As the worst snowpack in half a century kindles potential for a devastating wildfire season on Colorado’s 24 million federal acres, Colorado has lost more federal land management workers than any other state.
A new analysis of federal workforce data by two policy-watchdog groups — Prospect Partners and Hawk Eye Strategies, consulting firms made up of former government employees, including advisors in the Biden administration— shows that Colorado ranks at the top of states for public lands agency job cuts last year. Colorado lost 1,753 positions from agencies including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management amounting to a 26% loss in the public lands workforce in 2025.
The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts of nearly 300,000 federal jobs by the Department of Government Efficiency included 6,000 public lands jobs at 10 federal agencies in six Western states.
“We are heading into a summer of heightened risk with unprecedented low federal capacity,” said Bernie Kluger, a coauthor of the analysis with Prospect Partners and a former senior consultant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Biden administration, in a statement. “At a moment when federal agencies should be surging in capacity to protect Colorado communities from drought and fire, the Trump administration’s cuts instead eliminated the scientists who forecast the risk of these disasters.”
About 60 Forest Service jobs were cut from the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest, the busiest forest in the country with more than 8 million annual visitors who stir an economic impact of more than $1.6 billion in Colorado’s high country communities.
Scott Fitzwilliams supervised the White River National Forest for 15 years before resigning last year as visitation soared and he was forced to slash his workforce.
A year later he still can’t make any sense of the cuts.
“There was no rhyme or reason that I could see. They did not have any kind of strategic approach to the downsizing. If they tell you differently, they are lying,” he said in an interview with The Colorado Sun. “It just seemed random. When you think of the type of visitation we get and the needs of our forests, it’s just disheartening to think about how fewer people are out there doing this critical work.”
More than a third of those job losses in Colorado last year were newly hired or probationary employees on the frontlines of the agencies, including workers in visitor services, field operations and emergency operations. Another third of the job losses came from the reassignment of Interior Department staff from regional offices to the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
And now the Forest Service, as part of a “sweeping restructuring” will be moving its headquarters from D.C. to Salt Lake City in a move that will close all 10 of its regional offices across the country, including the Region 2 headquarters in Lakewood, where the Federal Center employs more than 6,000 workers in 28 federal agencies. The Forest Service also is consolidating all of its research centers into a single operation in Fort Collins.
“We need these foresters and oil and gas specialists on the ground here in Colorado,” Fitzwilliams said. “I really do worry about the work getting done. I’m not sure they have a plan. It’s like their war plan: ‘Let’s bomb these people and figure out what happens later.’”