The Forest Service Claims It’s Fully Staffed for a Worsening Fire Season. Data Shows Thousands of Unfilled Jobs.

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Originally published at: The Forest Service Claims It’s Fully Staffed for a Worsening Fire Season. Data Shows Thousands of Unfilled Jobs. - TPM – Talking Points Memo

This article first appeared at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. Despite the Trump administration’s public pronouncements that it has hired enough wildland firefighters, documents obtained by ProPublica show a high vacancy rate, as well as internal concern among top officials as…

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  1. Deny climate change. Deny big business’ responsibility for climate change.
  2. Impede, sabotage, and repeal policies designed to slow/reverse climate change.
  3. Hollow out agencies responsible for responding to climate change and its effects. Employ enough transphobia, misogyny, and racism to drown out any solidarity for the sacked workers.
  4. Let people die. Tell people it’s the Dems’ fault, it’s too late to stop climate change, and immigrants stole the good jobs they used to have.
  5. Retreat to your private compound and watch the flames draw nearer with every fire season. Complain to your peers at the country club that getting insurance coverage is nearly impossible.
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Here’s how we KNOW they are lying:

They haven’t hired anybody to rake the forests, and they promised that was coming next….

Also, Otto the Orange is in the Epstein files!

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No mention is made as to whether or not the Forest service is taking into account the rakers hired by Trump to lessen the danger of the fires. I am pretty sure that TRUMP has things well under control. Trump let in 10000s of Finns for tourism on the condition that they each spend 3 days raking in CA Forests.

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Let’s begin with the premise that any “public pronouncements” from this administration* are lies, half-truths, and made-up shit. Now then…

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Elon Musk wants to terraform Mars. I suggest that we start with Earth.

Unless we reverse the trends, we are going to become something like Mars, at least for the human species.

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It’s well-known that fires only happen in blue states so Trump is fine with this.

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Donnie, his family, his supporters, his enablers, all MAGAts, the members of his administration, are all compulsive, unrepentant liars.

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There is no logical reason to take at face value anything this administration says.

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As any Californian understands, fires don’t give a damn about the empty statements of corrupt officials. Anyone who has ever been in one of these fires knows full well how incredibly damaging they cam be, even when the government isn’t hamstrung in fighting them. It requires a lot more than some poor guy with a garden hose spraying his lawn in Pacific Palisades to fight one of these fires.

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Last week, Tom Schultz, the chief of the Forest Service, circulated a letter to high-ranking officials in the agency that underscored the dire moment. “As expected, the 2025 Fire Year is proving to be extremely challenging,” wrote Schultz in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by ProPublica. “We know the demand for resources outpaces their availability.”

You know you’re in trouble when the call sign of the nearest available strike team is POTEMKIN ONE.

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As Dean Martin used to say: nobody wants to talk about the good things the Mafia is doing. Or to put it another way, Trump’s people will simply declare wildfires a good thing. ‘Purification by fire’, something like that.

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A friend told me of a conversation she had with a FS employee cleaning bathrooms. He left a note apologizing for the fact they weren’t cleaned often enough. His real job is as a firefighter.

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We all know the Trumpers are lying. You can’t slash funding and hiring and yet somehow magically stay fully functioning. A family friend who has worked on fire crews throughout the West for several years, and had an offer to join one the park services before its budget was slashed by Trump/Musk, said that unless disaster funding is dramatically increased, the West and South, in particular, are — to quote verbatim — “absolutely fucked,”

And he’s not even talking about post-disaster relief — he’s talking about actually tackling the disasters themselves: fire-fighting, search and rescue, etc.

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Last year, California hired 700 new firefighters, 60% of them were from the Forest Service. This year will probably reflect the same kind of numbers.

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