That was 2021, Kapa’s first year working on a trail crew for the U.S. Forest Service. They’d worked on other crews for years before that. Kapa’s “position description,” or job title in the Forest Service, has never been that of a firefighter. But they hold a “red card,” meaning they are certified to fight wildfires, even though it’s not their primary job.

Amid the mass firing in February of about 3,400 Forest Service workers nationwide, plus a shift in recent years away from temporary seasonal workers in favor of permanent positions, Kapa is among the legions of longtime federal employees suddenly without a job going into the 2025 trail work and fire seasons.

The administration of President Donald Trump carried out the mass firings through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an entity that is not actually a congressionally created government department, but rather a White House office run by Elon Musk, a billionaire immigrant from South Africa and the world’s wealthiest person.

Administration officials and other supporters of the cuts — made ostensibly in the name of reducing costs and eliminating unnecessary programs and workers — have claimed that wildland firefighters were not fired.

It’s true that Forest Service workers whose primary job is being firefighters were spared. But that doesn’t take into account the thousands of others whose primary jobs are not as firefighters but who step up every fire season to fight wildfires alongside primary firefighters.

The cuts affected probationary workers: people who were new to their job positions and therefore still in a one-year probationary period, or two years for some jobs. But the workers weren’t all new. Many longtime agency employees who had recently moved to new jobs or were promoted, and thus in a probationary period for their new position, were fired.

A 20% firefighting boost in Montana and U.S., erased overnight

In 2024, the Forest Service employed 11,457 primary firefighters during the peak of fire season, according to agency data. The estimated 2,550 red-carded workers, who could also be called upon to fight fire, constituted about a 20% increase in the agency’s firefighting capacity.

That holds true in Montana. The Forest Service’s Region 1, headquartered in Missoula, includes national forests in the north Idaho Panhandle and all of Montana, and some grasslands in the Dakotas.

Union officials estimated that 360 Forest Service workers were fired in Region 1 during the Feb. 14 DOGE cuts. If 75% of them held red cards, that’s 270 people who would have been available to put their day jobs on hold and go fight wildfires.

There were 1,476 primary firefighters in Region 1 last year. That means the DOGE firings could constitute the loss of what normally would be an 18% boost to the region’s firefighting workforce when needed.

Seemingly no forest in the state was untouched. Terri Anderson, the top labor union official representing employees in Region 1, gathered tallies of fired workers by forest in Montana last month in response to a request from the Missoulian. She counted 60 on the Kootenai, 50 on the Lolo, at least 40 on the Flathead, 40 on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge, 30 on the Bitterroot and 38 on the Helena-Lewis & Clark.

Workers on the Custer-Gallatin aren’t under a collective bargaining agreement, so Anderson didn’t have their numbers, but a Feb. 27 letter from the Custer-Gallatin Working Group to Montana’s congressional delegation stated 36 workers were fired.

Anderson said workers were also fired from the Region 1 headquarters office in Missoula.

Overall, the firings meant each forest potentially lost dozens of firefighters without notice.

National-level press officials have steadfastly refused to answer questions from Lee Enterprises about the number of firings.

Lee Newspapers submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for public records to the Forest Service’s Region 1 headquarters in Missoula, requesting the number of people fired at each national forest in Montana during the mass firings, and what jobs they held. The inquiry was directed to the Forest Service’s National Press Desk, which, in an unsigned email, refused to answer questions.

‘They fight fire for you’

Tracy Stone-Manning, a longtime Missoula resident who was director of the federal Bureau of Land Management under former President Joe Biden, and who is now president of The Wilderness Society, addressed the loss of firefighting capacity in her remarks at the Hands Off Our Public Lands Rally in Missoula on Sunday.

“Those folks in charge, they say, you know, we’re not firing firefighters. But you know what? They are,” she said. “Because you know who firefighters are besides the ones that don’t have ‘firefighter’ in their job title? Archaeologists, engineers, biologists, executive assistants — these folks carry something called a red card. That red card means that they’re trained to fight fire. And when the fires are really hitting it at peak season, what do they do? They go drop everything that they do in their day job and they fight fire for you, to keep your and our communities safe. That is what service is.”

It’s a dynamic Kapa, now 27, knows well. After conducting initial attack on the lightning-caused fire above Quinn’s in 2021, working alongside a handful of smokejumpers who parachuted in, “We spent two weeks, the 14 days from that day, between that fire and I think we tackled a couple others.”

“After that, once we had a fire camp setup in Plains,” Kapa said, “I served in truck logistics for a 14-day roll, doing deliveries and support from fire camp to the national crews that were deployed in the district.”

Each of the past four summers, Kapa and the trail crews they were on spent weeks fighting wildfires — first on the Lolo, and more recently on the Bitterroot National Forest out of the West Fork Ranger District.

“We’ve been out on IAs (initial attacks), I’ve helped with wrapping historic buildings and guarding those with engines, doing road (closure) guards on the Magruder Corridor and protecting structures,” they recounted. “We logged out burnt trees that were falling onto the road daily, and eventually did a back-burn from some historic structures and thinned out some hazard trees that were around there as well.”

‘There’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes’

Red-carded Forest Service workers who aren’t primarily firefighters do much more than the work traditionally associated with firefighting, particularly on large, complex incidents. While crews of primary firefighters may handle the bulk of direct and indirect work like constructing containment lines, laying water hoses and thinning vegetation, many people are needed to handle everything from heavy equipment operation and supply distribution to vehicle fleet maintenance and accounting — and they all likely have other, non-fire primary jobs.

“What people don’t realize ... in order for me and my crew to operate, there’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes,” said a longtime senior operations official in the Forest Service who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation for discussing the impact of the mass firings. “There’s all these things that we’re scratching our head about, saying, how are we going to do this without these people?”

The “fire militia” is sometimes the term within the agency of red-carded workers who drop their normal jobs to work fires.

Generally, they said, it’s “a person who’s got a little bit of fire experience and understands how not to get burned up or killed ... there’s a ton of those people, and a lot of those guys also got removed.”

One example, the official said, was an archaeologist who, during fire season, operated unmanned aerial systems — drones — that performed reconnaissance and remote-ignition flights on wildfires. Technological advancements like that, the official said, allow for quicker, more effective and safer initial attack and ongoing firefighting — but they’re only possible if people like that archaeologist also hold a red card and train for a specialized role in firefighting.

The archeologist was fired Feb. 14.

The firings have reduced the Forest Service’s advancements in firefighting tactics, the official said, meaning that while ever-larger and faster-spreading fires become the norm in the West, the agency’s ability to fight them has regressed.

The official worried that the firings — even just loss of sheer staff numbers, regardless of specialty — would make it harder for remaining firefighters to catch and contain new fire starts while they’re still small.

“Sometimes it makes the difference between catching something before it gets so big … every fire has a moment that it’s fairly manageable, and it might be a grind but you’re going to be able to shut it down before it’s this massive time (and) resource black hole,” the official said. “And then they hit a tipping point. And when it hits that tipping point, it goes from being manageable and being something we can deal with to being this juggernaut that we’re going to be living with until it snows.”

Kapa noted that having more local resources who can drop everything and perform initial attack “helps keep so many small fires from blowing up and merging together.” Red-carded workers, they noted, also help the agency shuffle resources nationally during especially difficult fire seasons by staying on their home forest while primary fire crews decamp to other forests or regions where they’re needed on large incidents.

“So many actual fire crews travel across the country to help support when fires blow up and need additional support. It’s just the volume of people that support large complex fires, there’s definitely going to be that dwindling and gone,” Kapa said. “Some places, depending on how crews are run, maybe sometimes trail crews can’t go and do IA for some reason, but they have served in various positions at these massive fire camps. And that’s all going to be lacking, in addition to the fact that sometimes you just need more bodies,” because people are shuffling around regionally and nationally. “There’s just going to be so many less numbers to travel around to help tackle fires and get the IA done before we have these massive fires.”

‘Everyone in the Forest Service was helping’

Shelby Nall, 33, worked trail crew for the Forest Service and held a red card starting in 2018, save for one year working for Montana Conservation Corps as a trail crew leader. During her first season, when she worked in Alaska, most of her fellow trail workers, except her small three-person crew, were sent to the Lower 48 to fight fires — even her own crew’s leader went.

“So many people who weren’t fire were getting pulled,” she recalled. “Everyone was gone.”

The next year, 2019, she was working on a trail crew out of Philipsburg when a wildfire ignited near Butte.

“We were out on a day trip doing log work and they radioed my boss” to assemble more fire crews, she said. He “immediately brought in a four-wheeler and brought me out,” and that afternoon she was on the fire, where she would remain for a week performing fuels reduction and other structure protection work.

In 2022, Nall was sent to the Salmon-Challis National Forest to enforce road closures around the massive and explosively growing Moose fire on the Salmon River west of North Fork.

“That fire was honestly so huge that everyone in the Forest Service was helping with it,” she recalled.

Even if the Forest Service retains some capacity for initial attack and other core wildland firefighting functions, Nall said, public safety could be at risk if the agency lacks the personnel for things like road closures.

“I feel like on paper it seems like maybe they’ll have enough people to do initial-attack type stuff,” she said, “but not all the other stuff.”

On Sunday, Stone-Manning packaged the potential danger from reduced firefighting capacity as a call to action: “When the fires start this summer and you’re not protected, you need to get in touch with your elected leaders and let them know how mad you are.”