Liz Crandall and Isabella Isaksen, former U.S. Forest Service employees from Bend, traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier this week to attend President Trump’s address at a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night.
Crandall went as a guest of Rep. Janelle Bynum (OR-5) and Isaksen was there at the invitation of U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon). Each woman said they attended the speech in the hopes that Trump would explain how their firings from Deschutes National Forest and Ochoco National Forest, respectively, benefit Americans. They served as stand-ins for the thousands of Forest Service employees who were fired in the “Valentine’s Day Massacre” on Feb. 14.
In February, over a dozen employees from the Deschutes National Forest were terminated, according to Rep. Bynum’s office, and over two dozen at Ochoco National Forest, according to Isaksen’s estimates. The cuts for the Ochoco National Forest amount to a roughly 30% reduction in staff, Isaksen said.
Sitting just a short way down from Elon Musk, the billionaire and special government employee credited with leading the ongoing federal cuts at the Department of Government Efficiency, Crandall said the night felt surreal.
“The whole experience was extremely overwhelming, especially for someone like me and many others who were there and who were just unlawfully terminated,” she said.
Crandall, Isaksen and other fired employees assert that their terminations were an illegal overreach by the administration and done without cause. A federal judge in San Francisco ruled last week in agreement with plaintiffs in a case brought by civic organizations on behalf of employees fired from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the National Park Service, the Small Business Administration, the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Defense and the Fish and Wildlife Service, according to reporting from NPR.
“The head of DOGE, Elon Musk, is sitting, like, spitting distance away from me, and then they’re cheering these people on for the really socially unacceptable things that they’ve been doing,” Crandall said. “And I’m just sitting there, like, is this real? Is this real life?”
Isaksen, a former U.S. Olympian, Army veteran and wildland firefighter, said she was also disappointed at what she saw as a lack of care and empathy for herself and other public servants who were suddenly fired last month — and for the work they undertook.
“The effect [of the mass firings] is beyond my personal experience, my personal life or my former colleagues,” Isaksen said. “The effects will be felt throughout our communities. They’re going to be felt across our nation. Because these individuals are not waste. They had integral roles in their communities.”
Following Trump’s address, Merkley held a live-stream town hall where he responded to the President’s remarks.
“I must say we are in an extraordinary moment in American history,” Merkley said. “This is probably the first State of the Union that has been delivered by an authoritarian president who is gleefully breaking the laws of the United States and violating the Constitution that he took an oath to just weeks ago.”
In public statements leading up to the night, Merkley has called the terminations illegal and dangerous. And, on Wednesday evening, he hosted a joint roundtable with U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) and Angus S. King Jr. (I-Maine) where they spoke about the concerns and invited other recently fired employees an opportunity to tell their stories.
Bailey Langley, who worked in the Blue Mountains in Oregon for USFS, said that she worries about how the firings will hurt rural communities like her own in eastern Oregon.
“In rural towns where Forest Service offices are are one of the largest employers who provide solid benefits and pay. It will, and it has had, detrimental consequences,” Langley said. “I can think of Ukiah, Oregon, where the population is 200, if even. And John Day, where the timber mills have, and are, continuing to shut down and then all of a sudden, another employer is gone. How will these rural communities survive?”
Heinrich, who serves as ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, called the cuts “step two” of the administration’s larger plans to offload public lands.
“This isn’t careless, it’s intentional,” Heinrich said. “The architects of the public land transfer effort rebranded under Project 2025 want to be able to say that our public lands are going unmanaged so that they can justify step three: transferring our birthright to the states. And ask yourself this: Does Wyoming have the budget to fight large wildfires? Does Alaska? Does Utah? No, they don’t. If they’re successful in transferring public lands to the states, most of those lands will be sold off to private interests, just like the states did with millions of acres of their state trust lands.”
Meanwhile, Isaksen and Crandall said they hope that support from state officials and the public, along with adjudication in the courts, will lead to them being reinstated.
“I truly loved my job, and a part of me is hopeful that this will make its way through our court systems, and justice will be done,” Isaksen said. “I truly want to believe that.”
This article appears in The Source Weekly March 6, 2025.
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Deny climate change. Fine. It doesn’t exist. It’s just the naturally occurring oscillation of our climate. Getting rid of our fire fighters?! Just admit it. Our current red tie wearing administration just can’t wait for all the blue states out West to burn to the ground.
Yes, it’s real. Stop deluding yourself. It isn’t the job of the federal government to prop up local economies. Obviously. Come up with better excuses.
And as far as transferring “public lands”, to the states. First, those lands will still be “public”. Obviously. The intentional use of misleading language sums up the validity of the argument. And second, no one even pretends they can explain why the federal government owns most of the west. Someone please explain why the federal government owns 80% of Nevada?? Why is that necessary??
Where was the outrage when the spotted owl debacle shut down hundreds of mills throughout the west. It was people like her the did it. Now she’s whining when the shoe is on the other foot. I have no sympathy whatsoever. I would like to know what s Forrest service firefighter does all winter. For any one else the job would be seasonal at best.
All of these woke leftists who skipped math class to instead smoke and pierce would be better served with a remedial accounting brush up on YouTube.
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No one wants to lose their job but the point that so many people are missing is that if we do not control our national debt we won’t have a country and then there will be no Forest Servive, BLM, dept of Interior….nothing. It’s no different than personal bankruptcy. If we overspend on our personal account there is ALWAYS a day of reckoning. The question has always been where do we cut back, no matter where it is someone always gets hurt. OR we can do like Biden did and just print more money but that only makes the fall even higher when the time comes.
“And I’m just sitting there, like, is this real? Is this real life?”… Well, yes! Basically it is a possibility for everyone and has and will happen multiple times to everyone!
It’s not nice to loose your job, but at the same time seen all this people upset about being terminated shows that they took their job as granted and as a permanent thing, and being honest we all know that when people believes that nothing can go wrong at work they tend to “take it easy” and not give 110% at work, we all have done it at one point or other! And DOGE is becoming a wakeup call for government employees that have fallen on that mentality.