New firefighters set out in Lane County amid a federal workforce restructuring 

Blackened earth spewed around Ryan Negrete as he swung his pulaski into the ashes.  

His yellow Nomex shirt sleeves darkened with each blow in a slash pile from a timber operation near Sweet Home, where he and 200 others trained during the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Mid-Willamette Valley Interagency Wildland Fire School. 

Negrete is now stationed at the department’s Western Lane office in Veneta, on standby to protect people and property west of Interstate 5 in Lane County. 

While it’s his first season with the Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF), it’s his second season on the fire line. From southern California, Negrete’s introduction to wildland firefighting came last year in Los Angeles, when the explosive Palisades Fire sparked in early January 2025. 

He was working on projects for the California Conservation Corps that January, taking a break with his crew members when their captains told them to get on the bus. He watched from the windows as thousands drove on the freeway out of the city, evacuating.

“And us, going into it. That was crazy,” said Negrete, who was drawn to the job by a sense of public service, like his family members who served in the military. And while it was a job, it was hard to not feel something more. 

“It felt personal, just 40 miles away from where I was born,” he said. 

As with other historic fires — such as the “great” fires that swept Portland, Seattle and San Francisco in previous centuries —fallout from the Los Angeles fires is changing policy.

And that’s happening in an increasingly uncertain firefighting landscape, with changes mandated by the Trump administration coming at a time when the line between wildland and urban fires is quickly blurring.

It adds to uncertainty for this generation of wildlife firefighters, people like Negrete, who are training to fight extreme fires as climate change, population density and other factors make them increasingly intense.

Many are finding steady footing with firefighting jobs at the state level. But safety advocates within the profession say there’s real concern about federal firefighting readiness. And they say that adds another layer of risk for a place like Lane County, where nearly half the land is owned by the U.S. Forest Service. 

‘Trial by fire’ 

Thirteen days after the 2025 Los Angeles fires, President Donald Trump took his second oath of office. About a month later, an executive order directed agencies to make large-scale reductions in staff. At the U.S. Forest Service, nearly 20 percent of workers — about 5,860 people — were fired or they left, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.  

Nearly 500 Forest Service jobs were lost in the agency’s Region 6, which covers the Pacific Northwest, according to the offices of Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden.

Then came another executive order in June that read, “The devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires shocked the American people.”

It continued, “The Federal Government can empower State and local leaders by streamlining Federal wildfire capabilities to improve their effectiveness and promoting commonsense, technology-enabled local strategies for land management and wildfire response and mitigation.” 

The Department of the Interior also lost more than 7,500 of its staff, who took buyouts or early retirements. And in September, in response to the order, the department announced a new branch within it: the U.S. Wildland Fire Service.

The service, which started in January, “represents a historic modernization of federal wildfire management,” as the Department of the Interior describes. The service’s “about” page says it provides management on more than 500 millions acres and employs 5,780 fire personnel annually. 

It’s still unclear to elected leaders, such as Merkley and Wyden, how many — or if any — of those have been restored from the 2025 cuts, and how many will be seasonal versus year-round positions. It’s also unclear whether the new service is truly unifying resources or pulling them away from other agencies, like the U.S. Forest Service.

Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of the Eugene-based nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), and his organization have been tracking the new fire service since last year, offering policy analysis on what they view as a “deceptive downsizing” that could further strain systems both ecologically and operationally. 

Ingalsbee has heard from people in the new service who told him they were transferred from their home agency within the Department of the Interior, such as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, into the new wildfire service earlier this year without a say in it. 

The shift was anxiety-inducing, said Ingalsbee, because changes came quickly in the spring leading up to the wildfire season with more questions than answers.   

“Folks weren’t sure what their job or duty station would be. Who’s their supervisors and chain of command, and it just was all uncertain,” he said. 

This wildfire season, units are understaffed, according to Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, an advocacy nonprofit that surveyed nearly 800 federal fire personnel this year. The survey found understaffed units for both extended attack — including monitoring fire behavior and weather days after an incident starts — and mitigation work, actions that reduce risk to people and property. It adds another layer of risk for communities and firefighters alike, according to the nonprofit. 

“They (federal government) just can’t staff these incident management teams anymore. They’re the ones who kind of run more extended attacks, complex fire, suppression operations,” Inglasbee said. “Some people may have been bumped up into various leadership positions ahead of maybe their comfort zone, their experience, and their knowledge, and you know they are going to be trial by fire.” 

That worries Ingalsbee, a former U.S. Forest Service firefighter who saw the rise of megafires firsthand in 1987, shovel in hand, as the Silver Fire tore through 100,000 acres of the Siskiyou National Forest — the same year scientists began sounding alarms about climate change.

He took the job to pay for college, something firefighters still do today. 

Staying local 

Cassandra Brooks joined a firefighting contracting crew to pay for art school. 

“After my first fire, I was like ‘forget that,’ and I just fell in love with it,” said Brooks, whose first fire was the Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak Fire — the largest and most destructive wildfire in the history of New Mexico.

Five years later, she’s still at it, now with ODF’s West District Office in Philomath. 

Firefighters generally choose state jobs over federal ones for better pay and benefits, according to groups like FUSEE and Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. For Brooks, a state job meant assignments closer to home, where she paints in her downtime.

One of her pieces, “Girl on Fire,” now hangs at the LaSells Stewart Center at Oregon State University. 

She’s been moving up the ranks, now training as a crew boss in Sweet Home — the person in charge on the line, overseeing the crew. She kept a watchful eye as her crew dug line down to bare mineral soil and dragged hoses downhill from a water engine. 

Then they dry-mopped the ground — that’s when “they’re kind of chopping up stuff almost like a salad,” she said.

Among her crew was Josue Gomez, in his second year fighting fire and his first with ODF.

He was peer-nominated to be a squad leader reporting to Brooks. It’s experience that he’s taken back to Western Lane, where he works with Negrete and 56 others.

They are facing a fire season expected to last into October. Kacey KC, ODF’s new director, said she’s in close contact with her federal counterparts, talking with the U.S. Forest Service’s regional director at least weekly to coordinate between state and federal crews. 

Statewide, ODF has 792 positions in its fire protection program — more than half of them seasonal, offering young firefighters like Negrete and Gomez a starting point that can lead to full-time work with the agency, or at competitive agencies like Cal Fire. 

And they’re taking it one swing at a time. 

“I’m not going to be a leader automatically,” Negrete said. “But I’m going to keep chipping away at it.”