Federal firefighters fought L.A.’s blazes. Then came resignation offers

Justin Brown had done a grueling stint at the perimeter of the Hughes fire, battling last week to keep the blaze from spilling into towns in northern Los Angeles County. He was still sore Tuesday when an email from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management arrived in his inbox, warning of upcoming cuts to the civil service and presenting an offer to resign from his job.

“It was a slap in the face,” Brown said.

The deferred resignation offer, sent without warning to most of the country’s federal workers, tries to induce employees to resign by the end of September or risk being cut in a sweeping downsizing of the federal workforce.

The offer incited confusion and alarm for civil servants of various stripes, but it cut particularly deep for federally employed wildland firefighters like Brown. Many were just beginning to recover after battling some of the most destructive fires in California history this month. Now, those firefighters who communities depend on to battle increasingly frequent extreme wildfires are questioning their jobs - and their futures.

Federal firefighting teams are already underpaid and suffering from attrition, firefighters and union leaders said. Shrinking those forces, they said, would hamper the country’s ability to respond to another life-threatening blaze as climate change causes fire seasons to lengthen.

“Getting that letter just took the morale out of the workforce,” said Matt Brossard, a representative of the National Federation of Federal Employees, a union that says it has more than 100,000 blue- and white-collar government workers as members. “The guys are already an underappreciated group of firefighters, and getting that email just took the rest of the wind out of their sales.”

In response to questions from the Washington Post, an Office of Personnel Management spokesperson said agencies may exempt certain roles from eligibility for the deferred resignation offer and the hiring freeze ordered by President Donald Trump this month. The spokesperson did not respond to questions about whether federal firefighters had been made exempt from the offer.

The Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, which employs federal firefighters with the National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management and Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to requests for comment.

The federal government employs around 20,000 seasonal and full-time wildland firefighters, said Steve Gutierrez, another representative of the National Federation of Federal Employees. Those firefighters perform fuel management - the thinning and controlled burning of vegetation to reduce wildfire risk - and add muscle to the massive, interagency response needed when extreme wildfires break out across the country. Their ranks include specialized and dangerous roles such as smoke jumpers, who parachute into hard-to-reach areas to tackle fires when they begin.

It’s unclear how many federally employed wildland firefighters joined the response to the blazes that swept through Los Angeles this month. Firefighters sent to the region said they worked in harrowing conditions amid strong winds and the destruction caused by the fires, which had burned down the homes of some colleagues.

“It’s never a fun thing for any of us,” said Brown, a wildland firefighter for 15 years.

A six-year wildland firefighter with the Forest Service, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional retaliation, said she spent two weeks responding to the Palisades Fire, combing the charred swaths of land to eliminate pockets of heat that could spark another blaze.

A few days after she returned, she got the deferred resignation offer.

“I do feel like it is disrespectful and kind of callous toward our workforce,” she said. “It’s like, where are the people that care about us and care about what we’re doing?”

Brown said the offer caused confusion in his office and among firefighters still in the field.

“It disrupted everything,” he said. “… You couldn’t not hear about it. It was all over the news. It was getting thrown (around) in text messages of like, ‘What does this mean? Should I take this and resign now? Is there something worse coming down the down the pipe?’”

Trump signed a slew of executive orders affecting the federal workforce in his first days in office and has vowed to reshape federal agencies he blamed for opposing his agenda in his first term. The resignation offer, which claims to allow most federal employees to resign and receive pay through September, escalated those efforts and surprised even some Trump advisers, the Post has reported.

The effort was led by billionaire Elon Musk, who has said downsizing federal agencies would enable the government to drastically reduce its spending and operate more efficiently. Experts told the Post that the offer could violate federal law and that the Office of Personnel Management does not have the authority to promise several months’ salary to federal employees, who are paid by their respective agencies. Those agencies are only funded through March.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) criticized the offer in a Senate speech Wednesday, warning any firefighters considering taking it: “Let me assure, this offer is too good to be true because there is no federal funding to pay people who do not show up to work.”

The National Federation of Federal Employees is also advising members not to take the offer.

Federal firefighters had already been advocating for higher pay amid complaints that their teams were understaffed and underfunded, union leaders said. Although former president Joe Biden boosted the minimum wage for those firefighters to $15 an hour and allocated temporary pay increases in his infrastructure bill, Gutierrez said those could vanish in March when Congress’s spending agreement expires.

The Forest Service firefighter who fought the Palisades Fire said she had no plans to accept the deferred resignation offer.

“Myself and a lot of other people have been considering or weighing options for a long time of like, ‘What would I do if I had to leave this workforce or this job?’” she said. “(The offer) kind of gets me a little bit more riled up in a way. It makes me want to dig in a little bit harder.”

Brown said he feared what would happen come the next wildfire if his colleagues choose to leave the civil service.

“What do you do once all the federal firefighters and all of the federal workforce is gone?” he said.

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Brianna Sacks contributed to this report.