With $2.6 billion in hurricane-recovery money on its way to the national forests of North Carolina, Jenifer Bunty, a U.S. Forest Service disaster-recovery specialist, spent much of the week of February 10th working on a plan to start spending the money. Four months after Hurricane Helene, this meant deciding which bridges urgently needed to be rebuilt, which road repairs prioritized, and which trails in the Pisgah National Forest cleared first so that small towns dependent on visiting hikers and campers could get back to business. The most immediate need, Bunty and her colleagues knew, was manpower. They already had about forty unfilled positions and estimated that they needed another hundred to get the job done. To Bunty, the difficulty of spending the money with a limited staff was like “pushing a bowling ball through a cocktail straw.”

On Thursday, February 13th, Bunty and a few others from the Forest Service visited one of their most urgent projects, a section of Interstate 40 that had collapsed into the Pigeon River and remained closed to traffic. After they returned to the office, Bunty noticed that the leadership had stepped into a meeting. Soon, colleagues started getting phone calls. By the next morning, fourteen people who were involved in hurricane recovery had received word that they had been fired in the Trump Administration’s nationwide purge, including Mike Knoerr, the wildlife biologist responsible for the entire Pisgah National Forest, which sprawls more than five hundred thousand acres. His work was essential to insuring that recovery work would comply with federal law. “I came into work on Friday, ‘Am I fired?’ ” Bunty said. She wasn’t, not yet.

“The days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over,” Donald Trump declared in his speech to Congress last week. For the White House, the firing of tens of thousands of federal workers like Bunty is evidence of “promises made, promises kept.” But for the Forest Service the loss of at least two thousand workers will make it harder to fight ever-worsening wildfires and storms across the country. Last September, Bunty was filling in as a district ranger when word arrived that as many as twenty-four inches of rain could fall in the already saturated mountains. She said that the staff was stunned, knowing that four inches was enough to turn streams into rivers and wash out roads. After the storm hit, more than a hundred people died in North Carolina. At one point, Bunty worked nineteen days straight, even as her own family, an hour away in South Carolina, went without electricity.

“It was taking me three to four hours to get to the district from my house some days because of the damage on the roads,” Bunty told me. “There was no power, and no water in most cases. We had no radios, because our systems were not working. You couldn’t get gas. We were working with county emergency management to cut critical-access paths for ambulances.” Soon after the storm ebbed, the Forest Service team learned of thirty-one children and a number of adults who’d been stranded on a wilderness trip. Their exit, along Forest Service roads, was blocked by landslides and dangerous debris piles. Bunty said that her team considered multiple options, including opening a new path to reach the students. In the end, Forest Service rescuers used chainsaws and heavy equipment to clear an existing road, and the students made it out. “I am beyond proud,” Bunty said. “Those people are real heroes.”

As soon as the firings began, on February 13th, Bunty knew that she was vulnerable. Nineteen months after being hired, she was still about five months short of advancement to career status. That Sunday, in the middle of Presidents’ Day weekend, she was driving in Asheville with her husband, their two young daughters in the back seat, when she heard her work cellphone buzz. “Aw, that’s bad,” she said. She got out of the car to take the call. Her supervisor said that he had been told to fire her. He also said, “You’re the best damned hire I ever made.” She replied, “I’ve never been fired before. Do I come in on Tuesday?”

Bunty was in her dream job. She has two master’s degrees, in biology and public administration. Previously, she worked in communications for a consortium of fire experts in the Appalachian Mountains. After she was fired, she wrote on Facebook about the first time she opened her Forest Service uniform: “I held my badge and cried. I was so proud to be part of the agency whose mission is ‘caring for the land and serving people.’ ” She was making less money than she would have made in the private sector, but, like many federal workers, she was motivated more by a sense of commitment than by the money. She believes in investing in the public good. Plus, she loves the woods, which she described to me as “something that feels so big and constant and almost sacred.” She was especially gratified while working in Pisgah, the first national forest created from private lands purchased under the Weeks Act, which was signed in 1911, to protect watersheds and coördinate fire protection in the eastern United States.

It’s important to Bunty that she not be seen as a dissenter. She is certainly not, to use Trump’s go-to phrase, a “radical left lunatic.” For years, she has flown an American flag from her home, and, despite what has happened in recent weeks, she said, “I don’t like to talk bad about the President.” A few days after she was fired, I met Bunty in a coffee shop in Old Fort, where high-water marks from Helene are still visible on buildings that lie hundreds of yards from the Catawba River. We climbed into her car, which was still piled with the contents of her cleared-out workspace, and she drove us into Pisgah Forest, where she pointed out road crews, tall piles of storm-twisted timber, and an elderly woman’s home, which, after Helene, was reachable only on foot until a Forest Service bridge was replaced. Off to the left were the tangles of storm damage. To the right were trees scarred by one of the forest fires that have struck the area since, with forecasts of more intense blazes to come. Bunty feared that controlled burns to clear fallen and dead trees won’t happen. She also noted that, in addition to fighting fires, Forest Service workers keep trails open and roads cleared for millions of visitors a year. “Who’s going to do this work?” she asked. Bunty couldn’t help but reflect on the generations of poor treatment of Appalachia, where her family’s roots reach back hundreds of years. “We’ve just been abandoned, over and over,” she said.

After the Trump Administration announced the Forest Service cuts, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said that they didn’t include “operational firefighters,” a term Bunty had never heard. When fires strike, the Forest Service does not just dispatch full-time firefighters. Qualified firefighters from across its staff provide support. This included Bunty, who has done duty at a dozen or more wildfires, with deployments in the western United States. Hayley Pines, another Forest Service staffer, ordinarily served as a mule packer and wilderness ranger in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Recreation Area, earning about twenty dollars an hour. Last summer, when sixty thousand acres burned, her crew dropped its regular duties and fought the fires for weeks. Pines worked on a souped-up pickup truck fitted with a three-hundred-gallon water tank, driving through narrow Forest Service roads that large equipment couldn’t navigate. The other day, a supervisor called to tell her that she’d been fired. “She was crying. Then I was crying,” Pines recalled. “I feel like my community has been gutted. The trail crew, wilderness crew, timber crew, fisheries crew. We truly care for this resource we’ve been protecting. You have to be standing there to understand it, the beauty of it and how delicate it is.”