In mid-February, roughly a month after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration into office, thousands of United States Department of Agriculture employees were terminated via email.
Many of those affected worked for the U.S. Forest Service and National Parks Service. Amid a slew of ensuing protests, lawsuits and general public outcry, it is clear public and protected land in the U.S. is under attack.
Exact accounts of how many were targeted by this sudden and unforgiving round of layoffs are unavailable, as the Trump Administration has declined to provide that information. Estimates for the USFS range up to 3,500 firings, with some sources speculating these numbers will continue to grow as investigations develop, according to a press release from the National Federation of Federal Employees.
These firings were carried out in accordance with the new Department of Government Efficiency’s reported mission to downsize government employee bases. Thousands of government employees from crucial federal organizations across the board experienced similar blows, including the Department of Education, Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and many more.
According to an AP News report, the thousands of employees who lost their jobs under sweeping DOGE cuts were probationary workers with less than two years of experience in their positions. Without context, this information encourages people to believe these employees were young, uncommitted and expendable.
This rhetoric is extremely misleading. Employees are considered probationary both as new hires and after receiving promotions. Many of those fired had decades of experience under their belts. Even so, the length of time these positions were filled for and by whom is irrelevant; each served a necessary purpose in maintaining U.S. public lands.
The notice emails many employees received cited personal performance as grounds for their terminations. This reasoning is entirely disingenuous and a disgusting affront to the hard work and dedication of the people who received them.
In North Carolina, 17 USFS employees lost their jobs under Elon Musk’s heinous and compassionless direction. Several of them maintained Western North Carolina’s public forests and a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which sustained extensive damage during Hurricane Helene in late 2024.
The National Park Foundation’s website states 433 national parks and 150 related areas, or forests, make up the U.S.’s public land system. These natural areas account for over 85 million acres of land across all 50 states and are vital to preserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change, in addition to facilitating outdoor recreation activity.
The work USFS and NPS employees do to keep public land safe, accessible and protected for both human visitors and wildlife is invaluable.
Despite the president and Musk’s inflated perspectives of their own power, these large-scale layoffs have not gone unchallenged. Two federal judges found significant legal issues with the way the DOGE firings were conducted with one judge ordering that all government employees across eight organizations be rehired, as the terminations were unconstitutional and a “sham.”
This order includes the Department of Agriculture and is a hopeful indicator that perhaps not all U.S. government figures are either entirely spineless or the epitome of evil.
Despite this, rehiring efforts have yet to commence and pushback from the Trump Administration has already begun to surface. Whether or not the involved organizations are going to comply with the judge’s ruling is uncertain.
These terminations are just one alarming piece of a larger, more unsettling attitude the Trump administration has adopted toward environmental protection in the U.S. There is strong, ongoing evidence to suggest the Trump administration intends to destroy protected land for the financial benefit of oil and logging companies.
In a recent executive order, Trump demanded domestic logging in the U.S. expand to include 280 million acres of forested land. This stretch of land equates to about three times the size of the entire state of California and evades several laws and regulations intended to protect endangered species in the U.S.
Deforestation at this scale will have devastating ecological effects that will cascade throughout every part of the country, its infrastructure and beyond. It will mean the obliteration of vital environmental resources responsible for services like filtering pollution, mitigating the effects of increasingly destructive natural disasters and promoting biodiversity.
In addition to this order, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement in January— a move that threatens global cooperation on climate change mitigation. In accordance with his “drill, baby, drill” mission statement, he also declared a national energy emergency, allowing the government to potentially suspend environmental regulations to drill for oil on protected land.
This order states the Endangered Species Act cannot be an obstacle to energy development and allows for drilling in areas like the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge — an extremely fragile ecological system with little defense against accelerated industrial activity.
These instances are just a handful of recent federal efforts to roll back environmental regulation in the U.S. so far.
The importance of public land and environmental protection cannot afford to be politicized. Each and every person in this country, including U.S. politicians, benefit from the defense and management of environmental systems.
In the wake of the Trump administration’s atrocities, there is so much more at stake than employment rates and weekend hiking trips. Environmental crimes like those committed by the U.S. government in the past few months actively deplete the planet’s future, just for the profit of a handful of men.
The people of the U.S. must resist the government’s efforts to create division over likely the most universal issue that has ever existed. All of Earth’s people and ecosystems suffer when powerful nations like the U.S. sacrifice collective prosperity for financial greed. Public land belongs to the people and is not eligible for federal exploitation.
