The New Yorker:

The Trump Administration has cut two thousand workers, making it harder for the service to fight wildfires and repair storm damage across the country.

By Peter Slevin

With $2.6 billion in hurricane-recovery money on its way to the national forests of North Carolina, Jenifer Bunty, a U.S. Forest Service disaster-recovery specialist, spent much of the week of February 10th working on a plan to start spending the money. Four months after Hurricane Helene, this meant deciding which bridges urgently needed to be rebuilt, which road repairs prioritized, and which trails in the Pisgah National Forest cleared first so that small towns dependent on visiting hikers and campers could get back to business. The most immediate need, Bunty and her colleagues knew, was manpower. They already had about forty unfilled positions and estimated that they needed another hundred to get the job done. To Bunty, the difficulty of spending the money with a limited staff was like “pushing a bowling ball through a cocktail straw.”

On Thursday, February 13th, Bunty and a few others from the Forest Service visited one of their most urgent projects, a section of Interstate 40 that had collapsed into the Pigeon River and remained closed to traffic. After they returned to the office, Bunty noticed that the leadership had stepped into a meeting. Soon, colleagues started getting phone calls. By the next morning, fourteen people who were involved in hurricane recovery had received word that they had been fired in the Trump Administration’s nationwide purge, including Mike Knoerr, the wildlife biologist responsible for the entire Pisgah National Forest, which sprawls more than five hundred thousand acres. His work was essential to insuring that recovery work would comply with federal law. “I came into work on Friday, ‘Am I fired?’ ” Bunty said. She wasn’t, not yet.

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