Dayne Galash spent the summer of 2024 fighting Eastern Oregon forest fires with hand tools and hoses, driving engines through the smoke, one fire after another for months, sometimes 16 hours a day. And yet late in the afternoon Feb. 14, 2025, he got a call from a supervisor at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).
“I regret to inform you that you are being terminated for poor performance, effective immediately,” she read into the phone, Galash recalls. Then she followed that with this: “Everyone who’s worked with you on this forest knows that you’re the highest performing employee out there, that working alongside you is great, and that you’ve been a blessing with your time here so far.”
Four of his coworkers at Emigrant Creek Ranger District were fired the same week. They’re some of the thousands being fired at agencies across the federal government under the orders of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. At President Trump’s invitation, Musk and a hand-picked crew of temporary federal employees are engineering a mass purge of federal employees under the auspices of a newly announced “Department of Government Efficiency.” Public safety workers and firefighters are supposedly to be spared, but that’s not happening.
“Everyone at (USFS) is a firefighter in some capacity,” Galash tells the Labor Press. “When things go down, we all transition to assisting with the fire, whether it’s the person at the front desk driving water up somewhere, or people who are physically able on the front line.”
Galash’s actual job at USFS was as a botanist working to combat a highly flammable invasive plant called cheat grass. But like hundreds of other federal employees at the U.S. Forest Service and sister agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, he has a “red card,” meaning he’s trained and ready for fire duty when the time comes.
There’s no evidence any of them are being fired for poor performance. They’re being fired because having been on the job less than a year, they’re probationary employees, with fewer rights to appeal.
For Galash, getting the job took years of effort. After growing up in Portland and Bend, Galash worked as an arborist. He decided the U.S. Forest Service was where he wanted to be, and went to college to get the right degree, a bachelors of science from Oregon State University’s College of Forestry.
Galash reported for duty April 21, 2024, moving to Hines, a town of 1,500 in Harney County. He got active in the community, joining the Elks and delivering food to the needy at Christmas time. His firing came two months before the one-year mark.
Galash was represented by a union, the National Federation of Federal Employees, but like most other federal workers, he didn’t pay dues, something he now regrets.
Unions in the federal service are weak. Dues are voluntary and Congress never gave federal employees full collective bargaining rights. But now those unions are the backbone of the fight of a generation to defend the federal workforce.
It’s hard to exaggerate just how cavalier and clumsy Musk’s mass layoffs have been. The cuts are said to be about saving the government money. Yet they’re also taking place at agencies like the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which earn revenue for the government.
IBEW Local 125 business rep Kurk Shriver, who represents employees at the BPA, says four of his members who were in their probationary period were swept away in the purge. They’re electrical maintenance workers who work in energized yards maintaining the grid that distributes power from federal dams. Their termination came after two coworkers accepted the bizarre buyout offer, which arrived by email inviting workers to resign and collect wages through September. Shriver sys the six departed maintenance workers are half of a crew that maintains facilities across Oregon Washington Idaho and Montana. Not only that, but the government-wide hiring freeze meant BPA’s apprenticeship program has been cancelled. As many as two dozen workers were in that hiring pipeline. It’s like a looming storm, Shriver said.
“Their jobs are essential to the reliability of the Northwest,” Shriver told the Labor Press.
Charles Beeson is one of a group of probationary federal workers laid off from the BLM’s Coos Bay office. His job was to lay out the boundaries of parcels of federal timber being sold to private companies. In other words, he was a moneymaker for the government. Like Galash, he found it galling to be told his layoff was about performance.
“I moved across the country to take this job,” Beeson told the Labor Press. “And it’s not easy work. You’re going around some of the steepest terrain in the country, hacking through ferns with machetes to lay out the line so loggers know where to stop cutting.”
Fellow layout forester Cole Oakey says he drove four and a half days from North Carolina to Coos Bay to take the job, only to be fired five months later in the mass purge.
“All that talk about ‘We’re gonna unleash our natural resources.’” Beeson said. “You’d think they’d keep the folks that actually plan timber sales. Quite honestly, they fired the wrong people, the young people. It’s gonna scare a whole generation from public service.”
For now, union lawsuits may be fired workers’ main hope. On Feb. 27, a federal judge in California granted a temporary restraining order to stop further cuts, saying the termination of probationary federal employees was illegal because Office of Personnel Management had no authority to order it. The judge’s order covers 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.
