismissals, a spokesperson told WyoFile on Friday. The agency encourages “federal employees who may be affected by a layoff to contact their nearest Wyoming Workforce Center for assistance,” the spokesperson said. “These centers offer a range of individualized resources, including job search support and training opportunities. Our unemployment insurance website offers a portal for individuals to file unemployment insurance claims. Additional information can also be found on our website at dws.wyo.gov.”
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