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Danielle Bauman-Epstein knew there was a good chance that she’d be fired, but when it actually happened it still hurt.

“Honestly, I’m just devastated,” she said in a recent phone interview. “I loved my job so much. It was really a dream job.”

A program specialist living and working at the Mad River Ranger District in Six Rivers National Forest, Bauman-Epstein said her job involved formalizing agreements between the U.S. Forest Service and outside organizations — nonprofits, tribes, universities, etc. — for projects ranging from climate change mitigation and wildfire reduction to workforce development, reforestation, tribal youth stewardship and more. 

“These agreements help disperse federal funds into local communities,” she explained.

She was a year and a half into her two-year probationary period with the U.S. Forest Service and had received nothing but exemplary performance reviews, but she still saw termination coming. 

About a month ago, while on vacation with her husband — who also works for USFS, as an archaeologist — Bauman-Epstein learned that the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) had asked her agency to turn over a list of all their probationary employees. 

Like tens of thousands of other federal workers fired in recent weeks, she got the official word via an impersonal form letter. Hers was signed by the USFS’s acting director for Human Resources Management in Washington, D.C. It said, in part, “The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest.”

She knew this wasn’t true. On top of her stellar performance reviews, she’d received five performance awards during her short tenure, and she got a promotion in August. She believes her recent termination violated the terms of her union contract and federal employment agreement.

She’s not alone in that belief. Earlier this week, unions representing federal employees filed a lawsuit to block the mass firings of probationary federal employees by President Donald Trump’s administration, alleging that officials are exploiting and misusing the probationary period and “acted unlawfully by directing federal agencies to use a standardized termination notice falsely claiming performance issues,” the Associated Press reported.

Last weekend, Elon Musk ordered federal workers to report their previous week’s work accomplishments in five bullet points and warned that failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. Bauman-Epstein is worried that her husband could be among the next wave of fired workers. 

“He is not probationary, but is ‘career conditional,’ being just two months away from the permanent status earned after three years,” she said in an email. “I have a medical condition that makes health insurance essential, and we’re very worried about both of us being out of jobs. Additionally, we live in Forest Service housing and may have to move out of our house if he is fired.”

But she said their concerns extend beyond themselves and their coworkers. They’re worried that the reduction in Forest Service employees will harm the local economy and increase the risks of wildfires.

Firefighting

“While it may appear that firefighters were not affected by this firing, many people who work in areas outside of fire support wildfire prevention and incident response,” she said. This includes employees who run fire camps, transport resources, manage incident organization and budgets, communicate with the public and more.

According to current and former federal workers interviewed for this story, the mass terminations will have significant local impacts.

“These are skilled individuals and members of our community, many of whom have pursued higher education or moved long distances for these jobs,” said one employee, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation. “None of the affected staff were primarily employed as wildland firefighters, however many hold specialized firefighting qualifications and play key roles in response to local wildfires,” they said.

Among those fired were at least 17 employees at Six Rivers National Forest; five at the South Operations Center of Redwood National and State Parks; three employees at the Arcata office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; the office manager at the Eureka Vet Center (a position that took two years to fill); and several employees at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office in Eureka.

Working Lands

The NCRS is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Among the local employees fired this month was wildlife biologist and soil conservationist Kate Howard, who a colleague described as “one of the most experienced and beloved range managers in the county.”

She’d been in her position for nine years but was under “probationary” status because, until two months ago, half of her salary was supplied by a conservation nonprofit via a contribution agreement with the federal government.

In a phone interview, Howard explained that her work involved helping ranchers on privately owned working lands by offering technical assistance and information on financial assistance available through the farm bill. 

“My job title was soil conservation but I was essentially the rangeland specialist in my office,” Howard said. She helped private landowners — beef ranchers, mostly — to understand their land’s grazing capacity and learn how to restore grassland and oak woodland habitat. 

“At the end of day I don’t know exactly will be lost, but I got calls from most of my clients saying they’re very sorry [to see me go] and [they said] I was very valuable to them.”

Like Bauman-Esptein, Howard saw the writing on the wall beforehand. She knew getting fired under a new presidential administration was a possibility when she switched over to full federal employment status (partially due to evaporating grant funding). And she actually believes in the value of reducing the size of federal government.

“Bureaucracy is the dirtiest word I know,” she said. 

However, she enjoyed her job and recognized that she was good at it. And she didn’t expect to be fired via a mass email with the subject line “Excepted Service Termination during Probation Template on Letterhead.” Nor did she expect the attached termination letter to say that her firing was due to poor performance. 

“I hadn’t had a performance review yet,” she pointed out.

Howard said one of her coworkers was also fired, just 10 days shy of finishing her year-long probationary period. Howard found her sudden termination devastating, and in a Facebook post she offered an analogy for the way these layoffs are being carried out:

“[I]t’s kind of like a complex math proof taking up a whole blackboard; you ask someone for the solution, and they proceed to simply erase the entire board and walk away.”

While she believes in reducing bureaucracy, she also recognizes the importance of her work she was doing — not just for her clients but for herself, too.

“I really enjoyed being in public service and took that seriously,” she said. “It was personally fulfilling work, and I’m very sad that I’ll have to do something else.”

Fisheries Management

As a biological science technician with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Aliah Guerrero monitored salmon populations in both the Trinity and Klamath rivers, conducting out-migration and spawning surveys, depending on the season.

The data she and her colleagues collected — along with data collected by local tribes and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife — informed the catch limits set each year by fisheries managers.

Guerrero worked for USFW for three years, though she left at one point to take a higher-paying job as a project manager, only to realize that she missed being in the field collecting data, working in public service with people she liked. She returned to the agency after a nine-month absence and was therefore relegated back to probationary status despite being more experienced than most of her coworkers.

On the morning of Friday, Feb. 14, the head of her office’s fisheries department came over to the group of cubicles where Guerrero worked. 

“He was crying,” she said. “I was not quite understanding what was happening. I had heard that in morning he and our office supervisor were crying with the news because it’s something that had never happened before. It was so confusing.”

At 10 that morning, the probationary employees were called in with their supervisors to a video conference with agency personnel in Washington D.C. Those officials informed the probationary workers that they were being fired, effective immediately. An emailed memorandum confirming the terminations read, “The Department has determined your knowledge, skills, and abilities do not meet the Department’s current needs.”

“It honestly took a really long time to sink in,” Guerrero said. “I was so thrown off and blindsided. I got upset that on the letter said it said I have no rights to appeal this. And the termination letter said it was based on poor performance, which I knew was untrue. … All these people [who were fired] had great performance reviews.”

Guerrero’s office has been impacted by other federal funding cuts, too. This time of year the technicians often travel upriver to Yreka to set screw traps, which are used to catch juvenile salmon for measurement before they’re released. Travel expenses such as hotel stays and car rentals are arranged through the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

Recently, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) put a $1 spending limit on most credit cards belonging to GSA employees and contractors, ostensibly to reduce costs and eliminate fraud. Guerrero said her former coworkers some federal employees had no advance notice of this credit freeze and only learned about it while out in the field after attempting to buy gas or rent a room, only to have their cards declined. Her former supervisors are now hesitant to send crews into the field knowing that the GSA cards might not go through. 

“It’s fine to make things more efficient,” Guerrero said, “but the way they’re going about it is crazy.” 

Other Programs

An anonymous employee with Six Rivers National Forest told the Outpost that in addition to hampering wildfire response efforts, this federal firing spree will affect numerous other programs locally, including:

• visitor Services (front desk staff)
• archeology
• timber management
• engineering
• recreation
• botany
• wildlife biology and
• geology

When we reached out directly to local offices of the various federal agencies operating in Humboldt County we were typically directed to media relations offices in Washington, D.C. For example, an inquiry sent to the USDA was directed to headquarters, where a spokesperson issued a statement saying U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government.”

The few local people who responded to emailed inquiries were unable to provide much in the way of details. 

However, the fired employees we interviewed reject the notion that their terminations will “improve government” or that they were fired due to poor performance.

“The one thing I want people to know is that all these people are wonderful people who work hard and want to do their job,” Guerrero said. “We weren’t getting paid that much — I was earning $23 an hour, [often working] in the rain, sometimes snow, in cold and hot weather — but they’re committed to doing the work. … It’s a big slap in the face to say our work is not important and that [firing us] will save the government a lot of money.”

The Trump administration this week moved forward with the next phase of overhauling the government, which will include “large-scale reductions in force,” according to an executive order issued earlier this month.