ESTES PARK, Colo. — During a press conference in Estes Park on Wednesday, Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper and Congressman Joe Neguse called out the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) downsizing efforts, saying personnel layoffs could "hamstring" firefighting efforts in Colorado's national parks and public lands.
"I think those lands are under siege between what DOGE has done, the firings. If you add the people on the Forest Service, National Parks, and basically take the Department of the Interior and all the different components of the people that take care of our forests and our national parks, you're talking over 6,000 people have been either fired or have left their jobs, have been pushed out of their jobs," Hickenlooper said.
- Watch the full press conference in the video player below
According to an estimate by Hickenlooper's office, 6,000 people within the U.S. Firestorm Service and the Department of Interior were fired by DOGE. However, due to a federal court order, many employees on a probationary period were rehired while others chose to take buyouts, according to staff.
Still, the senator and congressman said Wednesday they're concerned about how remaining vacancies could impact firefighting efforts as Colorado enters its peak wildfire time.
"We're going to see more risk this summer and this spring from wildfires, from extreme weather," Hickenlooper said. "We're going to see more risk than we've seen before in all manner of aspects of the droughts we've had and the water we have to use at a time when we're dramatically diminishing the number of firefighters we're going to have available to fight fires in the West."
Congressman Neguse echoed that sentiment.
"The cuts that have been made thus far are reckless," he said. "They are short-sighted, and they do not put safety first, and one can think of no better example, in my view, than just a few short years ago."
Neguse referenced the firefighting efforts that went on for weeks during the Cameron Peak and East Troublesome wildfires in 2020. The two fires are among the three largest in Colorado's history, burning hundreds of thousands of acres.
It's a time former Rocky Mountain National Park Superintendent Darla Sidles remembers clearly.
"It was an interesting intersection of the Cameron Peak Fire and the East Troublesome Fire that came from the west side," Sidles said. "As a national park superintendent with some fire history and experience, I was the agency administrator. That's the title that they give to the person who is responsible for everything that happens within the park, but for the incident command team."
Sidles has since retired, but told Denver7 she worked closely with the incident command teams deployed for the fires, and she worries about what those teams could look like after federal government cuts.
"A lot of these folks that work for the incident command teams, they have regular federal government jobs," Sidles said. "They may be a budget person in a park, they may be a wildlife biologist, they may be a superintendent, and a lot of the folks that have been taking the early outs are no longer going to be on those teams. If those teams are shortchanged, that's a lot of very difficult experience to come by. Those people have had a lot of experience, a lot of training. They had worked a lot of fires and other natural disasters as well. If they've taken these early outs, then they're no longer going to be available for these teams. So, those teams will have a market gap in their expertise and just the numbers to be able to respond to wildfires and other natural disasters across the nation."
"They're absolutely critical," Sidles added. "If you don't have the teams, you don't have the expertise to understand what's going on climatologically with the fires, how fast they're moving, where they're going."
Sidles told Denver7 it's these exact concerns she carries heavily.
"You can't do without them," she said. "That was the thing that kept me up at night when I did work here at Rocky and in my other jobs, as well. I would still continue to worry about that, no matter where I live, that there will be the staff that's available to respond to those fires."
Tracy Coppola, the Colorado senior program manager with the National Park Conservation Association, said an estimated 2,500 staff members with the National Park Service nationwide were either laid off in the DOGE cuts or took buyouts. That amounts to roughly 13% of NPS staff, according to Coppola.
"That could be a very conservative estimate," Coppola said. "We don't know how many probationary people are back, so that is a hard number to even quantify. People are leaving. People are feeling like they're getting forced out, taking early retirement every day."
Denver7 reached out to Congresswoman Lauren Boebert and Congressman Gabe Evans' offices for comment on the federal government workforce cuts, but didn't hear back from either as of the posting of this story.
Back in February, Denver7 reached out to Congresswoman Boebert on the matter. In a statement, she said, "President Trump campaigned on cutting the size of the government and he is following through on that promise. With $36 trillion in debt hanging around the necks of our children, we need to make tough decisions about our federal workforce as we simply cannot afford business as usual anymore."
