Three takeaways from Sen. Martin Heinrich’s roundtable with public land experts

The 2026 fire season, staffing levels at national parks and monuments, and the long-term public land employee pipeline were top of mind for public land advocates and experts at a roundtable with Sen. Martin Heinrich on Friday.

Public lands have been a priority for the New Mexico Democrat, who has long touted his identity as a hunter and led some of the opposition to Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s proposal to make it easier to sell public land earlier this year. Here are three takeaways from his conversation with public land experts and advocates.

1. The 2026 fire season is keeping New Mexico’s state forester up at night

State Forester Laura McCarthy is concerned about a plan to combine federal firefighting teams next year in what she believes may be a bad fire season. The predictions for winter snowpack are not promising, part of why McCarthy is losing sleep over next year’s fire season.

President Donald Trump ordered the nation’s wildland firefighting forces underneath the Interior and Agriculture departments to combine. In September, the federal agencies announced a plan for implementing the order in January 2026.

McCarthy would like them to postpone implementation to January 2027.

“With the six-week shutdown, we’ve not heard what progress they’ve made on that,” McCarthy said. “And our fire season, given the snowpack and the forecast, we’re going to be cranking in February.”

The Interior Department’s effort to modernize the wildland fire response is on track, according to Interior spokeswoman Elizabeth Peace.

“The transition is being implemented in deliberate phases to ensure continuity of operations and readiness for the 2026 fire season,” Peace said in a statement. “Current firefighting capability remains fully in place, and there will be no gap in response capacity.”

The plan includes creating a joint federal firefighting aircraft service, modernizing training, streamlining cooperative agreements and integrating pre- and post-fire activities.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are cutting through the bureaucracy and building a unified, modern wildfire response system that works as fast and as fearlessly as the men and women on the front lines,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a September statement.

Heinrich said he would be willing to work with McCarthy on a letter asking Burgum to consider delaying combining federal firefighting forces. Based on conversations he’s had in Senate committees, the plan “is an idea with no detail in the actual implementation, and we cannot afford to have a single fire season where we don’t actually understand who’s in charge,” Heinrich said.

“Right now, we have a system, and it’s not perfect, but it pulls resources from all over the country, and it follows the fire season. … We have to make sure that rhythm is fully functional through any organizational changes,” he said.

According to Peace, the phased approach allows Interior to align personnel, systems and support functions while maintaining coordination with USDA, state and local partners, and the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group.

Implementation will continue throughout 2026 with oversight and support from the Agriculture and Interior departments and in coordination with Congress, Peace said.

2. Staffing levels are down at Bosque del Apache and beyond

Bosque del Apache, a national wildlife refuge in Socorro County known as a winter hotspot for sandhill cranes, has almost half the staff it did a decade ago, according to Deb Caldwell, Friends of the Bosque del Apache executive director. She’s expecting the wildlife refuge’s budget to be cut further.

“So we lost staff, we’ve lost funding, and so the Friends have really had to step up,” Caldwell said, by helping with machine repairs, buying fuel and putting in wells and bridges.

The refuge is an economic boon to the area, with an economic impact between $15 million and $17 million annually, Caldwell said. That impact may be blunted this year, as the annual Festival of the Cranes was canceled due to the government shutdown.

More broadly, the 15 national parks and monuments in New Mexico bring in 2.4 million visitors a year, according to Dennis Vasquez, a retired National Park Service superintendent. Vasquez has heard from former colleagues at parks around New Mexico that “the staffing shortage is the No. 1 issue,” he said.

“I think in this current climate, there’s just a lack of security, maybe, in taking on a job in federal lands or public lands anymore,” Vasquez said.

3. Advocates are concerned about future employee shortages

The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided an influx of money into federal agencies, meaning there were many recently hired employees within federal land management agencies like the U.S. Forest Service when probationary employees were laid off earlier this year, according to McCarthy.

“A lot of young people with master’s degrees and really specialized, important experience, scientifically — fire ecology for example, or conservation biology — that were going to really help the agency instead got let go,” McCarthy said. “The loss of science capacity within the land management agencies is really distressing.”

Outdoor recreation is a huge part of the Taos economy, according to Nick Streit, Friends of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument president and Taos Fly Shop owner. But he’s concerned that young people considering careers in public land management will be deterred from seeking those specialized degrees after seeing the federal layoffs and government shutdown this year.

“It really scares me about what’s down the road,” Streit said.