The phone call came at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. Maureen had been with the Forest Service for twenty-five years, working her way up from seasonal firefighter and forest manager to district resource specialist, learning every trail and watershed in our corner of Idaho. Six months ago, she'd finally gotten the promotion she'd been working toward. The promotion came with a standard probationary period—routine paperwork, nothing more.
"Probationary employee," the email said. "Position eliminated, effective immediately."
Twenty-five years of service. Six months into a promotion. Fired for being probationary.
She wasn't alone. The U.S. Forest Service terminated 3,400 ‘probationary’ employees over the next couple of weeks as part of what they're calling government efficiency. A lot of them seasoned FS like Maureen. She knew the Frank Church Wilderness better than most people know their own backyards. Now there's no one left to monitor the fire danger in two million acres of the largest wilderness area in the lower forty-eight states.
But that's just the beginning of the math.
The initial bill puts 1.2 million acres of public land up for sale. Mining companies are already circling, their lawyers measuring mineral rights and water access. Logging operations are calculating board feet and transportation costs. But 1.2 million acres was never the real number—it was the opening bid. Over 250 million acres of public lands are slated for sale after the initial bill passes, including local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, and inventoried roadless areas. A reminder: these are federally managed lands, not owned. The public owns this land. We own this land. Yesterday, public outrage forced Senator Mike Lee of Utah to withdraw the provision. They say they will find another way to initiate the sale of the lands.
Portions of The Frank Church Wilderness—2.3 million acres of roadless backcountry, habitat for wolves and elk and mountain goats—are on the chopping block. So are the hunting and fishing areas that bring millions of dollars to our rural economy every year. The places where families have been camping for generations, where kids learn to fish and hike and understand what wildness means. Famous for its river floats. Hunting and tourism are the lifeblood of this community.
Do the math on what we're selling. Do the math on what we're losing.
Maureen used to track weather patterns that could spark wildfires, monitor snowpack levels that determine spring flooding, coordinate with the volunteer fire departments when lightning strikes started moving toward populated areas. Now when the next fire starts—and it will start, because fires don't check the federal budget—there will be one less person who knows the terrain, one less radio in the network, one less set of eyes watching for the smoke.
Rural hospitals are hemorrhaging money and may close within the year because of budget cuts. The nearest emergency room will be ninety miles away, assuming the roads stay open during fire season. And winter. NOAA, which provides the weather warnings that give us time to evacuate livestock and shut off propane tanks, faces massive budget cuts. The meteorologists who track the storms that could kill us are being shown the door along with the foresters who understand fire behavior.
Meanwhile, Medicaid cuts will leave families with no healthcare options and no way to afford the ninety-mile drive to the nearest doctor. The same week Maureen lost her job, three families in our valley lost their health coverage. A friend’s mother lost her Social Security. Rural America is being systematically stripped of every safety net while facing the most dangerous conditions in our history.
This is not fiscal responsibility. This is managed decline.
The mining companies bidding on the wilderness areas have already submitted environmental impact assessments that read like blueprints for devastation. Strip mines where there are now mountain meadows. Clearcuts where there are now old-growth forests. Contaminated streams where there are now pristine watersheds that feed the rivers people depend on for drinking water. Irrigation. Recreation.
The math is simple: sell off the land that sequesters carbon while eliminating the jobs of the people who monitor fire danger and weather patterns. Remove healthcare from the people who will need it most when the disasters hit. Auction off the wilderness areas that provide the last refuges for wildlife fleeing climate change while firing the biologists who track those populations.
It's a comprehensive plan for ecological and social collapse, itemized and invoiced.
They call it the One Big Beautiful Bill, as if beauty were measured in board feet and mineral extraction permits. As if progress meant turning roadless areas into strip mines and wilderness into clearcuts. As if efficiency meant firing the people who know how to keep the rest of us alive. The cuts will make the wealthy wealthier and the middle class poorer.
The people writing this legislation have never fought a wildfire or tracked a mountain lion or spent a night under stars unpolluted by city lights. They have never watched a forest burn or a river run dry or a hospital close. They are selling off places they have never seen to companies that will destroy them for resources that will be depleted within a generation. Because the One Big Beautiful Bill only benefits billionaires.
Maureen knows what will happen when the wilderness areas disappear. She's seen the aftermath of extraction: the poisoned streams, the clearcut slopes that slide into valleys during spring snowmelt, the wildlife populations that disappear when their habitat is destroyed. She's also seen what happens when there aren't enough people left to monitor fire danger, track weather patterns, coordinate emergency response.
"Do the math," she said when she called to tell me about her termination. "Twenty-five years of institutional knowledge, gone. Multiply that by 3,400. Then add 250 million acres of public land sold to the highest bidder. Tell me how that math works out for places like ours."
The math is simple. We are selling our future to pay for tax cuts today. We are auctioning off our children's inheritance to fund our own managed decline. We are firing the people who know how to keep us safe while creating conditions that will make safety impossible.
The Intermountain West wilderness has stood for millions of years. In a single legislative session, it will become a memory. The Forest Service employees who dedicated their careers to protecting these places will find other work or retire early or move to places where their expertise still matters.
The rest of us will stay and watch the mountains stripped bare, the rivers poisoned, the forests clearcut. And suburbs for the rich built. We will fight fires with older and smaller volunteer crews while the professionals who used to help us find new jobs in other states or other industries. We will drive ninety miles for medical care and hope the roads stay open. We will drink water that tastes like mining runoff and breathe air that smells like slash burns.
We will do this math in our bodies, in our bank accounts, in our diminished lives. The bill will come due in poisoned groundwater and unstable slopes and fires that burn hotter and longer because there's no one left who knows how to fight them.
This is the arithmetic of American self-destruction, and the numbers don't lie.
What those numbers mean in lived experience—in sheep dying of thirst and insurance companies fleeing and wells running dry—requires a different kind of accounting altogether.
I know, I am living through it.
Image ©2025 Gael MacLean
Sadly, those in power only cared about the math about how much that would line their pocket
This is heartbreaking. Friends who work in federal agencies are being moved to different agencies, sometimes requiring a physical move. Then, they still might be furloughed.
States that pride themselves on wide-open spaces will lose theirs. The people who complain about transplants from other states will see their worst fears realized as these lands are developed.
And they're focused on contradictory statements and promises not kept about... Epstein. 🤯