Forest Service will partially refund federal firefighters’ rent in government-owned housing

The U.S. Forest Service announced Tuesday that it will begin providing around 5,500 federal wildland firefighters who live in agency-owned housing rent assistance in the form of a 50% refund.

The new relief for the beleaguered federal firefighting workforce is retroactive to the last annual rent increase March 10, and runs until the end of the fiscal year in September. The temporary housing refund amounts to 50% of rent costs for agency firefighters residing in government-owned housing from GS1 through GS 10 pay grades on the General Schedule and all Federal Wage Grade employees. The refund also will cover 10% of rent incurred by employees in the GS 11 to GS 13 pay grades.

In a blog post announcing the move, U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack used his “emergency subsistence” authority under the 1956 Department of Agriculture Organic Act to greenlight the assistance. The funding for the initiative will come out of the Forest Service’s existing budget, and Moore said the agency will “make trade-offs to focus on this high-priority need.”

While much of the federal government’s focus on making federal firefighting jobs more competitive with their counterparts in state and local government, the National Federation of Federal Employees has been working for years on improving housing affordability in regions where wildland firefighters live and work.

“Forest Service employees deserve to have a safe, affordable and reliable place to live, but many do not,” said NFFE National President Randy Erwin in a statement. “As the cost of living has soared in desirable locations near our national forests, USFS employees have been priced out, especially when considering many earn substandard wages. In places where USFS housing is available, it is often dilapidated, dangerous and costly, requiring employees to make repairs on their own with money from their own pockets. Today, we have taken an incredibly significant step toward solving this issue.”

The federal government charges rent according to Office of Management and Budget policy. A recent bipartisan commission studying the federal response to wildfires recommended updates to the policy to make agency housing more affordable for firefighters. The Forest Service and OMB are both in the process of reviewing those recommendations, Moore wrote.

“Since this refund relies upon specific emergency conditions, it is temporary while emergency conditions last,” he wrote. “USDA’s Forest Service anticipates leveraging the emergency authority for no more than a year while we concurrently work on government policy changes that address the emergency conditions. Once emergency conditions are addressed, the Forest Service will provide a 60-day advance notice to employees announcing the end of the emergency housing refund.”