A Letter from a Retired US Forest Service Employee

I was planning on writing a different piece about how the media misleads us on breaking news to make it sound as dramatic as possible, so I’d dug into a few stories that were making news, like the cuts in the Park Service, Telehealth, and other things. I’d actually read about the probationary firings, but putting them in the piece would have added more paragraphs to an already long piece.

Lucky for us, a retired US Forest Service and National Park Service employee wrote to clear a few things up. Worth a read:

As a person who is retired from the U.S. Forest Service and at one time worked for the National Park Service I wanted to clarify some things that a lot of the public doesn't understand.

First, the National Park Service is under the Department of the Interior; the U.S. Forest Service is under Department of Agriculture. The person who wrote the tweet said her daughter worked for the Manistee National Forest; National Forests have nothing to do with National Parks and vice versa.

Second, the only way this person's daughter would have been let go was if she was on probation by being hired into a career position within the last 12 months. Every permanent federal employee must go through a probationary period of one year, during which that can be let go (fired) without cause. This has been standard in federal service for as long as I've been alive. I have confirmed with friends still in the Forest Service that only probationary employees have been let go.

Third, the order on firing all probationary employees excluded fire fighters, law enforcement, and seasonal workers...most of the work accomplished within forests and parks is done by seasonal employees, not permanent employees (these are usually supervisors and admin staff).

Lastly, the Department of the Interior (D.O.I.), and especially the National Park Service, is probably the single most woke department and agency in the federal government. The D.O.I. required employees to put their pronouns in their signature lines and bios (the Department of Agriculture did not). Meetings hosted by the Park Service always began with land acknowledgements (something, by the way, my Indian friends hate) and Park Sevice employees always introduce themselves with their pronouns. There really needs to be some sort of house-cleaning throughout the D.O.I. and Park Service in particular (and in the U.S.F.S. but at the higher administrative levels) in order to change the cultures.

A big reason why I retired early from my job managing a ranger district on a National Forest (which I loved) was because of the woke-ism that was trickling down and impeding our job. It was bad in the Forest Service but it is beyond belief in the National Park Service.

I am sympathetic. I, too, am allergic to woke-ism, and it never had to be this way or get this extreme.

I remember when Oprah Winfrey was enlisted to motivate more Black people to attend the National Parks because, apparently, everyone thought it was a “whites-only” activity. The funny thing is, they somehow believe that wokeness will attract them, as if they aren’t just as annoyed as the rest of us.

Thank you for the letter.