As a child, Claire Sneed had a morbid fascination with natural disasters. In first grade, she followed NOAA's online storm tracker. Later she witnessed Hurricanes Irene and Sandy sweep past her home in the Philadelphia area. On visits to Santa Fe to see her grandfather, Sneed marveled at the dramatic cliffs of Bandelier National Monument, which were formed by staggering volcanic explosions a million years ago. In 2000, a prescribed fire escaped, whipped by high winds, and eventually burned around 1,000 acres across the monument. Sneed was fascinated by how such a massive landscape was altered by wildfire. "I think it was just a combination of how powerless you feel in the sense when you're met with natural disasters," she said. "There's a lot of resilience, both in the natural world and in human communities, that comes together after natural disasters."
While in college, Sneed spent her summer breaks working on AmeriCorps programs in the West. She worked on wilderness trail crews clearing fallen trees, constructing bridges, and repairing trails affected by wildfire and erosion in Colorado. "All of that was trail crew related work, but I kind of fell in love with public lands," she said. After Sneed graduated in May 2024, she started a permanent seasonal position as a hydrologic technician at Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming. There, she worked to ensure streams, rivers, and wetlands complied with environmental regulations like the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, a designation that determines how much water can be removed from a river sustainably.
Sneed was fired on Feb. 14 as a part of the mass layoffs directed by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Her firing was later reversed after legal appeals. But she'd heard rumors that the administration would try and fire her and other federal workers involved in ecology and natural resource protection through other means, such as a Reduction in Force, so when the second deferred resignation program came along, Sneed took the offer. Sneed and I spoke about the work that goes into maintaining clean and flowing water, the multipurpose use of public lands, and how the new administration's plan could ruin our forests.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you tell me a little bit about your path towards federal service?
I knew I wanted to do something where I would be some sort of ranger—either with the Park Service, Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, all that kind of stuff. I got particularly really interested in the intersections of watershed management and wildfire and fire ecology. When I'm thinking about watersheds, I'm not necessarily just thinking about all of the river systems that flow out in a certain area. I'm also thinking about the water cycle in a certain area as a whole.
After I spent this time working in these wildfire-impacted areas doing trail repair, trail restoration, I came back and did my undergraduate thesis work using satellite imagery to analyze how these forests were recovering following wildfires under ... climate change and the past 30 years. So in that sense looking at how different water patterns, like how humid or dry the air was, how much precipitation‚ how all of those changing conditions in the watersheds that were impacted by wildfire was going to affect how the forest recovered following wildfires.
Cities [such as] Fort Collins and Denver, most of their water supply comes from the mountains in the [Rocky Mountains] Front Range. Huge swaths of that were burned in these massive wildfires that happened in 2020. So now they're facing a lot of issues. There's an increased levels of sediments that are clogging up all the waterways that used to get the water. They're having a lot of issues with algal blooms because when the fires came in, they burned and released all these nutrients into the soil that led to these huge, massive algal blooms that are now impacting their drinking water reservoirs. ... It's all of those kind of things that you don't really think about when you think about the initial impacts of wildfire. There's a lot more lasting impacts that we don't realize on the watersheds, on the climate, on the forests.
We're seeing now that because of climate change, areas that had been forests for the past 100 years are now transitioning towards more grasslands or shrublands. All of that has implications for runoff and erosion, which all has implications for how we get our water sources and habitats.
What we're seeing right now in the West [is] that areas that were traditionally forests, after a wildfire comes in and burns, the growing conditions that existed when the forest was growing initially are now much more drier. So the plants that are able to come back and re-sprout and propagate and grow are no longer forest species. It's more shrublands and more drought-tolerant species. Because the area is no longer as wet as it used to be.
What did an average day look like for you on the job?
During the summer or the warmer months, everything was all based in the field. We worked anywhere from 10- to 13-hour days, because we're trying to drive around this forest and make as much use of the daylight as possible. So waking up fairly early in the morning. I personally like to start my day at 6 a.m., 6:30 just because—the sun's up, time to go and and work on stuff! I worked with two other hydrologic technicians, and we would meet up. Usually [we would] have a list. Depending on how far away the different sites were, we'd have a list of a few sites that we needed to go and monitor. Then we'd hike out to them.
We had one location that was a four-mile hike into the back country. So you'd have to hike four miles all uphill. And you're bringing all this gear with you to measure the stream flow. So we'd hike in, drive to wherever we needed to be, then we would measure the stream flow. Or if we weren't measuring stream flow, another thing that we would do would be to assess the soil types in areas that we suspected to be wetlands that were dependent upon groundwater. For some of those projects, we would be camping for three or four days on end. So we wouldn't go back home. We just camp out for that week. Monitoring that kind of stuff would last all day.
Sometimes we also would be helping with beaver mitigation activities. Obviously, beavers are very important to the ecosystems out there, so trying to build structures that help us preserve the beavers' habitat, but also make sure they're not flooding all of the forest roads.
The Forest Service already was understaffed, so it's a lot of helping out where you're needed. Sometimes there would be days where the recreation group needed me to help clean campground bathrooms or go help a visitor answer questions or sell Christmas tree permits. Sometimes I helped out with Smokey Bear activities.
Were there any particular projects that you did at your job that you were proud of?
The main one that we worked on was the water rights initiatives in line with the National Wild and Scenic River Act. A lot of that is just making sure that we are protecting these rivers and what makes them wild and scenic. They're huge recreation sites for people. We're monitoring how much water is flowing through them so that people aren't taking more water from them than they should be—in order to protect the habitat for people who love going fishing in it, to protect the recreation value. The Snake River, which was the main river we were monitoring for ... everyone loves rafting, kayaking, all that kind of stuff, on that river. Everything that we do all has implications for making sure that it is healthy and usable and beneficial for both the ecosystems and also the people who enjoy using them.
A project that I was really proud of was working with these groundwater-dependent ecosystems, which, again, basically just are wetlands that are really high up in the mountains. These areas are super, super vulnerable to climate change. Lots of times you're seeing areas at higher elevations being impacted by climate change first, which is why we're seeing areas like the Arctic being impacted by climate change first. They're at more extremes so you can see the changes better there. Our monitoring initiatives were to help field-validate these models that had predicted the locations of all of these areas. And these are super important to make sure that when certain projects are being done in the forest, whether that's timber projects or prescribed burns, to make sure that they're not going to be disturbing these areas that are huge carbon sinks—they hold and sequester a lot of carbon in the soil—and they also are huge hotspots for biodiversity and a lot of the threatened amphibian species on the forest.
I also did a lot of work with our inter-agency fire ecologist. He was the fire ecologist for both Grand Teton National Park and our forest. I just helped them with a lot of mapping and data analysis on their projects ... a lot of assessing how different prescribed burns or fuel treatments where they removed some underbrush, how those areas were recovering after the whatever treatments they did. It was cool to be able to see a lot of increased biodiversity in these areas or decreased fuel load, so there's less potential for massive wildfires to occur. That was something that I personally really enjoyed, given my obsession with wildfire.
Can you tell me about your experience of being fired and everything that happened after?
Once I saw on the Reddit and the news that they were firing probationary employees, I accepted that I was going to get fired. I found out again on the Reddit on February 13, they're like Forest Service probation employees are getting fired. And I was like, well! The next day, I got a call from one of my supervisors—not my immediate supervisor, but one of the higher-ups— that my position had been terminated because of my performance, which was weird, because I had only ever received excellent, stellar performance reviews.
I had been hearing a lot of rumors that like people who were doing anything related to natural resource protection—so stuff like wildlife biology, watersheds, a lot of the ecology side of things—were going to be like axed anyways, and that the only stuff that would really be protected would be things like recreation, timber, geology, because they do minerals and wildfire. I kind of felt like, even though I was brought back, I was just going to get fired again.
It was one of those things where initially I was so heartbroken—and I still am really heartbroken—but every other week, it was like the decision had changed. There was so much emotional whiplash, going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth—I'm fired, I'm not fired, I'm fired, I'm not fired. I was like, I even if I do come back, I feel like I'm probably gonna get fired again. And I mentally can't deal with that right now. I need something that's more stable, especially because when you work for ... natural resource management agencies, they provide your housing. So if I were to go back to work and I would have my housing there, if I were to get fired again, then I would have no housing. ... Bridger-Teton National Forest is in one of the wealthiest areas in the country, near Jackson Hole. So housing is not affordable if it's not given to you.
I wanted to ask if this firing has affected your personal life in any way,
One hundred percent. My boyfriend and I were set to work both on the Bridger-Teton, the same forest. He was going to be a wildland firefighter. We've been long distance for our entire relationship. We met doing trail crew through the AmeriCorps program the second year that I did it. Our dream, our goal was to work our way up through the Forest Service ladder and eventually become permanent. So the fact that I had already had a permanent job, and he got this job—there was one position left on this firefighting crew in my forest, and he got it, which was huge! But then I got fired.
My boyfriend and I and also most of my friends from college are all in the natural resources environmental science space. So whether that's environmental engineering or geology or wildlife biology, GIS mapping—we've all been in that space. The government for a really long time was a very big employer for us, because a lot of the time they were funding research. Not even just working for the government, but working for nonprofits and doing grad school, a lot of that stuff is funded through federal government NSF grants. And now so many people's grad school funding is being stripped. A lot of people that I did research with when I was in school, they have [run] out of funding and they don't know how they're going to finish their doctorate. It's just really disheartening to see that every plan that I make in my head gets thwarted by what's going on right now.
A lot of people say that, "Oh, layoffs happen all the time. It doesn't matter the industry that you're in. These government layoffs are just the same thing. I don't understand why it's a big deal." What's different about what's going on with federal employees is that our employer, the President, and a lot of his administration are actively vilifying these employees, myself included. Saying that we're lazy, that we're bureaucrats, that we're wasting money, when in reality we are working for almost no pay in the middle of nowhere—we don't get overtime because there's no funding—in extremely underfunded and understaffed environments, because we care so much about our country. We care so much about our country and serving the American public, whether that's through taking care of our public lands or serving our veterans. So it feels like it's a unique situation in how we are being actively and consistently vilified by our employers, which doesn't really happen in the private sector.
What do you think these cuts at the Forest Service, or these governmental cuts more broadly will mean for the natural lands that you were working on, or with the communities that you were dealing with?
Lots of times when people hear public lands, they automatically think national parks. In reality, there's so many different types of public lands. For example, the Bureau of Land Management, you use a lot of that for recreation, for mineral extraction. We already have tons of mining projects, oil fracking projects on Bureau of Land Management lands. We are already using our public lands to help support local economies through mining, mineral extraction, that kind of thing. And you have the Forest Service lands, which lots of times people think it's the same thing as the Park Service. They're very different, even though lots of times the landscapes look similar. Again, Forest Service lands, we have mineral extraction. We have grazing. Lots of times ranchers will be able to graze their cattle on Forest Service lands. We have lots of timber production, that kind of stuff.
The public already has valid complaints of: The bathrooms aren't clean. There's no toilet paper. The campgrounds are closed or unmaintained. The trails are awful. I can barely hike on them because there's so many downed trees. That kind of stuff is just going to get worse, because we don't have anyone now to be clearing the trails. To be monitoring the wildlife.
People don't realize on the Bridger-Teton, a lot of stuff that they do is avalanche warnings and mitigation. There's a huge avalanche area. I think we had one person die in an avalanche on our forest earlier this year. So a big part of predicting the avalanches is what the Forest Service does. But the main one that I'm concerned about is wildfires. Because people don't understand that with the Forest Service, everything is so interdisciplinary. Even though people whose technical job title was "wildfire" were safe, most other employees with the Forest Service, regardless if they had wildland firefighter in their title or not, were cross-trained to be able to fight wildland fires. By firing all of those people, you're essentially getting rid of the force that is available to help wildland fires in a time when we are having increasingly dry conditions. We still have very overpopulated forests.
The current administration's perspective to solve the wildland fire crisis is to increase timber production. While on face value, that seems like a good idea, there's two components. To oversimplify it, there's two components to the current wildfire crisis in the US—it's increasing like wildfire-prone conditions due to climate change, and then we have a history of fire suppression, so we have these very overpopulated forests. Theoretically, increased timber production should help with that. But the way they're trying to go about doing it is firing all of the people who make sure that when we increase timber production, we're not harming the natural environment. We're [supposed to be] doing it in the most sustainable way possible, while also extracting the timber. He fired all of those people and is trying to bypass that. So he's basically just trying to shortcut that. That's not going to be great for people in the long run. It's not going to be good for forest health. It's not going to be good for local communities. It's going to leave them more prone to flooding.
The last thing I'm concerned about is a brain drain or loss of scientists in federal service, because a lot of scientists work for federal land management agencies and are now being vilified. When I was still working for them, I think we were being directed to remove mentions of climate change from our website and certain data sets were being taken down. And I'm like, what are we trying to hide? I don't understand. We were being directed that we couldn't mention clean water. When I saw that, I was like, I don't know if I can stay here. Because I can't do my job if I can't talk about clean water.
I wanted to ask if there's anything else about this job, these cuts, etc, that we haven't had a chance to talk about, that you'd want to mention?
I know there's mentions of people [wanting] to sell out public lands so that we can build more houses for the housing crisis and stuff like that. To that, I would say, I feel like a lot of times public lands are there to preserve natural beauty. And if you build more houses there, I feel like it's just going to turn into another Jackson Hole where the rich people come up and buy them all up and turn them into Airbnbs and just perpetuate the housing crisis. Because that's what happens near the public lands that I live [by].
This is not just some liberal wishy-washy stuff, trying to save the trees and not protect the people. This is something that is ingrained in our history, and is something that is, and should be, non-partisan: protecting public lands.
If you have lost your job as a result of ongoing government cuts and are interested in speaking with me for this series, please contact me on Signal at simbler.88 or simbler@defector.com. I would love to hear from you.
