LOS ANGELES (KABC) — With fire season basically year-round in California, seasonal wildland firefighters are a necessity, but some say their jobs have been rescinded.
Jenn McCarthy has worked as a seasonal firefighter for the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management for the last five years.
“It’s one of those jobs where you really feel like you’re doing something,” McCarthy said. “Especially for me working for the federal service.”
McCarthy had accepted a seasonal wildland firefighter position in Alaska.
She was in the middle of the onboarding process when she found out the job she had been offered was rescinded.
“I’m trying to keep a level head, and it’s not really fathomable to me that you can get rid of your wildland firefighting workforce, especially given the fire season that we had this last year and certainly this winter,” McCarthy said.
Last month, a federal hiring freeze put into place by President Trump ordered no vacant federal civilian positions be filled or created.
The order does not apply to positions related to public safety.
However, thousands of seasonal firefighter positions like McCarthy’s are on hold.
“There’s a lot of fear. There’s fear for me too. Am I going to have a job? Do I need to look elsewhere?” she said.
California Sen. Adam Schiff is demanding federal seasonal firefighters be exempted from the hiring freeze.
“Our constituents and communities rely on the hard work and sacrifice of the more than 15,000 seasonal federal wildland firefighters each year,” Schiff said in a letter to the Office of Management and Budget and Department of Agriculture.
“In the face of increasingly destructive wildfires, we cannot afford to diminish the tools at our disposal to fight these fires,” he added.
In December, a U.S. Forest Service spokesperson confirmed retention issues, especially in middle management positions because of pay.
The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE,) the union that represents federal wildland firefighters, believes money and the hiring freeze may fuel possible firefighters to look for jobs elsewhere.
“We expect wildfires to get bigger. We expect communities to burn and people to lose their lives if wildland firefighters aren’t able to do their jobs,” Steven Gutierrez with the NFFE said.
McCarthy wants to get back to the job she loves.
She plans to wait a couple of weeks before weighing her options and other job opportunities.
“The lack of transparency in this decision is what the difficult part is because there are people that are just not going to return from this,” she said.
The U.S. Forest Service says their top priority is protecting the communities they serve.
They add wildland firefighting positions are considered public safety positions and they’re actively working with the Office of Personnel Management to fill them.
