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Outside the United States Forest Service (USFS) office for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. In mid-February, USFS fired about 3,400 employees nationwide, including field rangers and public affairs specialists, but not firefighters. 

THE GORGE — “The Forest Service and all our other land management agencies will just not have the staff to deal with things as they have been,” said Morgan Gwynn, a former public affairs specialist for the Deschutes National Forest near Bend. “The last few years I was with them, I think they could’ve used even more staff and more support.”

The United States Forest Service (USFS) fired Gwynn — and roughly 3,400 others without civil service protection — in mid-February under direction from President Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to terminate probationary employees who fail to prove their “qualifications for continued employment.”