Born and raised in Colorado, Mikayla Moors — who was recently fired from her position in the U.S. Forest Service as part of mass layoffs by the Trump Administration — fell in love with the nation’s public lands during her childhood.

“I was born with hiking boots on my feet and a fishing pole in my hand,” said Moors, an avid hunter and angler. “Going outside was a family value when growing up.”

Growing up frequenting the outdoors “gave me this sense of respect for the land,” Moors said. As an adult, she found herself working seasonal jobs with the National Parks Service, including as a park ranger for the Rocky Mountain National Park, and dreamed of ultimately becoming a lead park ranger.

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Then, last May, Moors got what she described as a “foot-in-the-door permanent position” with the U.S. Forest Service as a forestry technician with the Region 2 Timber Strike Team. The job involved traveling throughout the Forest Service Region 2 — which is also known as the Rocky Mountain Region and includes Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and most of South Dakota and Wyoming — to assist “already understaffed” districts, she said.

“We completed the hard physical labor that is very time consuming,” Moors said. “These projects consisted of forest health management tasks like recording data in the field, being an extra set of eyes for sensitive species like goshawks, painting the boundaries of beetle-kill and diseased-tree sales to aid wildfire mitigation and local lumber production and assisting in forest regeneration surveys.”

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Last summer, Moors said she worked in Colorado’s White River National Forest — the most visited National Forest in the U.S. — assessing the health of aspen forests and marking diseased trees for removal by local lumber companies. She said she also worked in Wyoming near Meeker, Colorado, marking the boundaries of beetle-kill trees for salvage sales to lumber companies.

“There’s miles of dead, fallen trees, which is a huge hazard, especially with the big wildfire’s we’ve had in recent years. That’s why the Forest Service decided to start selling what they could,” Moors said. “We were there to paint the boundaries of the units for salvage sales, which is extremely physically exhausting. There were several points where me and my crews were scaling about 8-foot walls of trees just to get through the unit. My legs were beat up.”

Because the forestry technician job was a permanent position, rather than a seasonal position, Moors said it opened the door for her to apply to internal jobs in the federal government that are not listed to the general public.

Last fall, Moors applied for a position as an administrative support assistant for the Bureau of Land Management, hoping to further her career. She was offered the position, accepted it, completed a background check and began the training.

Then, on Jan. 21, the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Moors received an email, revoking the offer.

“To comply with the Executive Order Hiring Freeze signed on January 20, 2025 by President Donald Trump, the agency has decided to rescind your tentative offer of employment and non-select you for this position,” the email, shared with Summit Daily News, stated.

The sudden revocation threw a wrench in Moors’ plans. In addition to stymying her career prospects, she had already told her landlord that she was moving to take the job, and he had lined up another tenant to replace her. 

Luckily, Moors said she was able to keep her living situation and planned to remain in her position with the Forest Service. But less than a month later, the Trump Administration fired her from her forestry technician position, as mass layoffs of thousands of federal workers.

“I wholeheartedly believe in the land management agency missions because, for me, caring for the land and serving the people, there is nothing more important in my life,” Moors said. “I found a calling for public service. I just couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else. This is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

Trump Administration lays off tens of thousands of federal employees

On Feb. 11, Trump issued an executive order that the administration says aims to eliminate “waste, bloat, and insularity” from the federal government. The executive order instructed agency heads to work with the newly-established Department of Government Efficiency to reform the federal workforce to “maximize efficiency and productivity.”

Since then, tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired from their positions, including an estimated 3,400 employees of the U.S. Forest Service, about 1,000 at the National Parks Service and at least 800 Bureau of Land Management. Other federal departments and agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Small Business Administration have also seen mass layoffs.

At the Forest Service, the firings targeted probationary employees, which are most often employees in their first year of service but also has included long-serving employees that recently received promotions. Certain firefighting and public safety positions were spared from the cuts.

Colorado elected officials, including Gov. Jared Polis and U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper, have decried the layoffs at the Forest Service, raising concerns that the cuts could have impacts on the state’s economy and wildfire preparedness.

Summit Daily News reached out to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which includes the Forest Service, with questions about how many employees and what positions in Colorado and Region 2 were laid off, asking about the cost-benefit analysis that determined the layoffs were in the public interest and seeking a response to concerns about the impacts to the economy and wildfire preparedness.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson did not address those questions but instead provided a statement. Summit Daily also sent similar questions to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, but the federal office did not return the request for comment.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins “fully supports the President’s directive to improve government, eliminate inefficiencies, and strengthen USDA’s many services to the American people,” the statement said.

“We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of the American people’s hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar spent goes to serve the people, not the bureaucracy,” the statement said. “… Released employees were probationary in status, many of whom were compensated by temporary (Inflation Reduction Act) funding. It’s unfortunate that the Biden administration hired thousands of people with no plan in place to pay them long term. Secretary Rollins is committed to preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted.” 

Last week, over 1,000 Forest Service firefighters were approved, with more currently under review, according to the statement. The USDA spokesperson added, “Protecting the people and communities we serve, as well as the infrastructure, businesses, and resources they depend on to grow and thrive, remains a top priority for the USDA and the Forest Service.”

Trump Administration cites ‘performance’ in layoffs of U.S. Forest Service employees

Moors said she and four other members of the Region 2 Timber Strike Team received notice of their termination via an email Friday, Feb. 14. With the firings, she said the Timber Strike Team at its peak had just one crew lead and one forestry technician when she left.

At an all-employee meeting of Region 2 that day held that day via Microsoft Teams, Moors said that there were “a lot of questions, but not a lot of answers.” People were concerned for their jobs, and many supervisors were visibly upset, she said.

“It was demoralizing — that was the atmosphere,” Moors said. “Our leadership for our region was exceptionally compassionate and caring in the way they handled this issue. They didn’t want this to happen. No one wanted this to happen because there’s a lot of jobs and the whole operation is at risk.”

Moors shared her termination letter with Summit Daily News, as well as performance reviews that showed she met “fully successful” criteria in every category of evaluation.

“The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the termination letter states. “For this reason, the Agency informs you that the Agency is removing you from your position … and the federal civil service effective immediately.”

“When I read it initially, I was absolutely insulted,” Moors said. “The people who are sending us these letters have probably never put a pair of forestry boots on their feet and carried 50 pounds of paint through the woods and busted their ever-loving butts off to perform this hard work for the mission of caring for the land and serving the people.”

Moors noted that as a forestry technician, she expected to become eligible next season to hold an incident qualification card, or a “red card,” that would allow her to assist with certain duties in the event of a wildfire in a National Forest where she was working.

“I just really want to emphasize, all forest service employees work fire-adjacent in some way,” Moors said. “Whether that is educating people and ensuring campfire safety, putting out campfires, issuing citations … or being called to the front lines of a fire, to after the fire when we have to deal with the consequences.”

Noting that she attended the Rocky Mountain National Park protest, Moors said that the outpouring of support she has received from communities in Colorado and on social media suggests to her that her and other terminated Forest Service positions were in the public interest.

Moors recalled a moment from last summer as the Alexander Mountain Fire, which destroyed more than 50 structures, including 26 homes, in Colorado forced her to evacuate her house just as she was leaving for an eight-day work shift in Wyoming.

“It was one of the most formative, impactful experiences of my entire life. When I got to come back to headquarters after an eight-day hitch in Wyoming and shake the hands of my Forest Service colleagues who saved my home,” Moors said. “Their commitment and dedication to this line of work just makes me feel more connected to it as well because we’re all part of the same mission: caring for the land and serving the people.”