More than a quarter of firefighting positions at the United States Forest Service (USFS) remain vacant, according to internal data reviewed by the Guardian, creating staffing shortages as extreme conditions fuel dozens of blazes across the US.
The data paints a dangerously different picture than the one offered by Tom Schultz, the chief of the USFS, who has repeatedly assured lawmakers and the public that the agency is fully prepared for the onslaught in fire activity expected through this year.
It’s already been busy. So far this year there have been more than 41,000 wildfires – nearly 31% higher than the 10-year average.
“In terms of firefighting capacity we are there,” Schultz said during a Senate committee hearing on 10 July, claiming the USFS had hit 99% of hiring goals. He repeated the claim multiple times.
But staffing reports produced on 17 July show more than 5,100 positions were unfilled, more than 26%. The problem was especially grim in the Pacific north-west, a region facing extremely high fire risk this year, with a vacancy rate of 39%. The Intermountain region, the largest region with close to 34 million acres of forest lands that stretch across parts of Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho and California, has nearly 37%.
The numbers also fail to capture the strain being felt in specific areas within these regions where ranks are severely thin. There are reports of USFS crews staffed with less than half of the positions once considered necessary to be fully operational.
Six federal firefighters, who asked for anonymity because they are barred from speaking publicly, described how the staffing shortages had complicated crews’ ability to suppress large fires and contribute to increased injuries and risks for firefighters on the ground.
“There is definitely a lot of tension in the system this season,” said a fire captain, describing how these issues have long plagued the agency. “It’s sort of like that medieval torture device that stretched people – just one more crank.”
Dangerous gaps in senior leadership
Many of the positions left unfilled are in middle management and leadership, leaving critical gaps in experience and tactical planning.
“The agency saying it is ‘fully staffed’ is dangerous,” a squad leader familiar with the data said. “Maxing out 19-year-olds with no qualifications isn’t the best strategy.”
Vacancies at higher levels create limitations on who can be deployed in the field. “We can’t send [a crew] without supervision because it is unsafe – if they don’t have a qualified supervisor that engine is parked,” said Bobbie Scopa, a retired firefighter who dedicated 45 years to the service.
The empty positions also add to fatigue for firefighters who are already working in extreme weather and spending weeks at a time on fire lines with little opportunity for rest and recovery. Without back-up, those at higher levels are less able to take badly needed time off. If they get sick or injured, there’s no one to take over.
“Folks are having to fill in and fill holes,” Scopa said, “and they are going out without all the positions they need for a team.”
The agency did not respond to requests for comment about the issues or questions about Schultz’s claims of full staffing. But one firefighter speculated the agency may be using hiring numbers that only show whether an offer was accepted, and not if that hiring created a vacancy in another area.
“If people that are already permanent take a different job it still counts as a hiring action,” he said. “But if the place they leave doesn’t get backfilled, it just means they moved someone, not that they added someone.”
Another firefighter said the agency might be exploiting the difference between “minimum” staffing requirements and what was traditionally considered “fully staffed”. “You can technically play a football game with 11 people on the team,” he said. “It would be considered negligent, maybe even abusive to the players, but they signed up to play and it’s technically allowed.”
A longstanding problem
The Forest Service has struggled to recruit and retain qualified firefighters in recent years, as escalating job hazards paired with low pay pushed scores of people out of the service.
The exodus has exacerbated the exhaustion felt by those who remained, creating a vicious cycle at a time when the climate crisis is fueling a new era of catastrophic fire. The USFS lost nearly half of its permanent employees between 2021 and 2024 alone, leaving the agency scrambling to fill positions with less experienced recruits.
The loss in experience took a toll on the workforce, several firefighters said, and the agency was left struggling to keep pace.
The issue has come into sharper focus as the Trump administration continues to slash budgets and cut support staff positions, creating a new layer of challenges and plummeting morale. Firefighters and forest experts expressed deep concerns that the drastic cuts and resignation incentives offered earlier this year, which culled thousands from the agency’s ranks, have left crews dangerously unprepared.
Roughly 4,800 USFS workers signed on to a program offering paid administrative leave through September if they opted to resign or retire, pushed by the Trump administration as a way to rapidly shrink the federal government.
While firefighters were exempt from the programs , they left significant gaps in a workforce that supports wildfire mitigation and suppression. That figure also includes 1,400 people with so-called “red cards” who trained to join operations on the fire line if needed.
The Department of Agriculture, which oversees the forest service, has tried to address the loss of employees with fire qualifications by calling for those with red cards who took early resignation or retiring offers to voluntarily return for the season and take on fire assignments until their contracts end. But when Senators questioned Schultz about the problem, he said the agency did not yet have numbers on if staffers decided to return.
“We depend on those people to help run the large fires,” Scopa said. “Teams are not fully functional right now because we have lost so many people.”
Firefighters have already been experiencing the effects of a reduced workforce firsthand. There have been reports of crews being left without power for weeks due to cut maintenance workers, paychecks being late or halved because administrative roles were left empty, or firefighters having to mow lawns or do plumbing work in addition to their other duties.
“I am hearing from firefighters who aren’t getting meals because they are having problems with the contracts for the caterers because we laid off people who worked in contracting,” Scopa said. “There was no efficiency in this – they just slashed it with an ax.”
And more cuts could be coming.
Schultz told lawmakers that the Trump administration’s plans to eliminate multiple programs in the agency along with “significant funding reductions in programs that remain”, with greater responsibility shifted to states, private landowners, and tribes to fund emergency preparedness, management, and response.
The administration is also proposing to consolidate federal firefighters into a new agency, housed under the Department of Interior – an idea that many federal firefighters support – but there are concerns that the process is being rushed and prioritized over managing emergency response during an intense summer.
“You all have trotted out another new reorganization in the middle of a very dangerous fire season,” said Ron Wyden, the Oregon senator, to Schultz during the committee meeting, warning that the lack of emergency preparation this year could cost lives. “These infernos are not your grandfather’s fires – they are bigger and they are hotter,” he said. “We need to address this critical preparedness gap.”
In Oregon, where region-wide staffing gaps are among the most acute, the governor declared a state of emergency last week to preposition resources for the threats expected from wildfire. Several blazes have already torn through the state this year, including the Cram fire, which had sprawled across more than 95,000 acres by Monday, making it the largest in the nation.
Firefighters were battling 83 large blazes nationwide on 21 July, roughly two-weeks after the country’s fire managers moved the country’s response to “Preparation Level 4”, the second-highest designation meant to show that resources are already heavily committed.
Despite his assurances to Congress that the USFS was ready for the intense fire activity, Schultz shifted tone in an internal memo sent to agency leadership last week, shared with the Guardian.
“As expected, the 2025 fire year is proving to be extremely challenging,” he wrote. Forecasts issued from the Climate Prediction Center and Predictive Services indicate the season is far from slowing. Higher than normal temperatures are predicted for much of the US through September, along with drier than normal conditions, creating high risks for big burns.
“We have reached a critical point in our national response efforts and we must make every resource available,” Schultz added. “At times like this we know the demand for resources outpaces their availability.”
Will Craft and Andrew Witherspoon contributed reporting
