Did you see the chiefs public service recognition week message?
As Public Service Recognition Week comes to a close, I want to personally thank each of you for continuing to perform the actual functions of this agency while leadership conducts an exciting live-action experiment in organizational collapse.
It remains the honor of a lifetime to lead an organization whose mission I was briefly introduced to during onboarding. Everywhere I go, I’m impressed by the professionalism, adaptability, and emotional restraint of employees who continue showing up despite receiving communications that read like they were generated by an HR chatbot trapped inside a McKinsey presentation.
When I meet with partners, stakeholders, and elected officials, they consistently express appreciation for your work managing forests, wildfire response, recreation, research, watersheds, and infrastructure. They also quietly ask whether anyone currently steering the agency has ever spent more than six consecutive minutes in a national forest.
As we continue our reorganization, I recognize many employees may be experiencing confusion, concern, or the subtle sensation of watching a beloved institution get sold for parts. Change is difficult. Especially the kind of change created by political appointees whose primary management experience involved forwarding emails marked “high importance.”
That’s why your participation in upcoming working groups is so important. These sessions will provide a valuable opportunity for employees to share insights, expertise, and carefully reasoned concerns that leadership can later ignore with greater efficiency.
I also want to thank those of you continuing to mentor younger employees while simultaneously training your own replacements, covering vacant positions, and pretending morale surveys still matter.
As we enter another busy fire season, please remember that safety remains our top priority, immediately after budget reductions, hiring freezes, travel restrictions, attrition, centralized decision-making, and whatever “operational streamlining” means this week.
And while many of you may feel exhausted watching decades of institutional knowledge leave the building, I encourage you to remain optimistic. According to several consultants earning the GDP of a small county, this is all part of a bold modernization effort designed to increase efficiency by removing most of the people who know how anything works.
Thank you again for your continued service to the American people. Your dedication, competence, and willingness to hold this place together with duct tape and suppressed rage has not gone unnoticed.
From the basement of some building in SLC or Idaho or another location undisclosed,
Chief TS
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